CHAPTER 67: VETRA

I turned to face him fully. The garden had never felt smaller.

Neither of us spoke. I simply stared, waiting for him to say something worth the mess he’d caused.

He stood there in the moon-washed silence, looking terribly out of place in all that finery, like a god who’d forgotten his own divinity.

He fidgeted, actually fidgeted, straightening the collar of his silver-trimmed attire, glancing at me, then away, then back again. The same hands that had commanded armies were now uncertain of what to do with themselves.

I raised a brow. "You’re going to speak, or just stand there and suffocate in your own awkwardness?"

He gave a weak, nervous laugh. "I might melt under the heat of your glare if you’re not careful your Majesty."

"Good," I said flatly. "That wouldn’t be too much of a punishment, considering the stunt you pulled at the ball."

His smile faltered. The humor drained from his face, replaced by something softer. Guilt, or maybe something close to it.

When he spoke again, his voice had lost all the teasing edges.

"It wasn’t a stunt," he said quietly. "I merely spoke my mind."

Something about the way he said it made my breath hitch before I could stop it. I hated that.

He gestured slightly toward the stone bench beside me. "May I join you?"

"No."

He blinked, then gave a small, awkward chuckle that sounded like defeat. "Fair." He didn’t push further, only stood there a few paces away, the night wind teasing the white fur trim of his cloak.

I folded my hands in my lap, studying him through the half-light. "Tell me, Your Majesty," I said finally, "why would you be bold enough to assume I would accept your marriage proposal?"

He didn’t flinch at the edge in my tone.

Instead, Soren’s gaze lifted to mine, and even in the dim light I could see something unreadable flicker through those glacier-blue eyes.

"Maybe," he said, voice low, "because I’ve always known you were escaping."

He took a slow breath, words deliberate. "And I felt like I could offer you the escape you needed."

I let out a small, humorless laugh even though my heart skipped a beat. "You think too highly of yourself."

His mouth twitched, something between a smile and self-deprecation.

"Maybe I do," he murmured, almost sheepishly. "But I know I’m not wrong about you."

Before I could gather my breath to reject him again, because surely that was what I intended to do, Soren spoke first.

"I’ve seen the look in your eyes."

My brows rose. "What look?"

"Longing," he said simply.

The word struck me like a blade slipped under armor. For a moment, I couldn’t even speak. Longing. What right did he have to name something I barely admitted to myself? My expression hardened. "What do you mean by that?"

Soren tilted his head, studying me with that disarming calm that always made me want to set something on fire. "I’m not sure yet. But I know perhaps you can find it right by my side."

I exhaled through my nose. "I don’t need help searching for anything. I’m capable on my own."

His smile was patient, almost knowing. "Then what are your plans after you leave Solmire?"

"Travel," I said flatly. "Engage in... hobbies."

"Hobbies," he echoed, amused. "You don’t sound very excited about it. Perhaps you need a companion. I could abandon my empire and volunteer if you so wish your majesty. Just say the word."

"I don’t need you." The words came out colder than I intended. I looked away. "It’s the same if I don’t have any sense of purpose. Companion or not."

That made him quiet for a moment. Arms folded, hand to his chin, thinking in that calculating way that promised nothing good ever came next. Then, light in his eyes, mischief sharpened into decision.

"Perhaps," he said slowly, "I can give you a purpose."

I stared at him, incredulous. "What did you just say?"

"Well you see.." He grinned like he’d been waiting for that exact reaction. "I have a little problem back at home."

"Problem?"

"Yes," he said, almost cheerfully. "It’s my adoptive mother. Who is also the Regent Empress."

I blinked. "The Regent Empress?"

Soren inclined his head, a faint shadow crossing his expression. "Vetra Nivarre. A woman who freezes entire negotiations with a glance. And lately, she’s been getting rather fond of reminding me who really holds Nevareth’s throne."

He was quiet for a moment, gaze distant, as if deciding how much to reveal. Then he drew a breath and began.

"Vetra found me when I was small enough to be folded into her skirts," he said, voice low. "Invisible enough for a slave to be erased."

I watched him as he spoke, the way his jaw tightened slightly when he mentioned the word slave.

"The court calls her regent and savior. I call her the woman who plucked me from the gutter and taught me to wear a crown without cracking it on my head." A bitter smile touched his lips.

