Declan Thorne had blood on his face when Isadora found him.
Not a little blood. A river of it — streaming from his nose, pooling in the hollow above his lip, dripping onto the white linen of his shirt in bright crimson drops that bloomed through the fabric like small, damning roses.
He was sitting on the ground outside the stables. His sword lay three feet away in the mud, knocked there by something considerably stronger than a human arm.
His left eye was already swelling shut.
She did not need to ask. She had felt it coming for days — the dark pulse in the bond every morning when she walked into the courtyard with Declan and Caelan's gaze burned through the study window into her spine.
But she asked anyway. Because formalities mattered when you were about to start a war.
"What happened?"
Declan looked up with his one working eye and produced, through a mouthful of blood, a smile that was both impressive and deeply worrying.
