Chapter 1
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## Faye's POV
The night was bitterly cold — the kind that settles into your bones and refuses to leave, carrying with it a strange, eerie stillness. Even so, I stood on my balcony as I always did, my long blonde hair drifting in the frozen breeze while I gazed at the full moon. It hung enormous and luminous in the sky, so bright, so beautiful, so magnetic that I could almost forget the unease curling quietly beneath my ribs.
Tomorrow was my wedding day.
I was to marry Regis — the King of Regsialand. Yes, the name leaves something to be desired. His parents were clearly not poets. But the man himself… he was everything. The boy I had watched grow into someone extraordinary. The person I had chosen, and who had chosen me in return.
Love had not always been my companion, though. Not even close.
I was born a princess — not of Regsialand, but of a kingdom lost to time and fire. My homeland, Lordor, had once been a place of green valleys and gleaming towers, a thriving kingdom full of life. Until the Night Terrors came, eighteen years ago. I was six years old. A child who still believed the world was safe.
That belief died in a single night.
Shadows swallowed the land whole. Creatures born of nightmare tore through stone walls, slaughtered the innocent, reduced everything I knew to ruin and ash. My parents. My brother. My older sister. All of them — gone. I remember the blood on my small hands as I tried to wake them, pressing my palms against still chests and hearing nothing. The only soul who escaped that night alongside me was Bridgette, my white cat, who pressed herself against me as though she understood.
I still don't fully know how I survived.
I would have died in those ruins if not for Ragar — the King of Regsialand, and Regis's father. He found me in the wreckage, a six-year-old girl clutching a cat and barely breathing. He took me in. Gave me a home, a name to shelter under, a future I hadn't dared to imagine. And through the years of growing up within those palace walls, I found something else entirely in his son.
Regis.
We grew together the way two people do when fate keeps placing them in the same spaces — slowly, inevitably, until friendship became something neither of us had words for. And then, finally, we had the only word that mattered.
Love.
Tomorrow, I would become his queen.
Lost somewhere between the moonlight and my memories, I almost didn't notice the shift — the faint displacement of air behind me, the prickling at the back of my neck that my instincts recognized before my mind did.
I turned.
I expected Regis. Perhaps a royal guard. Anyone familiar.
A masked man stood in the shadows of the balcony doorway. The moonlight caught the scar first — enormous, vertical, carved across his left eye like a wound that had never quite healed. His presence hit me like cold water. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to run.
I didn't get the chance.
He moved.
The knife found my chest before I could draw breath to scream — its hilt decorated with a small red poppy flower, delicate and obscene against the violence of the act. For one terrible, suspended moment, there was nothing. Then the pain arrived. Burning, consuming, absolute.
He yanked the blade free. I crumpled.
The marble was cold beneath me. My vision fractured at the edges, my breath coming in thin, useless wisps. I could feel myself disappearing — slowly, like a candle guttering in the wind — and the only thing I could hold onto was his name.
I screamed it with everything I had left.
*"Regis — help me—"*
Footsteps. Thundering. A door slamming open so hard it cracked against the wall.
Then he was there.
Regis dropped to his knees beside me, his hands shaking as he cupped my face, his warmth barely reaching the cold that had already begun to claim me. He was shouting — at the guards, at the room, at the world — but his voice sounded distant now, muffled by the roaring in my ears.
I was too far gone to follow the words.
I had just enough strength left to look at him. To let everything I felt rise into my eyes one final time.
*"Re… Regis… I love you…"*
Then darkness took me.
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## Regis's POV
The scream split the silence like a blade.
*Faye.*
I was already moving before the sound finished echoing through the halls, my heart slamming against my ribs, my mind throwing up walls against the thoughts trying to form. I refused to think it. I refused.
I burst into her chambers and stopped.
The room — her room, always so elegant, always so carefully her — was unrecognizable. Faye lay crumpled near the open balcony, her gown soaked through with crimson, her body trembling with the shallow, desperate rhythm of someone running out of time. The smell of blood hit me like a fist.
A figure in black slipped over the balcony railing and vanished into the night. I barely caught the shape of his back before he was gone.
*"After him!"* I barked at the nearest guards. *"Find him. Now."*
They poured past me, boots thundering against marble. But I was already on my knees.
I took her hand in both of mine — so cold, so terrifyingly cold — and bent close to her. My voice was shaking. I forced it steady, because she needed steady. She needed me.
*"Don't be afraid, love,"* I whispered. *"I'm here. I'm right here."*
Her eyes opened. Blue and soft and full of everything she'd never needed words for. She smiled — this small, broken, unbearable smile — and her lips parted.
*"R… Regis… I love you…"*
The words came out barely above a breath.
*"No."* My throat closed around the word. *"No, Faye. Stay with me. Stay—"*
A violent shudder moved through her, and the sound of her breathing changed into something ragged and wrong.
*"Call Doctor Navis!"* I roared, the sound tearing out of me. *"Now! Move!"*
I pulled her closer, pressing my warmth against her as if I could simply refuse to let the cold win. Her fingers twitched faintly in mine. Her lips parted once more, as though she had something else to say — but nothing came.
The silence that followed was unlike any I had ever known.
I pressed my forehead to hers and shut my eyes.
*She cannot leave me. Not tonight. Not like this.*
Doctor Navis arrived quickly. He examined her with practiced hands, his expression shifting through careful neutrality into something worse. He straightened slowly. Looked at me.
And said the words.
