The gardens at midnight smell like a lie.

Night-blooming jasmine hangs heavy in the air, sweet and cloying, mixing with the ozone-sharp scent that means Kael is near. I recognize it now the way I recognize the particular ache in my chest that comes with him—involuntary, unwanted, impossible to ignore.

He's waiting by the fountain, the one where water runs upward instead of down, defying every law of physics I understand. The moonlight catches the silver in his hair, makes him look like something carved from starlight and malice. Beautiful. Dangerous. Mine in the way that a caged bird belongs to its cage.

"You came," he says, and there's something raw in his voice, something that sounds almost like relief.

I came because I'm a masochist with abandonment issues and a body that betrays my mind's better judgment. I came because the summons wrapped in shadow felt less like a command and more like a plea, and I'm apparently pathetic enough to respond to that distinction.

"Rowan said you wanted to talk." I keep my distance, arms crossed, every muscle locked down tight. "So talk."

Kael turns to face me fully, and the silver of his eyes seems to glow brighter in the darkness. He's wearing the dark silks again, the ones that make him look like he stepped out of a fever dream. The ones that smell like him—like midnight and electricity and everything I've been trained to fear.

"I owe you the truth," he says quietly.

"Shocking revelation. You've been lying to me. Alert the presses." I'm going for flippant, for the armor of sarcasm that's kept me alive through worse than this. But my voice comes out thin, betraying me. "What truth? That you're a manipulative asshole? Already picked up on that one."

He steps closer, and every nerve in my body screams at me to move away. I don't move.

"The alliance with the North Court was necessary," he says, each word measured, careful. "My sister has been consolidating power for centuries. Building alliances. Turning the other courts against me. Without the North Court's support, she would have moved against me by now. I would have lost my throne."

I knew this already. Rowan told me enough for me to piece together the political chess game. But hearing it from Kael—hearing the exhaustion beneath his words, the weight of a crown that's apparently crushing him—hits different.

"And I was the price," I say flatly. "The human sacrifice to seal the deal."

"Yes." He doesn't try to soften it, doesn't offer excuses. Just the brutal honesty of it, and something in my chest cracks a little. "Your bloodline. The prophecy. The political advantage of binding a human with fae magic. All of it was necessary."

The fountain behind him gurgles upward, water defying gravity, and I think about how nothing in this world follows the rules I understand. How I've been swimming upstream since the moment I woke up in the Twilight Court.

"But?" I prompt, because there's a but hanging in the air between us, heavy as humidity.

Kael's jaw tightens. He reaches up, runs a hand through his hair, and the gesture is so achingly human that it hurts to watch. "But I sensed something in you before I ever took you. Before I even knew your name."

My breath catches. I hate that it catches.

"What does that mean?" I ask, though I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

"I felt you," he says, and his voice drops lower, becomes something almost vulnerable. "In the spaces between worlds. In the thin places where fae magic bleeds into your realm. I felt your defiance like a beacon. Your refusal to break. Your loneliness." He steps closer, and I let him, which is its own kind of surrender. "I recognized it because it's the same loneliness I've been drowning in for two hundred years."

The night-blooming jasmine is overwhelming now, mixing with the scent of my own skin, my own fear-sweat. I can feel the heat radiating off him, the pull of his magic like gravity, like I'm being drawn into orbit around something massive and ancient and completely beyond my comprehension.

"Don't," I say, but it comes out as barely a whisper.

"Don't what?"

"Don't make this romantic. Don't turn an abduction into some twisted fated-mates narrative. Don't—" My voice breaks, and I hate myself for it. "Don't make me want to believe this."

Kael reaches out, and I should move away. Every survival instinct I've honed over five years of abuse screams at me to create distance. Instead, I let him cup my face in his hands, let his thumbs trace my cheekbones with a gentleness that feels like violence.

"I'm not making it anything," he says softly. "I'm telling you what's true. I wanted the alliance. I needed the alliance. But I also—" He breaks off, and for a moment, he looks almost human. Almost breakable. "I wanted you. Not as a tool. Not as a pawn. You. Iris. The woman who looked at me in that first moment like I was the most contemptible thing she'd ever seen."

My heart is racing. My hands are shaking. I'm standing in a Fae prince's arms in a midnight garden, and every rational part of my brain is screaming that this is a trap, this is manipulation, this is exactly how it starts—with pretty words and promises and the intoxicating feeling of being wanted.

I've been here before.

"If you actually felt something," I say, pulling back just enough to see his face, "if this isn't just politics and manipulation, then break the binding."

The words hang in the air like a challenge. Like a test. Like the moment where everything either becomes real or reveals itself as theater.

Kael's hands fall away from my face.

"What?" His voice is careful, controlled, but I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenches.

"Break the binding," I repeat, and my voice is steady now, cold as the grave. "If you care about me—if this is anything more than you wanting to keep your favorite pet on a leash—break it. Let me go. Give me a choice."

The silence that follows is deafening.

