Page 89 of The Golden Rose Of Valenul

The General chuckled darkly as the stable hand hurried over. He snatched the reins unceremoniously and swung up onto his stallion’s back. Beside him, the Captain did the same.

“She is now betrothed to Lord Governor Caldwell.” He spat the name like something foul on his tongue, then yanked the reins to start down the drive. “There is a bastard half-fae now sitting on the High Council.”

“Ludicrous!” Nikolai shook his head. “Have they all gone mad?”

“They may very well be.” Loren ground his teeth, beating back the inferno building in his chest. The embarrassment of losing his fiancée and a duel to that disgrace was too much to think about for long. “He has poisoned their minds, just as he did to that bitch.”

Nikolai barked a laugh. “Fae magic, perhaps?”

“Tenebra does not have the capacity to see beyond his own cock let alone harness any significant magic.” They turned onto the Old Highway and started toward Laeton proper. “That duel should have ended the moment I disarmed him.”

“Right you are.”

“Perhaps they are well-matched,” Loren mused with a scoff. “She hardly has two thoughts to string together. Quite the empty-headed pair. It is no wonder he was able to seduce her so easily.”

Another boisterous laugh. Nikolai shook his head to clear the mirth away. “You will get your revenge—of that, I have no doubt.”

Loren let his own smirk drop. “Indeed.”

“I know that tone.” Nikolai raised a questioning brow and turned in his saddle to look at him fully. “You have a plan?”

“Knowledge, Captain.” Loren could not keep the sneer off his face. “I have been building my knowledge on this matter.”

“Is that so?”

“I overheard those low-life guards speaking about the Caldwell Will just last night,” Loren explained, “and how they knew they would be claimed as heirs.”

A frown creased Nikolai’s brow. “Suspicious.”

“To say the least.”

“What have you discovered?”

“Supposedly,” Loren said with a roll of his eyes, “the bastard’s mother is a distant Caldwell relative. Maribel Tenebra. I cannot find any records of her aside from the forms he filled out for guard duties.”

“Maribel Tenebra?” Nikolai looked contemplative. “The name is unfamiliar.”

Loren had thought the same thing as he stood in the Princeps’ office with the pages of the Will spread across his desk for inspection. The Councilmen, as perplexed as he, muttered their dissent. Many preferred the Lord Governor Steward and asked whether or not they could, instead, place him at the helm of the Eastern Province. To his credit, even Azriel had appeared in agreement.

Which did not bode well when Markus had said, “A Caldwell has ruled that region for millennia. We are to change it now?”

That had shifted many perspectives. A half-breed though he was, Azriel Tenebra was still a Caldwell and the eldest male heir to the title, with Madan second in line.

“Given a proper wife,” Markus had continued, “he will produce a Caersan vampire heir to continue the lineage.”

All eyes had shifted to Loren at that. Heat rose to his face. There had been no mistaking what the Princeps implied by that choice of words. He had been defeated in the duel for Ariadne’s honor and no longer held the right to her hand.

“I have already voiced my decision before the Society,” Markus had said as no one spoke. The attention shifted away from the General. “But I will heed the Council’s vote.”

So Loren had watched on in horror as nearly every member of the Council voted in favor of instating a bastard-born guard with zero training to the position of Lord Governor—one of the highest seats of power in Valenul. The only men who declined were his own father and those present from his home, Notten Province.

Loren had spoken to no one as he left, not even his father, who remained to congratulate the newest Lord Governor despite his vote against him. Traitor.

Dragging his thoughts from the recent memory, Loren returned his attention to Nikolai. “Evidently, Maribel Tenebra is a distant cousin of Garth. There are no other men still alive in the Caldwell line.”

It did not surprise him, really. The Caldwell family had been hit hard from the beginning of the vampire era in Valenul. As the first to settle on the northern side of the Keonis Mountain range, they were targeted by dhemons who lived nearby. If nothing else, that reason alone upheld Azriel’s claim to the seat. For a family as hardy as the Caldwells to be wiped out would be considered a crime.

“What will you do?” Nikolai asked after a beat. “I have never known you to let something like this stand.”

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