Page 174 of Fearless

My feet falter. It feels as though I’ve disturbed a piece of the past, intruded on a stranger I now call “mother” in title alone. I scan Queen Iris’s chamber slowly, taking in the four-poster bed hiding beneath a layer of neglect. Dust blankets every piece of furniture—the desk, vanity, and bookshelves all warmed with white grime.

“Father never let anyone in here.” Kai’s words only emphasize the clear signs of isolation. “Always claimed that he wanted to preserve it for her.”

My gaze drifts to the shelves once again, noting the toppled books and wedged papers between them. On her nightstand, dust collects around the shape of a rectangle at its center. “This is where Kitt got her jewelry box from,” I murmur.

Kai nods. “During your first Trial, I found him in here holding it. He must have been looking through some of her old things.”

I halt my slow pacing at the end of an untouched bed. “If he looked through that jewelry box, he would have seen those notes from Calum.”

Thoroughly distracted, Kai only manages an absentminded “Hmm.”

With a sigh, I drop the subject. His mind is far from my speculations. “So, what are we doing here, exactly?”

“You don’t want to see your mother’s chamber?”

I shrug. “Maybe if she actually felt like my mother. But…” I run a hand across that dusty quilt hugging the bed. “This woman feels like a stranger.”

Kai nods slowly, sympathetically, before he spews the real reason he dragged me here. “You mentioned Calum saying something about the true records being sealed away.”

I glance around the abandoned room. “And you figured they might be in here where no one was permitted to enter.”

“Nothing gets past you, Little Psychic.” His following huff is laced with humor. “Actually, if I am right, then something did get past you.”

This offends me. Greatly. “Just spit it out, Azer.”

Kai pokes around the desk, pulling at stubborn drawers. “I am a year older than you, Pae. If my father married Myla after you were born—”

“You would have been a year old already,” I breathe.

His smirk is infuriating.

“Don’t be an ass.” I join him at the desk with a lethal look. “My mind has been a little occupied today.”

“And mine hasn’t?”

I almost laugh. “I got married!”

“And I have been mourning you since the day we left that poppy field!”

My lips part slightly. I stare at him, watching every ripple of emotion cross his unmasked face. He sighs out a steadying breath. “The slow death of us started the day my brother slid that ring onto your finger,” Kai murmurs. “And I have had nothing but you on my mind for weeks.” He reaches for me before thinking better of it. “We will always be inevitable, Pae. But in this lifetime, we are doomed. Today was evidence of that. It’s…” He swallows. “It’s best we move on.”

A long moment passes between us before he turns back toward the desk, as though he hasn’t just crushed my heart in his calloused palm. The ache in my chest is only amplified by the truth in his words. We are ruin.

Kai clears his throat. I blink away the emotion stinging my eyes.

Attempting to let the tension fall from between us, I ask, “You think the records are in this desk?”

I peek over his shoulder at the fingerprints he’s scattered across the dusty wood. Kai tugs at a rattling handle to no avail. “It’s locked,” he mutters. That hardly deters him from yanking it open with ease and stating, “Brawny.” He tosses his head toward the door. “Down the hall.”

Within a matter of moments, he is pulling three weathered scrolls from the depths of that locked drawer and laying them on the desk.

One speaks of birth, the other of death, the final of marriage. Each is a decree with secrets.

We lean in, skimming the swirling dark ink. My eyes flick betweenthe three pages, head spinning. Frustrated, I try to fit Calum’s admittances between the scrawled words.

Eighteen years ago, a daughter was born to the king.

Eighteen years ago, Queen Iris died in childbirth.

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