The wine spreads across his papers like blood, dark and damning.
"Clean it."
His voice is silk wrapped around steel, and I know what he means. The court watches, a sea of hungry faces waiting for my humiliation. Waiting for me to break.
"With your tongue," Prince Kael adds, his dark eyes never leaving mine.
The marble floor is cold against my knees as I lower myself. I could beg. Could cry. Could give them the show they want.
I won't give them tears. Only the taste of my defiance.
Instead, I meet his gaze and let my tongue dart out to taste the wine from the stone.
Bitter - like everything here.
His jaw tightens. Something flickers behind those ancient eyes - surprise, maybe. Or hunger.
"Good pet," he murmurs, and the words should shame me.
Silence stretches between us, heavy with unspoken things.
They don't.
Because I see the way his hands tremble slightly. The way his breath catches when I look up at him through my lashes. He wanted me to break, but my defiance breaks something in him instead.
And that terrifies him more than it should.
"Again," he says, his voice rougher now.
I smile. It's a dangerous thing, that smile. It promises that he may own my body, but my spirit remains wild.
*****
This story unfolds through a blend of first-person and neutral third-person perspectives.
Some chapters are experienced through the protagonist's eyes — raw, personal, and intimate. Others pull back, offering a distant lens on events she cannot witness, but that reshape the world around her.
Each shift in perspective is deliberate. Every lens reveals what the other cannot.