I watch his face in the moonlight, watch the conflict play out across his features like a storm system moving in. The silver of his eyes flickers, dims, becomes almost human. Almost vulnerable. And then it hardens again, becomes something distant and regal and completely unreachable.

"I can't," he says finally.

There it is. The answer I already knew, but hearing it spoken aloud is like a blade between my ribs.

"You can't," I repeat, tasting the words like poison. "Or you won't?"

"It's the same thing." He reaches for me again, and I step back, creating distance. "If I break the binding, the North Court will see it as weakness. They'll question whether I'm truly committed to the alliance. Morrigan will use it as an opening. The throne—"

"The throne," I say flatly. "Of course. The crown comes first. It always does."

"Iris—"

"No." I hold up a hand, and he stops, respects the boundary in a way that feels like an insult. "You don't get to explain this away. You don't get to make me understand why you're choosing a crown over—" Over what? Over me? Over the possibility of something real? "You made your choice. I see it clearly now."

I'm doing what I do best: building walls. Reinforcing the armor. Turning myself into something untouchable, unreachable, incapable of being hurt because I'm already gone, already retreated into the fortress of my own indifference.

It's a survival mechanism that's kept me alive.

It's also a lie, and we both know it.

"You think I wanted this?" Kael's voice rises, loses some of its careful control. "You think I wanted to be in a position where I have to choose between the woman I—" He stops himself, but it's too late. I've already heard the shape of the words he didn't finish.

"Between me and the crown," I say, finishing it for him. "And we both know how that choice goes. It always goes the same way. I've seen it a thousand times—men who care about you, men who say they'd do anything for you, right up until the moment their own survival is on the line. Then suddenly you're expendable. Suddenly you're the price they're willing to pay."

"That's not—"

"Five years," I interrupt, and my voice is sharp enough to cut. "I spent five years with someone who told me he loved me while he systematized my destruction. So forgive me if I'm not impressed by pretty words and midnight confessions. Forgive me if I've learned that love is just another word for ownership."

Kael moves toward me, and this time I don't let him get close. I sidestep, put the fountain between us. The water continues its impossible upward trajectory, and I think about how nothing here makes sense, how I've been drowning in a world where the rules don't apply and the beautiful things are the most dangerous.

"This is different," he says, and there's desperation in his voice now, the first real crack in his princely composure. "You're different. We're different."

"Are we?" I ask coldly. "Or are you just better at this than he was? Are you more sophisticated in your manipulation? Is that what makes this different—that you're a Fae prince instead of a broken man, so the cage is prettier, the lies more eloquent?"

"I'm not lying to you."

"You're not breaking the binding," I counter. "Which is the same as lying. Which is the same as choosing the throne over me. Which is the same as every man who's ever looked me in the eye and promised me forever while keeping one hand on the door."

I turn away from him, because if I don't, I'm going to do something stupid. Like believe him. Like let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, this time could be different. Like forget that hope is the most dangerous drug of all.

"Iris, wait—"

"No," I say, and I don't turn around. "I'm done waiting. I'm done being the consolation prize, the side quest, the thing you want until it costs you something real. I'm done."

I walk away from him, and with every step, I feel myself becoming harder, colder, more remote. By the time I reach the garden gate, I'm barely breathing. By the time I'm back in my borrowed room, I'm completely numb.

I lock the door—a useless gesture in a place where walls are suggestions—and sit on the edge of the bed. My hands are shaking. My chest feels like it's been caved in. And beneath it all, I can still smell him: night-blooming jasmine and ozone and the scent of lightning before a storm.

The scent of something I wanted so badly it hurt.

I spend the next hours doing what I do best: compartmentalizing. Burying. Transforming the raw wound of his rejection into something harder, sharper, more useful. I've survived worse than a Fae prince's indifference. I've survived worse than a crown prioritized over my humanity.

But as the night deepens and the castle settles into sleep, I find myself at the window, staring out at the gardens where he's still standing by the fountain. Motionless. Alone. Looking like he's drowning in something deeper than water.

And the worst part—the part that makes me hate myself—is that I almost go back down.

Almost.

But I don't, because I've learned that "almost" is where women like me go to die.

So instead, I sit in the darkness of my borrowed room and feel the binding between us like a physical thing, a chain wrapped around my ribs, and I understand with absolute clarity that I'm trapped. Not just by magic, but by the terrible, consuming reality of wanting someone who will never choose me.

Not when the crown is at stake.

Not when anything is at stake.

Never.

A knock comes at my door just before dawn—soft, almost apologetic. I don't answer. I lie in bed and listen to Rowan's footsteps retreat down the hallway, and I wonder what he's come to say. Whether Kael sent him. Whether there are words that could possibly fix this.

There aren't.

Some betrayals don't have solutions. Some wounds don't heal. Some loves just end in the dark, quietly, with no ceremony and no closure—just the slow suffocation of knowing that you were never enough to compete with a crown.

And me? I'm already planning my next move.

Because if Kael won't break the binding, I'll find someone who can.

And if I have to burn this entire Fae realm to the ground to do it, well—I've survived fire before.