Chapter 9: The Confrontation
The panic was a living thing, a wild animal clawing its way up her throat. Elena sat frozen on the sun-warmed stone, Marcus’s stupid carrot forgotten in his hand. The world telescoped down to the hitch in her breath, the impossible tightness in her chest, the way the bright garden blurred and swam as silent tears cut tracks through the dirt.
She couldn’t get air. The more she tried, the less came. Spots danced at the edges of her vision. Her fingers were locked claws in the fabric of her skirt.
The steady thwack of the axe stopped.
Jovi was just there. He didn’t walk; he simply appeared, kneeling on the broken path in front of her, his large frame blocking out the sun, the garden, the others. His hands came up, calloused and streaked with soil, and took hers. He pried her grip open, flattening her palms against his. Her knuckles were white, her fingers ice-cold.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice not a command this time, but a rope thrown into a chasm.
Her eyes, wide and drowning, flickered over his face but wouldn’t settle.
“Elena. Here.” He squeezed her hands, the pressure firm and absolute. “Breathe with me. In.” He took an exaggerated, slow breath through his nose, his chest expanding. He held it, his amber eyes locked on hers. “Out.” He let it go, a long, controlled stream.
She shook her head, a tiny, frantic motion. She couldn’t.
“You can. Copy me.” His thumbs began moving in slow, deliberate circles on the centers of her palms. The rhythm was insistent, grounding. “In.”
A shuddering gasp. It caught halfway.
“That’s it. Now hold. Feel it.”
She held, the world swimming.
“Out.”
A shaky, ragged exhale that sounded like a sob. But it was air. Expelled air. It made room.
They did it again. And again. The circle of his thumbs, the anchor of his hands, the unblinking focus of his gaze. Her breathing began to sync with his, the terrible hitch softening, the panic slowly, molecule by molecule, receding. The garden sounds seeped back in—the birds, the distant rustle of the others who had stopped working entirely.
Kael stood like a felled tree, the scythe limp in his hand, his brow furrowed in deep, uncomfortable confusion. Oscar had removed his spectacles, cleaning them methodically while watching the scene with unnerving stillness. Marcus had lowered the carrot, his usual levity vaporized. Cai leaned against the doorframe, his ledger clutched to his chest like a shield.
Jovi didn’t look away from Elena until the tension had drained from her shoulders and her breaths, though still shallow, came without struggle. He gave her hands one final, firm press before releasing them.
He stood, turning to face the four other men. His expression was stripped bare, all icy aloofness burned away by a hard, cold fury that wasn’t for the woman on the bench.
“We need to talk,” he said, the words like stones dropped into a still pond. “All of us. Now.”
He didn’t wait for agreement. He bent, sliding an arm behind Elena’s back and under her knees. He lifted her from the bench as if she weighed nothing. She didn’t protest. She was hollowed out, listless, her head leaning against his shoulder as he carried her past the frozen tableau of her husbands, back into the dark mouth of the kitchen.
One by one, they followed.
The kitchen was a tomb of cold hearths and lingering shadows. Jovi set Elena carefully on a bench at the massive, scarred oak table, then took a seat beside her, close enough that their arms almost touched. A statement.
The others filtered in. Cai sat opposite, setting his ledger aside with deliberate care. Oscar took the seat next to him, his copper hair fiery in the gloom. Marcus slid onto the bench on Elena’s other side, leaving a careful foot of space. Kael remained standing, his bulk leaning against the stone sink, arms crossed as if holding himself in.
The silence was thick enough to taste. It was the silence of five years of shared bitterness, now curdled into something else. Shame.
Jovi spoke first. He didn’t raise his voice.
“She was not the monster,” he said, looking at each of them in turn. “We were the fools.”
No one breathed.
“We believed the court. We believed her father. We believed the convenient story of the scheming, murdering daughter because it was easier than looking at the truth sitting across from us at breakfast for five damn years.” His voice was low, each word precise and lethal. “A truth that flinched when we moved too fast. That never raised her voice. That looked at her food, not at us.”
“We didn’t know,” Marcus murmured, his grey eyes on the table’s grooves.
“We didn’t try,” Oscar corrected softly, his snake’s eyes sharp. “There is a difference. The signs were there. The chronic silence. The strategic illnesses before any public events. The way she’d shrink from her father’s touch at state functions. We chose to read it as arrogance. Not terror.”
Cai ran a hand through his sandy hair. “The financial reports from the Imperial household… the discretionary funds for the royal physician were exorbitant. I thought it was for the Empress’s ailments. But the dates… they often coincided with Elena’s… absences.”
The word ‘absences’ hung in the air, heavy with new, horrific meaning.
Kael pushed off from the sink, the sound of his boots on the flagstones loud. “What are you saying? In plain words.”
Jovi’s jaw tightened. He looked at Elena. She was staring at a knot in the wood, utterly still, a doll waiting to be broken. He didn’t have the right to say it. But someone had to.
