The vision came without warning, and that was the worst part. I was lying in bed, blind, my hand wrapped in Fergus’s, when color bloomed behind my eyes. I could see. I was in the library, but not in my body.
Fergus stood near the desk, his shirt hanging open. Cordelia stepped into view, silk dressing gown slipping from her shoulders. She pressed herself into him, and he pulled her closer. “Cordelia.
Oh, Cordelia,” he groaned. I couldn’t look away. I was trapped behind my own eyes, forced to watch her climb into his lap. And then the vision vanished, leaving me in darkness with my husband’s hand still holding mine.
“Siri, what’s wrong? ” Fergus asked. I pulled away. I told him I needed to be alone.
In the hallway, I heard their voices from below. Fergus and Cordelia. I crept to the top of the stairs and listened as my world shattered. “What if she knows?
” Fergus asked. Cordelia laughed. “She’s human, Fergus. She can’t smell the mate bond between us.
”
My husband. My sister. And then my stepmother’s name, spoken with poison. My hand slipped from the banister.
“Mother said we’d only have to wait a little bit longer,” Cordelia purred. “Soon, she’ll be out of the way. And we’ll have Siri’s fortune. ”
I left through the servants’ stairs.
I ran into the rain, barefoot, blind, with nothing but the truth burning in my chest. I wasn’t running from them. I was running toward something else entirely. The forest floor tore at my feet, but I didn’t stop until I heard it: the steady beat of horses’ hooves.
A carriage. A vision had shown me this road, this carriage. I threw myself into its path. The driver shouted, but I didn’t care.
I needed to get away, or I needed to die trying. “Are you all right? ” A man’s voice, deep and calm. I lied.
I near shouted at him, telling him that he nearly killed me and that he owed me compensation. He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Let me get you to a doctor. ”
Relief flooded through me, and I stepped into the carriage he offered.
Inside, he asked my name. I asked his. His name was Roman. And he could smell my fear.
The sound of his voice shifted something in me. But then I remembered exactly what shifters were capable of, and I went rigid. He draped a cloak over my shoulders. “Why are you helping me?
” I asked. “Because you need help. ”
I wove a lie about my family trying to kill me, and he listened without speaking. Then he made a promise that felt impossible to believe.
“I won’t let anything hurt you. ”
I was too tired to argue. I slipped under, and when I woke, I was in the palace of the Alpha King. “Welcome back, Your Majesty,” voices murmured around me.
The man who’d saved me wasn’t a stranger. He was the king himself. And he had a reason for stopping that he refused to name. “Why did you bring me here?
” I demanded. “Because you’re my mate. ”
The words were like ice water. I had been married.
I had been betrayed by the mate bond my own husband shared with my sister. I refused to be drawn into another one. But Roman made his case differently. “Your enemies are my enemies now,” he said.
I thought about Oz. My little brother, who’d died of the same “illness” that had taken my sight. The illness that was actually poison, fed to me drop by drop by the people who were supposed to love me. “They killed my brother,” I whispered.
“I want to destroy them. ”
Roman didn’t flinch. “Then that’s what I’ll help you do. ”
The healers came, purging the poison from my body.
It was a brutal process, and the visions came with it. I saw their plot unfolding: Ariadne given the poison to Fergus, Cordelia’s desperate love for him, my own grave being dug. Then I saw the future they had planned for me. A signature forced onto legal documents.
A celebration over a fresh grave. I woke gasping. Roman was there. “We use the visions,” he said.
“We stay ahead of them. ”
We set up a trap for Fergus. I wore Cordelia’s perfume and hid behind a screen. He came to the inn, desperate, expecting his mate.
“She’s gone, so we can be together,” he said. “The poison was genius, really. ”
I let him keep talking. Let him confess to everything.
Then I stepped out from behind the screen and revealed myself. Fergus was arrested. The marriage was annulled. I waited for the satisfaction to come.
It never did. All I felt was hollow. Then the wolf came to my room at night. It sat beside my bed, warm and solid.
I talked to it, told it all the things I couldn’t say to anyone else. How I was angry. How I was sad. How I didn’t know how to trust anyone again.
Morning came, and my vision returned. The shapes became clear, the colors sharp. I turned to find Roman watching me. I had dreamed of a wolf with blue eyes that watched over me in the darkness.
Roman’s eyes were the same blue. The truth clicked into place: the wolf in my room hadn’t been a dream. It had been him. Days later, the summons came.
Ariadne demanded an audience before the council to free Cordelia. “She’s trying to create a doubt,” Roman warned. I watched from a hidden gallery as my stepmother played the grieving mother. She lied to the nobles with tears in her eyes, spinning the poison into love and care.
“My daughter is innocent,” she said. “I loved Cyrilla as if she were my own. ”
I wanted to scream. Instead, a vision took hold.
I saw my brother. Oz. Alive, locked in a cold stone room, scratching marks into the wall. “Ariadne’s family owns a hunting lodge north,” Roman said.
“It’s registered as empty. ”
We rode there that hour. He was in the basement, behind a door with three locks. He was thin, pale, shaking, but he was alive.
I held my little brother and wept. Ariadne was arrested at sunset. She screamed curses as they dragged her away. I stood still, waiting for the feeling of triumph to come.
Nothing came. Then, four days later, the vision showed me something I couldn’t ignore. Roman reaching for a glass. Pain contorting his face.
Him falling. I found Roman in the corridor, heading to a council meeting. “Don’t go,” I said. “I had a vision.
”
Instead of laughing, he did what I asked. He canceled the meeting. He hid me in his chambers. In the silence, the truth between us began to crack open.
“You’ve been pushing me away for days,” Roman said. “You build walls so high I can’t reach you. ”
He poured wine from his own bottle and brought the glass to his lips. It was too late.
The vision was already playing out. I screamed. “Roman! ”
He fell to his knees.
Poison. The wine had been poisoned. I caught him, cradled his head in my lap. “I love you,” I pleaded.
“Do you hear me? I love you. ”
The healer came. “An incomplete bond won’t be enough.
If you complete the bond, it might be. ”
I bit down at the junction of his neck and shoulder. The bond exploded between us, golden and blinding. I felt his pain, and my own, and then something else.
A complete connection. “Stay with me,” I whispered. Through the bond, he said, “I will never leave. You are mine.
”
Roman healed. By the next month, I was queen. And together, holding onto him in the dark, I finally understood what it meant to be whole. The blind girl who ran into the rain had found more than revenge.
She’d found a reason to live.
