To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

I heard the speech through the doors before they ever opened for me.

His voice carried, muffled through wood and stone, and I recognized the shape of it even distorted. He’d started strong. Eulogizing his uncle, invoking the goddess, painting the late King Cornelius as some paragon of moon-blessed leadership. He was trying. I’d give him that much, whatever else happened tonight. But he was one man standing against something far larger than himself, a machine built over centuries to grind people like me into something useful and then discard the remains. I found myself doubting, for one brief and traitorous second, whether letting him abandon his original plan to defend me outright had been the right call after all.

Then a sentinel’s hand slammed into my shoulder blade from behind.

”Bitch,” he said, low and mean. ”You’re up.”

The doors opened.

I walked through them and let the shield around the bond fall away completely, no longer caring what he felt from me now that there was nothing left to hide. The rage hit me instantly, sharp and immediate, radiating off him the moment his eyes found the chains at my wrists and throat. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. Any fool watching his face closely enough would have seen exactly what was happening between us, and I silently begged him, through whatever thread connected us, to just let this moment pass without giving Johann or anyone else more ammunition than they already had.

He pulled it back. Barely. Enough that his expression settled into something colder, more composed, though I could still feel the fury simmering underneath it like a held breath.

The sentinels flanking me marched me forward until I stood in front of the entire gathered court, every black-clad face in that hall turned toward me with an expression ranging from disgust to open hatred. It was unnerving, standing there, feeling that much collective loathing pointed at a single body.

Then my eyes caught on someone near the front who wasn’t looking at me that way at all.

A woman, seated beside a man I vaguely recognized, offered me the faintest, kindest smile I’d seen since this entire nightmare began. There was something strange about her, something I couldn’t quite name, a soft blue sheen that seemed to hang around her like light refracted through water. I wondered, briefly and absurdly, if I’d finally started losing my mind from stress alone. But the impression lingered, calming somehow, even in a room full of people who wanted to see me suffer.

Lysander continued.

”This is my uncle’s murderer,” he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the hall. ”A rogue who infiltrated this palace, and despite being given the privilege to serve, chose to cruelly end his life.”

I watched several heads nod along.

”The standing position of rogues has always been that they stand against prejudice,” he continued. ”But leaders like my uncle worked to ensure the caste system carried less cruelty than it once did. That lower ranks retained legal rights. Personhood. The chance to shape their own futures.” His eyes swept the crowd. ”Some of you here are even married to Omegas.”

He felt insane making the comparison. But he was following some script, and he was following it well.

I watched several people turn instinctively toward a handful of couples scattered through the hall, but the majority of eyes landed on the woman with the strange blue sheen. I wondered if she’d married up from an Omega designation, if that was why the room had turned toward her so naturally. She didn’t seem bothered by the attention at all, and the man beside her, someone I now fully recognized distantly as the Alpha of Skollrend, took her hand without hesitation.

She was the sister of the girl that Johann mentioned that Lysander murdered. She did not seem remotely pissed at him, though.

”But you,” Lysander said, and his voice hardened again as they broke my complicated train of thought, ”rogue, will now know what true oppression looks like.”

I felt something in my chest tighten.

”Death is far too kind for the likes of you.”

His voice wavered slightly on that line, just enough that I caught it through the bond as clearly as I heard it with my ears. I wondered if it would help to turn toward him, to somehow signal that this was fine, that this was simply the performance we’d agreed he had to give. I decided against it. Instead I pushed calm through whatever bond connected us, steady and deliberate, hoping he’d feel it and find enough footing to finish.

He continued.

”You will have no true identity moving forward,” he said. ”No rights. No inheritance. No autonomy. No place within this pack’s proper order.” His jaw tightened visibly now. ”You will be nothing but a vessel of pleasure. A breeder.”

The murmurs started low, rippling outward from the front rows, and then the yells of agreement rose up loud and sudden, more from the men in the crowd than the women, though a few of those joined in as well.

”As I have spoken it aloud,” Lysander said, ”it becomes law. Before the goddess. Before my people.” He paused, drawing in a visible breath, something flickering behind his eyes that I recognized as pure restraint. ”Till the end of your days.”

Applause broke out across the hall, scattered at first and then swelling, a handful of women rising to join the men already on their feet.

Then Johann’s voice cut through it from the front row.

”My father would be proud,” he said, standing, ”that his regent, his favorite nephew, is taking such a stance. Such a show of strength.”

”Thank you, cousin,” Lysander said, tight and clipped. ”But now is not the time.”

”I agree,” Johann said, though nothing in his expression suggested agreement at all. ”But as I look at that murderer’s face, I see nothing but a hardened heart. Death does not frighten her. Neither, I suspect, does this.” He let his gaze drag slowly over me, deliberate and cruel. ”I believe she should be humiliated here. Stripped and taken like the breeder she is, right now, to send a proper message.”

The elders near the front cut in immediately.

”Your Highness,” one of them said sharply, ”this is neither the time nor the place.”

Johann turned to the crowd instead, ignoring them entirely.

”Am I right?” he called out.

Silence held for a moment, and then a voice broke it from somewhere near the front.

”The Prince has a point.”

The man rose, and I recognized him then, some distant echo of a resemblance clicking into place. Queen Edelina’s father. His support was so transparently for his own grandson that it should have landed as nothing but obvious flattery, and yet the crowd shifted anyway, murmurs picking up again, some faces turning to nod along with him.

Lysander opened his mouth, and I felt the flood of rage building in him through the bond, ready to spill over into something neither of us could take back in front of this many witnesses.

That was when a man stood up near the middle of the hall.

He looked directly at me, and something about his stillness made every hair on my arms rise before he even spoke.

”Comrade,” he said, his voice carrying clean through the sudden quiet, ”I would never let a fate worse than death befall you. For us rogues, you will be a martyr. You deserve a kinder end.”