Sarisa hit the floor on one knee, silk dragging over rough wood instead of white stone.
For a second the world would not settle. Teleportation always tore the breath out of her, but this one had come on the heels of terror, smoke, blood, and the sight of a masked monster walking through an entire wedding ceremony like it was nothing.
Her pulse was still trying to claw its way out of her throat. Her veil hung crooked. One sleeve of the dress had slipped half off her shoulder.
Somewhere between the garden and here, she had lost one shoe.
She pushed up at once.
The room around her was nothing she recognized.
Not a palace chamber. Not a dungeon. Not any estate she had ever visited under royal duty.
It looked like the inside of a small house, but beautiful in the sort of careful, lived-in way no palace ever managed.
Warm wood. A deep green rug. Shelves with books stacked badly enough to suggest real hands had touched them.
A low table by the window with a bowl of fruit and a vase full of wildflowers.
Two armchairs near a stone hearth. A lamp already lit, throwing soft gold over everything. It was not grand.
It was lovely.
And Sarisa did not trust it for a second.
She spun toward the masked person.
They had let go of her wrist, but only because they clearly thought they no longer needed to hold her.
The pale mask still hid the face. The terrible aura still clung to them, thin now but present enough to make the room feel wrong around the edges.
Sarisa backed up once, found the wall with her shoulders, then lunged.
No hesitation. No thought. She had spent too many months being arranged and handled and spoken over.
If this thing thought it could drag her out of a wedding in front of half the realm and then stand there calmly in some pretty little room, it was going to learn otherwise.
She went for the mask first.
The figure caught both her wrists immediately.
"Stop."
Sarisa twisted hard, bringing one knee up toward the intruder's ribs. They turned just enough to take the impact badly but not fatally, then released one of her wrists only to catch her around the waist before she could reach the door.
"Stop fighting," the masked person snapped, voice still too high, too wrong. "It's me, Lara. I didn't think you would not recognize me."
Sarisa froze.
For one heartbeat, everything in her body simply stopped obeying.
Then the masked figure swore under their breath and yanked the pale mask free.
Lara.
The room changed instantly.
The false, monstrous wrongness peeled away like a bad dream burning off in sunlight. Her real scent hit Sarisa first, warm and sharp and achingly familiar.
Then the magic beneath her skin, no longer twisted into that sickening aura but bright and golden and unmistakably Lara. Even the air seemed to breathe differently around it.
Sarisa stared at her.
Lara's hair was damp with sweat and shoved back badly from her face. There was a bruise darkening near her jaw and the edge of a split lip that had clearly been earned recently and honestly.
Her expression held too many things at once: relief, apology, adrenaline, and a flicker of uncertainty that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.
"You," Sarisa said.
It was not a question. It was not even a sentence. It was all she had.
Lara's mouth twitched weakly. "Yeah."
Sarisa hit her.
Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to mean it.
Her palm landed flat against Lara's shoulder with a crack of silk and fury, and Lara actually let herself rock back with the force of it like she deserved worse.
"You insane woman."
"That's fair."
"You absolute lunatic."
"Also fair."
Sarisa hit her again, this time with less anger and more helplessness than she wanted to admit. "I thought you were…"
She could not finish it. Could not shape the terror into words now that Lara stood in front of her in a room full of light and books and wildflowers.
Lara's expression softened at once. "I know."
Sarisa stared at her for another beat, then grabbed fistfuls of the black fabric at Lara's chest and kissed her like she had been holding her breath for an hour and had only just remembered how not to drown.
Lara made a startled sound into her mouth, then held her like she had expected the blow and hoped for the kiss anyway.
When Sarisa finally pulled back, she was still furious.
"Explain."
Lara nodded immediately. "Okay."
She caught Sarisa's hands but only loosely now, rubbing her thumbs once over the backs of them as if to make sure she was really here.
"The mask and the aura were an invention from Elysia and Veylira. It hides scent, twists voice, buries my magic under something wrong enough to make people see a threat instead of a person."
Sarisa looked up at the discarded mask lying on the floorboards by the hearth and shivered all over again. "It worked."
"Yeah."
"That thing was horrifying."
"Also fair."
Sarisa narrowed her eyes. "Do not keep saying fair like that gets you out of this."
Lara had the decency to look only a little amused. "It doesn't. It just keeps me from interrupting."
Sarisa wanted to be angrier. She really did. But the relief still moving through her body made it difficult to arrange pure outrage in a stable form.
"So this was the plan?" she asked.
Lara's mouth flattened. "Plan B."
There it was.
Sarisa exhaled sharply and looked around the room again, forcing herself to breathe properly for the first time since the explosion. "So you found nothing about Neris?."
"No." Lara's hand tightened once on hers. "We found more. Documents. Funding. Research into creating life with bloodline material and magic. Enough to know the queen's involved. Not enough to stop a wedding by sunrise."
Sarisa closed her eyes for a second.
Of course.
"So you decided to storm my ceremony wearing nightmare magic and kidnap me."
"When you say it like that, it sounds dramatic."
Sarisa gave her a look so flat it could have skinned bark. "Lara."
"Yes." Lara sighed. "Yes, I did."
There was a pause.
Then Sarisa asked the question that had been clawing at her throat since the garden exploded. "Malvoria and Raveth."
Lara grimaced. "Part of the act."
"You hit them."
"I had to." Lara looked deeply offended by the universe. "No one could believe it was me. I needed everyone thinking some vicious, unhinged bastard had come straight for the queen and ended up taking you instead."
Sarisa folded her arms. "You were very convincing."
"That's because Elysia and Veylira are monsters."
"That is not reassuring."
"No. But it is true." Lara ran one hand over her face. "Raveth and Malvoria knew I'd hit them. Not exactly how hard, but they knew. I'll give them something later."
Sarisa blinked. "Something?"
"A peace offering."
"That sounds suspicious."
"It will probably be expensive."
That, somehow, helped.
Sarisa let herself really look at Lara then. At the bruise on her face. At the way adrenaline still vibrated in her body.
At the tenderness under all the recklessness, laid so bare now it no longer even pretended to hide.
"And Vaelen?" she asked.
Lara winced. "He… was not part of the practice rounds."
Sarisa almost laughed. Almost. The poor, awful, perfectly dressed prince.
She should have been appalled. Instead she found herself absurdly relieved to discover that Lara's expression suggested she had been perhaps a little too sincere with him.
"He'll live?"
"Yes." Lara looked offended. "I'm not an amateur."
The silence after that settled warm and strange between them.
Sarisa's wedding dress rustled softly when she moved.
She looked down at the white silk, at the veil half slipping from her hair, and then back up at the woman who had exploded her ceremony and dragged her across realms because plan A had failed and she refused to lose anyway.
"You really did it," Sarisa said quietly.
Lara held her gaze. "You told me to ask again when the day came."
For one second, Sarisa could not speak.
Then she laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because everything was too much and not enough and impossible and wonderful all at once.
"Yes," she said. "I suppose I did."