The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 534

She was released from service by the next day. My father, who had only married her a few months prior, didn’t question it. She was a Queen by then, and a Queen shouldn’t be a spy.

But I knew he never expected her to turn into what she did. No one did.

I thought about her hands last night, the ones I’d held while she lay there barely breathing, her skin papery, her emaciated body trembling even in her sleep. It was hard to picture those hands holding a blade steady enough to kill a man before he could finish raising his. But the diary didn’t lie, and neither did the medals.

I’d spent my whole life thinking she was weak. Resenting her for wanting me safe instead of strong, for always hovering, always trying to keep me hidden away from the world.

But she hadn’t been weak, had she? She’d used up everything she had keeping me alive before I was old enough to remember it, and never once told me why. She’d buried her past in an attempt to make sure I didn’t follow in her footsteps.

It made something else click into place, too. I thought about how steady my hands had gone the first time MArcus put a blade in them, how violence had never once made me hesitate the way it was supposed to.

I’d always figured that came from nowhere. Just a fluke, or something about my nature passed down through my father’s line.

I never thought…

I never thought it could come from the woman who I had spent my entire life looking at like a disgrace.

My throat was tight, my vision blurred with tears, but the box wasn’t empty—and I knew, in my father’s brief few moments of clarity, that he hadn’t wanted me to find a story. There had to be something else, something more useful for what was to come.

There was one thing left in the box. Whatever it was, it was small, wrapped in a piece of velvet that matched what the medals were pinned to. I picked it up, running my thumb over the fabric, then unfolded it.

I forced my shoulders back down from around my ears and made myself walk toward her instead of away.

“I needed to stretch my legs,” I said.

The guards closed in on either side of me. I kept my chin lifted, my face neutral, like I had been doing just that—walking. Like there wasn’t currently a razor-sharp death weapon tucked into my wedding dress.

“Sure,” she said, her eyes flicking over me. I knew she didn’t believe me, not entirely, but right now, she didn’t seem to care. The wedding was set to begin in an hour. In her eyes, by that point, I would no longer be a problem to be solved. I’d be halfway to Falcon’s Reach by midnight, my suicide dangling at the edges of my future like a carrot on a stick.

“Come along now,” she said as the guards wrapped their hands around my arms. “Your groom won’t wait forever.”