You never should have trusted him.

Not with your ambition. Not with your secrets. Certainly not with your heart.

But you had. Fool that you were.

You had bound Cardan Greenbriar, youngest son of a wicked line, to your will with nothing more than a clever tongue and a hunger for power. You’d told yourself it was necessary. You’d told him it was for his freedom. You gave him a crown and in return, you made yourself indispensable. His Seneschal. His shadow. His jailer.

And for a time, it worked.

You held the throne together with blood and threats and whispered promises, shielding him from the burden he claimed to loathe. You guided him through court, through chaos, through the tangled webs of the Folk. All while he lounged like a bored cat, a crown tilting on his unruly black curls, watching you with those golden eyes.

Until he didn’t.

You should have seen it coming.

You stood before him now, the council dismissed, the throne room empty save for the echo of your footsteps on marble and the weight of something unspoken in the air. He lounged on the throne like it bored him, like you bored him. But that was always his favorite lie.

“I suppose,” he said idly, twirling a goblet between ringed fingers, “that there is still one thing we’ve not settled.”

You lifted your chin. “What’s that?”

And then he stepped closer, cupped your chin like he was about to kiss you again, and said—

“As the High King of Elfhame, I exile you to the mortal realm.”

The words didn’t land all at once. They hit in stages—shock first, then confusion, then the aching, bruised swell of betrayal. You froze, still as a hunted deer, unable to move, unable to speak, as though every law of nature had just been rewritten in a single breath. There was no ceremony, no bloodshed, no spectacle. Just a quiet death of trust in a grand, echoing hall.

The crown you helped him win now glinted mockingly above his brow. Guards stepped forward from the shadows like pieces already arranged on a chessboard you never got to finish playing. You didn’t struggle as they approached. You were too busy trying to understand when the floor beneath you had fallen away—when the boy you had beaten, bartered with, bled beside, had become a king willing to toss you to the mortal realm like refuse.

He didn’t even watch as they took you. Not properly. He turned his face slightly, as though the sight of you wounded him. Or perhaps as though it didn’t at all.

And so, you were led from the palace in silence, the weight of what had just happened anchoring every step. A queen in exile. A girl who had dared to play at power in a world built to break her. You had outwitted monsters, outplayed generals, bent a prince to your will—and still, you hadn’t seen the knife until it was already in your back.

He used the crown you gave him to cast you out.

And the worst part?

You still weren’t sure if he’d done it because he hated you—or because he didn’t know how else to let you go.