TAVRIC
Lucy had a child?
The world stutters. My face must be a roadmap of the confusion and burgeoning agony swirling through me, because Jaxl sighs and tugs at his hair, his eyes filled with a pity I'm too numb to resent.
"Received the information from one of our informants—someone close to a palace maid in Virelan," he explains softly. "She lost a pregnancy. Some claim it was the sheer trauma of the mate-bond rejection. Others repeat the words of the princess herself. A story born out of jealousy, they call it."
"And what story is that?" I breathe. My body feels like defeated lead.
She was pregnant with Doyle's child? That arrogant, polished fool… did he even know? And her parents—surely they had to know, if the palace staff were already whispering.
The thought of her enduring that kind of loss alone, in the wake of her banishment, in a world that had just thrown her away, makes Ryker howl somewhere in the depths of my mind.
