Snow dusted the capital by dawn. Where once Evelyne had dreamed of walking its streets as a future queen, she now moved like a shadow unseen but felt. Every step she took on Caerthwyn's stone roads whispered treason to the loyal and hope to the broken.
She wasn't here to be admired.
She was here to remind them she hadn't been erased.
Inside a tavern built beneath the city's old chapel, Evelyne met with her growing circle of allies people who wore no sigils but bore scars that matched her own.
At the head of the table was Lady Maren of Elowen, once shunned from court for refusing to marry an aging duke.
Beside her sat Thorne Kael, a former royal guard stripped of his title after protecting a peasant girl from a noble's wrath.
And then there was Rowan Dorne, leaning in his chair with that same crooked grin.
"You sure this isn't suicide?" he asked.
Evelyne's eyes swept across the room.
"Revolution is just suicide that succeeds."
Thorne gave a grim chuckle. "You've got the heart of a general."
"No," Evelyne said softly. "I've got the heart of a girl they tried to bury. And it still beats."
She unrolled a map of the inner court, pressing a dagger into its center.
"This is where it begins. The royal coronation is in one month. We don't wait until they crown the next tyrant."
Lady Maren leaned forward. "And what do we crown instead?"
Evelyne's voice was ice.
"Truth. Even if it bleeds."
At the palace, Lucien stared out across the snow-covered garden, his thoughts miles away. The frost reminded him of Evelyne's eyes now cold, clear, unflinching.
"She's building something," he murmured.
Behind him, Silas replied, "No. She's undoing something. Everything we let stand while she was burned."
Lucien turned. "Then maybe we deserve it."
"Do you want her stopped?"
Lucien was silent.
What answer could he give?
That he missed her? That he still dreamed of her laughter? That the guilt clawed at him like a second skin?
But none of that mattered anymore.
She wasn't a memory now.
She was the reckoning.
That night, Evelyne stood in her chamber before an old mirror. Her reflection stared back no longer soft, no longer kind.
She wore a new dress: black and crimson, threaded with silver embroidery shaped like thorns.
And on her head, she placed a circlet an heirloom from her mother's side, forgotten in a chest for years.
It wasn't a crown.
Not yet.
But it would do.
Because Evelyne Ashthorn was no longer waiting for someone to hand her power.
She was coming to take it.