Three visiting nobles. Fourteen courtiers. Atlas at the head. Tristan across the table. Vesper beside him, occupying a chair that carried the weight of protocol and the stench of politics.
Vesper addressed River as "the prince's former companion."
The words crossed the table and landed on River the way all of Vesper's cruelties landed: silently, absorbed without retaliation, processed behind a composure so practiced it had become architecture.
Through the matebond: pain. The specific pain of a woman being erased in public, her title stripped, her identity reduced to a footnote by a woman sitting in the chair that should have been hers.
Lucian felt it hit his chest and stay there.
