Chapter 7
"Of course I burned it," I said, staying seated on the bench, watching him through the shadows. "Did you want Alden's search party to find a hand-drawn map of the palace signed by the Crown Prince?"
Julian let out a ragged, trembling sigh, leaning his back against the closed door as if his legs could barely support his weight. "You should have gone, Rowan. The shift at the Water Gate was twenty minutes ago. The skiff is waiting. By dawn, you could have been ten miles downriver, past the outer blockades."
"And where would you be at dawn, Julian?" I asked, my voice dangerously low. "Standing on that scaffold, explaining to Alden why the cage is empty?"
Julian looked away, staring at the damp floor. "I would have handled Alden."
"Don't lie to me!" I snapped, rising to my feet.
The chains clanged against the stones, but I didn't care. I crossed the cell in two long strides, stopping right in front of him. I was bigger than him, broader, smelling of sweat and dried blood, but he didn't shrink back. He tilted his head up, meeting my fury with that same brittle, heartbreaking defiance.
"You wouldn't have handled him," I snarled, leaning down into his face. "He would have called it treason. He would have used my escape as an excuse to purge the remaining royalists from the garrison, lock you in the north tower, and crown himself Regent for life. You gave me that map because you've given up."
"I haven't given up!" Julian hissed, his hands flying out from his sleeves to shove against my chest.
He didn't have the strength to move me an inch, but the desperation in the gesture hit harder than a mace. His knuckles bunched into the wool of my shirt, his knuckles white, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps against my neck.
"You don't see what's happening up there, Rowan!" he whispered frantically, his voice cracking with sheer, unadulterated terror. "You sit down here in the quiet, but up there—the walls are bleeding. Alden dismissed the Royal Halberdiers this afternoon. Every single guard at my father's bedside is an Iron Watch mercenary. My cousin, Lord Lucan... they found him in the canal at dusk. Drowned. An 'unfortunate accident.'"
My blood ran cold. Lucan was the only man on the council who still openly challenged the Duke.
"Alden isn't waiting for the Emperor to die naturally," Julian whispered, his forehead dropping against my collarbone, his voice muffled by the rough fabric of my clothes. "He's accelerating everything. The apothecaries told me my father won't last past the new moon. Once he stops breathing, Alden doesn't need a puppet prince anymore. He'll present a forged will naming him Lord Protector, and my throat will be cut before the funeral bells stop ringing."
I lifted my bound hands, resting my forearms heavily across his shoulders, pulling him against me until there wasn't an inch of air between us. The iron chain dangled across his back, cold and heavy, but he didn't care; he burrowed closer, his arms wrapping tightly around my waist, clinging to me as if I were the only solid thing in a collapsing universe.
"Then we go together," I murmured against his ear, feeling the violent shudder that ran through his frame. "Right now. We take the kitchen sluice. We take the skiff. We burn the weir behind us and ride north. My scouts—"
"I can't!" Julian cried, his voice breaking into a muffled sob against my neck. "Gods damn you, Rowan, I *can't*! If I flee, Alden takes the throne without striking a blow! The entire kingdom—millions of people—handed over to a butcher who will bleed them dry to wage war on the Free Cities! My family built this realm from the mud. I cannot abandon it. I will not be the coward who ran into the woods while his people burned!"
"Then what do you want from me?!" I growled, my hands sliding up to cup his face, forcing his head back so he had to look at me.
His cheeks were wet with tears, reflecting the orange embers of the brazier. He looked so young, so impossibly broken, carrying the weight of an entire rotting empire on his narrow shoulders.
"You tell me to wait three days," I said, my voice thick with emotion, my thumbs wiping away the dampness under his eyes. "Then you give me a map to run. You call me a dog in the court, and then you come down here at midnight and weep in my arms. What is the game, Julian? What do you want?"
"I want you to live!" Julian choked out, his fingers clutching my wrists, pressing his thumbs hard against the iron cuffs that bit into my flesh. "That's all I want! I brought you here thinking... thinking I could control the board. Thinking I had enough time to outmaneuver him. But the board is gone, Rowan! Alden flipped the table! He is going to kill me, and I can accept that—I made my peace with the grave months ago—but I cannot watch him put you on that block! I cannot watch them take your head because of my failure!"
The sheer, unbridled agony in his voice shattered whatever restraint I had left.
"You think I'd survive without you?" I rasped, my vision blurring with a sudden, violent heat. "You think I'd ride north, sit in a mountain camp, and drink myself blind while I imagine your blood on Alden's flagstones?"
Julian froze, his lips parting, his grey eyes wide and stunned.
"I held that border for two years because you asked me to," I said, my voice dropping into a harsh, fierce growl, every word dragged straight from the center of my chest. "I didn't give a damn about Valenica. I didn't care about your father, or the High Council, or the peasants in the valleys. I fought for *you*. Because every time you rode into my camp with ink on your fingers and that stubborn, impossible light in your eyes, I knew I would follow you into the mouth of hell."
"Rowan..." he breathed, trembling.
"You want me to run?" I pulled his face closer, until our foreheads pressed together, our breaths tangling in the freezing subterranean air. "I'm not running, Jules. If your palace is going to burn, then let it burn. But I am staying right here. If Alden comes for you, he goes through me first. I would rather tear this keep down with my bare hands, flagstone by flagstone, and drag us both into the ashes, than leave you to bleed alone in this dark."
Julian let out a broken, shuddering sound that was half a sob and half a gasp.
He didn't argue. He didn't tell me I was mad.
Instead, he surged upward, throwing his arms around my neck, pulling my mouth down onto his with a ferocity that bordered on violence.
The kiss was wild, desperate, and taste of copper, salt, and raw, frantic hunger. There was no courtly grace in it, no royal restraint. It was the colliding of two men who knew the noose was tightening, who had run out of time and lies. His teeth scraped against my lip; his fingers tangled deep into my hair, holding me to him with an almost bruising force, as if he were trying to pull the very soul out of my chest.