“The Emperor,” Jovi said, the title dripping with venom. “He didn’t just frame her for the Empress’s murder to get rid of a political liability. He was cleaning up a mess. His mess. The weeks of ‘private tutoring’ before the banishment. The injuries she arrived with. The poison she just tried to take.” He glanced at the dry sink, where the pennyroyal tea had vanished. “She wasn’t protecting a secret. She was carrying one. For him.”
The understanding crashed over them, visceral and ugly.
Marcus made a small, wounded sound in his throat. Cai looked physically ill, his golden complexion gone sallow. Oscar’s analytical composure finally cracked, his lips pressing into a thin, white line. Kael just stared, his bear’s mind slowly, painfully, connecting the horrific dots.
“The child?” Kael asked, the word a growl.
All eyes went to Elena. She didn’t move.
“Cai needs to examine her,” Jovi said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
“No.” The whisper was so faint they almost missed it. Elena’s eyes were still on the knot. “There’s no point.”
“We need to know,” Cai said, his healer’s tone gentle but unyielding. “For your health. The… aftermath of a miscarriage can be dangerous. Or if it’s… ongoing.” He couldn’t say the other word. Not yet.
“It’s not ongoing,” she whispered. Her hand drifted to her lower abdomen, a fleeting touch. “The kicking stopped after the second day in the carriage. After… the pain.” She meant the fever, the jostling, the kick from her father that had bruised her ribs. A full, devastating sentence in fragments.
The room swayed. The cruelty of it was so immense it was almost abstract.
“Oh, gods,” Marcus breathed, putting his face in his hands.
Jovi’s hand, resting on the table, curled into a fist so tight the knuckles turned bone-white. The panther inside him was screaming, a silent roar for blood and vengeance.
Oscar leaned forward. “The pennyroyal. It was for the bleeding? To… cleanse?”
Elena gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. “To make sure. To be clean of him.” Her first full sentence to all of them. The cost of it shuddered through her.
For a long minute, the only sound was the crackle of the last embers in the hearth and the ragged sound of five men grappling with a monstrous truth.
Cai stood up, the legs of his chair scraping. “Come upstairs. To your room. Please. I need to… I need to ensure you are not in danger.” He said it like a plea.
Elena looked at Jovi, a flicker of her old fear returning. He gave a short, firm nod. “We’ll be right outside the door. All of us.”
It was a vow.
She pushed herself up, unsteady. Marcus rose to help but Jovi was already there, offering an arm. She took it, her fingers trembling against his forearm.
They moved through the dark house like a funeral procession—Elena leaning on Jovi, Cai ahead, the others following close behind—a silent, united front for the first time. Not as husbands bound by a hated contract, but as men who had just discovered they had unknowingly left an ally to rot in a dungeon of their own making.
The attic room was cold. Cai lit a lamp. “Lie down. This will be clinical. I swear it.”
Elena obeyed, lying on the rough mattress, staring at the slanted ceiling. Jovi stood just inside the door, a sentinel. The others waited on the landing, a wall of simmering rage and grief.
Cai’s hands were gentle, his questions quiet and specific. He worked with a focused detachment, but his face grew graver with each passing moment.
Finally, he pulled the thin blanket back over her and sat on the edge of the bed. “The physical trauma is significant,” he said, his voice carrying to the men outside. “There is no ongoing pregnancy. But the process is… incomplete. Your body is still trying to expel the tissue. That’s likely the source of the continued pain and fever.” He took a deep breath. “The pennyroyal might have helped. But it’s also a risk. I have herbs in my stores. Safer ones. To help your body finish what it started. To prevent infection.”
Elena closed her eyes, a tear escaping down her temple into her silver hair. A nod.
“We’ll start tonight,” Cai said. He looked toward the door, at Jovi’s shadowed face. “She needs rest. Real rest. And food.”
Jovi nodded. “We’ll get it.”
Cai stood and joined the others on the landing. He pulled the door almost closed, leaving it open a crack. A line of lamplight cut across the floorboards.
The five of them stood in the narrow, dark space. The truth was out now, a vile, squirming thing between them.
Marcus spoke first, his voice thick. “What do we do?”
Oscar adjusted his spectacles. “First, we secure the house. Then, we care for our wife. Then, we plot.”
“Plot what?” Kael rumbled.
Jovi’s amber eyes glinted in the dark. The panther was right there, in the calm, deadly certainty of his voice.
“The Emperor thinks he sent her to the wilderness to be forgotten. To die quietly, disgraced. He thinks he sent us with her as punishment, to resent her until we tore her apart.” He looked at each of them. “He gave us the one thing he never intended to. A common cause.”
He glanced at the sliver of light from the room where Elena lay, broken but alive. Where a princess had ended, and something else was beginning.
“We are not forgotten,” Jovi said, the words a promise and a threat. “And we are not done.”