He stumbled back into the cold, torch-lit corridor outside Aelina's chambers, his body shaking, his mind a maelstrom of shattered certainties. The reek of bile was sharp in his throat.
Everything was a lie.
His entire life, his entire understanding of his own family, of his own history, had been built on a foundation of secrets and murder. Aelina hadn't loved him. She had used him. His mother hadn't been protecting his honor. She had been protecting her own ambition.
And the grief he had carried for seven years, a clean, sharp, noble grief for a lost love… it was a phantom. A farce. He had been mourning a woman who had never truly been his, a future that had never existed.
The hollowness inside him was a vast, cavernous thing. The cold fury he had felt for Arin, the certainty of her betrayal, it all felt… childish now. Insignificant. She may have betrayed him with his cousin, but his own mother had betrayed him with a ghost, with a lie that had shaped the very man he had become.
