Chapter 4
Chapter 4:
I had cried enough tears for Thane to fill every champagne flute in that hall twice over, and I was finished. My body had simply run out. There is a limit to grief, it turns out—not a poetic one, not a beautiful threshold where suffering transforms into wisdom. Just a dry, cracked feeling behind the eyes, like a well that has been pumped past empty, and your body sends a memo: we’re done here.
“Isolde, you’d better behave.” Thane’s voice came from behind me, low and controlled, the way you’d speak to a dog that had slipped its leash. “Stop making scenes. Cut it out p>
A migraine was building behind my left eye—the kind that comes with its own heartbeat. I pressed two fingers against my temple and kept my voice level.
“This isn’t a scene. This is a conversation between two adults about the termination of a bond that makes neither of us happy. If you’d like, I can use smaller words p>
He closed the distance in three strides. His hand found my chin—thumb and forefinger, a grip that looked almost tender from a distance and was anything but—and tilted my face up to his.
This close, I could see things the candlelight usually hid. The shadows under his eyes, deeper than I remembered. A vein pulsing at his temple. The way his pupils dilated when he looked at me—not with desire, never that, but with something equally consuming. Hatred is intimate. People forget that.
“You used the lowest tricks your bloodline could muster to trap me into this marriage.” Each word landed like a dropped stone. “You think you get to walk away? When you’re no longer Luna, tell me—what pays for your mother’s treatment? What keeps her breathing? Have you thought about that, or were you too busy rehearsing your little speech p>
I flinched. He saw it and pressed harder.
“And let’s not forget the main act, darling. You and your father murdered the woman I loved. You really think I’m going to let you go? That this ends when you decide it ends p>
I pulled my gaze away from his. Looking directly into Thane’s eyes when he was like this was like staring into a furnace—not because of warmth, but because something in there was always, always burning, and it would consume anything close enough to catch.
He had never believed me when I told him the truth: that I hadn’t known about the potion, that my father had acted alone, that I was as much a pawn as Thane himself. I had explained it a thousand times—calmly, desperately, sobbing, screaming—and each time the words bounced off him like rain off stone. He didn’t want to believe me. Believing me would mean he’d spent a decade punishing the wrong person, and Thane was not a man equipped to carry that kind of debt.
My silence was the wrong answer. It always was.
He shoved me downward—a hand on my shoulder, not hard enough to bruise but hard enough to make the message clear—and I dropped to my knees in front of Ravenna.
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“If you won’t lick them,” he said, “at least wipe the dust from her shoes p>
The marble was cold through the thin fabric of my dress. Ravenna stood above me in those red-soled heels, and I could smell her perfume—something floral and expensive that she sprayed too liberally, the way people do when the bottle was a gift and they want to make sure the giver notices.