*"She's gone, Your Majesty. There is no pulse. I am so sorry."*
The world stopped.
Then it cracked open.
*"No."* I was on my feet before I knew I'd moved, my hand locked around the doctor's collar. *"No. Absolutely not."* My voice was somewhere between a command and a plea and something far uglier than either. *"Send word across the entire kingdom — every physician, every healer, every person who has ever touched a wound and called themselves a doctor is to stand before me in the throne room by tomorrow. Whoever brings her back will be granted anything they desire. Anything. And whoever refuses to come will answer to me personally."*
The doctor scrambled. The guards scrambled. Within hours, all of Regsialand knew.
By morning, five physicians stood before me in the throne room.
Four of them were exactly as expected — seasoned men with lined faces and the measured confidence of long careers. The fifth was not. He was young, almost absurdly so, with white hair that looked like it had never once submitted to a comb and red eyes that moved across the room with the particular ease of someone who found most things amusing.
He looked nothing like any physician I had ever seen in Regsialand.
I leaned toward Hector, my tallest and most trusted guard.
*"The one with white hair,"* I said quietly. *"Who is he?"*
Hector glanced over. *"Bom, my King. A new doctor. Arrived recently."*
*"His name is Bom,"* I repeated, mostly to myself, one eyebrow rising without my permission.
I turned to face all five of them.
*"We begin now,"* I said. *"Doctor Jeff — you first. Faye is lying on the table to your left. Do what you came here to do, and you will have more than you can spend in a lifetime."*
Doctor Jeff's eyes lit with the particular shine of a man who had already begun mentally counting his reward. He rushed to Faye's side, produced a shimmering serum from his coat, and tipped it carefully between her lips.
We all waited.
Seconds passed. Then minutes.
Nothing.
*"You've disappointed me, Doctor Jeff,"* I said. *"Guards — take him."*
Jeff's face collapsed into open panic. *"Wait — what? You never said failure meant imprisonment!"*
I smiled without warmth. *"Well. Now they all know. You've done the rest of them a service."*
He was still protesting as the guards hauled him out. The remaining three physicians watched him go with wide eyes, then stepped forward in succession, each worse than the last. The first attempted CPR on a woman who had been dead since yesterday evening — with great enthusiasm, I'll grant him. The second began what appeared to be a massage. A *massage*. The third was trembling so violently by the time he reached her side that he lost all dignity before he'd attempted a single thing.
*"Remove them,"* I said, closing my eyes briefly. *"All three."*
They joined Jeff in the dungeons. At least he would have company.
Which left one.
Bom.
The youngest of them all — and given what the others had just demonstrated, the bar was not high. He stepped forward with his hands in his pockets and the expression of someone about to make an unreasonable request at a reasonable pace.
*"Before I begin, my Lord, I need three things."*
I studied him. *"Bring her back first. Then name your price."*
He tilted his head slightly. *"No. I need them now."* His red eyes caught the light, entirely unbothered. Faintly entertained, even.
Hector stiffened beside me. *"You dare give the King an order, servant?"*
Bom glanced at him with something like fond tolerance. *"I'm the only one left in this room. And I'm confident I can bring her back — your beautiful Faye."*
*"Then do it,"* I said through my teeth.
He found a chair, pulled it out, and sat down. *"Not yet."*
My patience, which had been eroding since yesterday, hit the floor.
*"What. Do. You. Want."*
He raised three fingers.
*"One — a place in the royal family. Two — money, a generous amount. Three—"* he paused, as though for effect, *"—chickens."*
The room was completely silent.
*"Chickens,"* I said.
*"Chickens,"* he confirmed pleasantly.
*"You want membership in the royal family, a fortune, and chickens."*
*"You're repeating me, which suggests you heard me correctly, so yes."*
My hand moved to the hilt of my sword. *"Do you have any idea how close you are to dying right now?"*
Bom laughed — a loud, genuine, slightly unhinged sound that bounced off the high ceiling. *"You're welcome to try. I'll even give you a head start."*
I looked at Hector. Hector looked at Clavis. Clavis looked at Bob. The three of them — my finest guards, the best fighters in the kingdom — moved as one.
What followed was brief and deeply humbling.
Bom didn't fight back so much as he simply *declined* to be hit. He moved like something between water and smoke — unhurried, almost lazy, ducking and sidestepping with a fluidity that made my guards look as though they were fighting a man made of wind. None of them could touch him. Then, with a motion I couldn't fully follow, he flicked his wrist — and all three of them rose off the ground, suspended in the air with their weapons clattering uselessly to the floor below.
He picked up one of the fallen swords.
*"My King, run—!"* Hector shouted from somewhere above us.
I did not run.
A king does not run.
Bom walked toward me slowly, still with that infuriating smile. He stopped just short of arm's length. Then — with absolutely no hesitation and no discernible reason — he turned the sword and drove it into his own stomach.
No blood. No cry. No flinch.
He pulled it back out and set it aside like a man returning a borrowed pen.
No one in the room moved. No one breathed.
Then he glanced up at my suspended guards and, with a casual gesture, dropped them. They hit the floor with a chorus of pained grunts and immediately began checking their limbs for damage.
Bom turned back to me, brushed something invisible off his sleeve, and smiled — wider this time, and with the particular warmth of a man who knows exactly how this ends.
*"Three things,"* he said simply. *"And everyone gets what they want. It really is that easy."*
The silence stretched.
He had already won, and we both knew it.