"Vetra had hands that could sew a kingdom together and fingers that could strangle a rumor before it learned to walk. She taught me everything, how to read the winter lines in a man’s face, to bargain with a blade in one palm and a treaty in the other. How to be an emperor." He paused. "And how to make sure the throne could not be taken from me."

His birth mother, he told me, was property in the eyes of Soreth, a man who burned with suspicion and fed on the trust of others until there was nothing left. "He murdered his own children because he feared betrayal," Soren said flatly. "My mother hid me from him. Vetra found me afterward, with the careful eye of a woman who did not tolerate loose ends."

She raised him, armored him with lessons and daggers, and when the hour came she put him forward to take the name that had been butchered under Soreth’s reign.

"I owe her everything," he said, and something flickered across his face, something raw and unguarded. Loneliness.

The kind that comes from knowing you were chosen but never truly saved. It was there for only a heartbeat before his expression smoothed over, that imperial mask sliding back into place.

"The throne, my soldiers’ loyalty, the discipline that kept my frost from becoming a brittle thing. But debts have a peculiar habit of turning into roots."

He began to pace now, restless energy breaking through his careful composure.

"Vetra’s roots have sunk deep into every branch of Nevareth. She doesn’t merely advise, she anchors. She whispers in the right ears, places the right people in the right councils, and when she smiles, the ice in the palace listens."

His hands clenched at his sides. "That influence, what should have been my instrument, has become a muzzle. I can sign edicts and stand in the sun and hold the empire’s shape in my hands, and yet the courtiers still move at her shadow. The councils bend as if pulled by a tide that is not mine."

He stopped pacing, turned to face me fully.

"The Regent Empress has the patience of glaciers and the cruelty of long winters. Removing her with sabers and proclamations would be foolish artistry, blood for blood with no guarantee of true victory and only looks of tyranny. You cannot simply outfreeze a glacier by throwing a handful of snow at it."

I said nothing, still watching him. That flash of loneliness had lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs, unwelcome and insistent.

"So I came to you," he said quietly, "with a truth blunt enough to cut: she made me emperor, and now she rules me. She made a kingdom that obeys her more than me." He met my eyes. "There are hands that rule by force, and there are hands that rule by letting others think they rule. Vetra has mastered the latter."

Something shifted in his gaze then, determination sharpening into offer.

"I need your villainy, Eris," he said, stepping closer, voice low enough that the garden would not feed our words to the night.

"Not the petty cruelties, not the pyrotechnics of terror. I mean the patient, unforgiving kind. You know how to break things so they can be rebuilt your way. You know how to make people surrender a throne as if they gave it away for the price of their own comfort."

He was near enough now that I could see the silver threading through his dark cloak, the way his breath misted slightly in the cool air.

"Vetra has woven webs of loyalty that only a cruelty of equal measure and imagination can unravel," he continued. "And I think you understand that language better than anyone I know."

"What exactly are you offering me?" I asked, voice carefully neutral even as my mind raced.

"Sanctuary and choice. Sanctuary as my empress , protection that even Solmire cannot touch. And choice, to shape that role however you see fit, or to walk away from it entirely

He laid it out plainly: if I helped him unmake Vetra’s stranglehold, he would give me freedom in a way that could not be revoked. Protection by the might of Nevareth, safe passage from every favor-calling hand, and if I wished it, a new seat, temporary or permanent, crafted under terms we both wrote.

"I’m not couching this in flattery," he said. "I’m not pleading. I’m laying the problem bare and offering you partnership, the kind I don’t offer to Caelen or any courtier."

Then his voice dropped, became something more vulnerable.

"Stay. Stay near me, in whatever shape you can tolerate. Help me take what is mine without becoming what I despise." He exhaled slowly.

"You owe me nothing, Eris. But Vetra’s will not be pried loose by common steel. She will yield to cunning and a cruelty she recognizes. Help me do it, help me cut her out of Nevareth, and I will give you your life. Freedom without chains and the means to live it as only you can."

The night inhaled. The jasmine held its scent like a secret.

That look... that brief, unguarded loneliness, rose in my memory again. I recognized it because I’d seen it in my own reflection more times than I could count. The loneliness of being shaped into a weapon and wondering if that’s all you’d ever be.

It was the first thing that made me truly consider his offer.