After My Wife Was Sacrificed for His Lie

The blood had barely dried on my thighs when the guards came for me. They didn’t offer a hand to help me stand; they hooked their armored fingers under my armpits and dragged me across the stone floor. My legs were useless, trembling not from fear, but from the hollow, aching void where life had flickered and died only hours before. I was a husk, scraped clean of hope, being hauled toward the final butchery of my pride.

The doors to the Great Hall groaned open, unleashing a wall of noise and light. The court was assembled, a sea of velvet and jewels, their faces twisted into masks of jeering anticipation. They smelled blood in the water.

At the far end, upon the Iron Throne, sat Carter. He looked like a man haunted by ghosts he refused to name. His skin was gray, his eyes rimmed with red, and his hands gripped the armrests so tightly I expected the wood to splinter. He was destroying me to save himself, cannibalizing the woman he loved to feed the monster of his paranoia.

"Bring the accused forward," Carter commanded. His voice lacked its usual timber; it was brittle, dry as dead leaves.

The guards dropped me at the foot of the dais. I collapsed onto the cold marble, too weak to rise, my breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. I looked up, not at the King, but at the woman standing beside him.

Jasmine Flores smiled down at me. The breath hitched in my throat. She was wearing blue silk—shimmering, iridescent, embroidered with silver thread. It was a replica of the gown I had worn at the coronation, the dress Carter had once said made me look like the sky itself. On her, it looked like a shroud.

"Aurora King," Carter read from a scroll, his eyes fixing on the parchment to avoid mine. "You have brought darkness to this land. Storms, blight, and cursed blood. To purify the realm, the entity must be humbled. You are hereby stripped of all titles. You are no longer Duchess of the High Vale. You are no longer my consort."

He gestured to the guards. Rough hands seized me. There was no ceremony, only violence. They tore the fine linen tunic from my shoulders, the sound of ripping fabric echoing like a gunshot. I shivered, exposed and trembling, until a rough, burlap sack was thrown over my head. It smelled of mildew and rot, scratching against my skin like sandpaper.

"A fitting raiment for a curse," Jasmine purred, stepping closer to the edge of the dais. "But, my King, simply stripping her of rank is not enough. If she remains unattached, the darkness may still seek to claim the throne through her."

Carter looked at her, desperate for salvation, desperate for someone else to make the cruel decisions. "What do you propose?"

"Mercy," Jasmine lied, the word dripping with venom. "Let her be wed. Bind her to a station so low she can never rise again. Let her marry the refuse of your dungeons."

A ripple of cruel laughter moved through the court. Carter hesitated, his gaze flickering to me—a shapeless heap in rags—and then back to the security Jasmine offered.

"So be it," he whispered.

They didn't let me leave. They marched me down, past the wine cellars, past the barracks, into the suffocating damp of the dungeons. The air here was heavy with the copper tang of old blood and fear.

In the center of the torture chamber, a man was chained to a rusted ring in the floor. Blaze Moreno. I remembered him as a proud general of the opposition, a man of broad shoulders and defiant eyes. The creature before me was a ruin. His skin was a map of scars, his body emaciated, trembling violently as the torchlight hit his dilated pupils.

"Stand him up," the magistrate barked.

Blaze flinched as the guards hauled him to his feet. He couldn't stop shaking. He looked at me, his eyes glassy and unseeing, broken by years of agony.

"I... I will be good," Blaze mumbled, a mantra of the tortured. "I will be good."

I looked up toward the iron grate in the ceiling, the observation deck. I saw the gleam of a crown. Carter was watching. He needed to witness this, to convince himself that this cruelty was justice.

"Do you, Aurora, take this traitor to be your husband?" the magistrate droned, bored.

I didn't answer. I stared up at the grate, locking eyes with the shadow of the man who had traded his soul for safety.

"She accepts," Jasmine’s voice floated down from above, light and airy.

The magistrate grabbed my hand and shoved it into Blaze’s. His palm was clammy, his fingers missing nails. He squeezed my hand, not in affection, but in sheer terror, clinging to me as if I were a raft in a storm.

"I pronounce you man and wife," the magistrate spat.

As the shackles were snapped back onto Blaze’s wrists, tethering me to him, the temperature in the dungeon plummeted. The torch flames turned blue for a fraction of a second. The hairs on my arms rose, not from the cold, but from a familiar, static charge in the air.

From the corner of the room, where the shadows were deepest, I felt a gaze heavier than the King’s. Silent. Watchful. Lethal.

Spencer was here. Watching the pact seal my fate, waiting for the moment the world broke enough for him to step through.