Chapter 124: The law

LYSANDER

"He’s not dead," she repeated, her voice dropping to something barely above a whisper. "You didn’t kill him. He deserves to die."

I opened my mouth to agree, to tell her that I wished I’d finished it, that I should have kept my hands around his throat until the light left his eyes. But there were reasons I could not do that.

But she was already moving, shifting the dead man’s head from her lap with a gentleness that seemed impossible given what came next. She laid it beside the body, her fingers trailing through the blood as though memorizing the texture, and then she stood.

Her legs steadied beneath her. The trembling stopped. The tears on her face dried in streaks that looked like war paint.

"He deserves so much worse than death," she murmured, and the courtyard seemed to hold its breath. Even Johann’s wet coughing quieted. "Do you know what it’s like to grow up knowing that your life belongs to someone else? To wake up every morning and remember that your body, your time, your future, can be taken by anyone who holds a title you weren’t simply born with?"

She turned slowly, her gaze sweeping across the assembled sentinels, the Omegas, the witnesses who had come to watch men die. Her eyes settled on Johann, who had managed to push himself up onto his elbows, his ruined face contorted with pain and confusion.

"They practically scrubbed your floors while you slept in beds with silk sheets," she continued, and her voice gained strength with every word. "They ate scraps while you feasted. They would put their lives at any time because it was what was expected of them, and when the tables turned, no one would do it for them. They learned to be invisible because being seen meant being used. I know that all too well. I have lived it. And when any one of us low caste finally finds something worth protecting, when we finally let ourselves believe that someone with power might actually keep their word..." She laughed, and the sound made my skin prickle. "They proved us right. They always prove us right."

She stepped toward the edge of the platform. Her bare feet left bloody prints on the wood.

"The law says he can kill those men because his father died on their watch," she observed, tilting her head as though examining a puzzle. "The law says he has the right to vengeance. But where was the law when my mother bled out on a stone floor for no reason at all? Where was the law when I was starving in the streets for being born like this? Where was the law when the powerful took everything from the powerless and called it their birthright?"

I climbed to my feet, my legs still unsteady from the adrenaline crash. I didn’t need the mate bond to know, but having it by my side was enough to understand the gravity of what was happening. All I could feel pouring out from Bonnie was this ink-black darkness that had crossed anger and had entered pure malice. "Bonnie."

She didn’t look at me. "You want to kill him too, don’t you? I saw it in your hands. I heard it in your voice when you had him on the ground."

"Yes." The word came out raw. "I want to tear him apart. I want to make him suffer for what he did to you, what he did to them. I want it so badly I can taste it."

"Then why don’t you?" She finally turned, and her eyes were different. The color hadn’t changed, but something behind them had shifted, moved into a darker place I didn’t recognize. "Why did you stop?"

"Because..." I gestured helplessly at the crowd, at the sentinels, at the reality of what I’d almost become. "Because I’m supposed to be better than this. Because if I kill him, I lose everything. The council might revolt. The nobles will demand my head. I’ll never be King, and everything I’ve worked for, everything his father built, it all crumbles. I will not be able to protect you, and I need to be able to." I need to be able to do that."

"So that is enough for you," she concluded, nodding slowly. "As long as the crown is protected. As long as you have it all. Your crown. Your future. Your power. How apathetic."

"I know how it sounds. But it is important I do not act like an animal. Order is paramount, stepping closer. "It protects the kingdom from chaos."

"Does it?" She took another step toward Johann, who was trying to crawl backward across the stone, his one good eye fixed on her with dawning horror. "Or does it just protect the people who wrote it? The people who enforce it? The princes and kings and the... nobles who decide which lives matter and which ones are disposable?"

She reached the edge of the platform and stepped down onto the courtyard stones. The crowd parted before her like water, pressing back against the walls, suddenly desperate to be anywhere else.

"I cannot fix this," she announced, her voice carrying across the silence. "I cannot bring them back. I cannot make the world fair. I cannot rewrite the laws that let men like him destroy lives while men like you stand by and watch because you’re afraid of losing some stupid throne."

Then I realized something was deeply wrong. Bonnie had every right to be mad. But this seemed... She sounded... for lack of better words... inhuman.

She stopped three feet from where Johann had collapsed. He tried to speak, to plead, but only a wet gurgle emerged from his damaged throat.

"But I can get them justice."

She raised her hand.

At first, I thought the air itself was rippling, heat rising from the stones in phantom waves. Then I saw them. Bubbles, nearly translucent, forming around her fingers like soap films catching the light. They drifted upward, multiplying, expanding, and I felt a pressure building in my ears like a storm descending.

The bubbles converged around Johann’s throat.

He clawed at them, his fingers passing through the membranes without resistance, but then they solidified, tightened, and he rose into the air. His legs kicked beneath him, finding no purchase, and his hands flew to his neck, scratching at the invisible collar that was lifting him higher, choking off what little breath he had left.

"Bonnie!" I vaulted off the platform, my boots hitting the stone hard. "What are you doing?"

She didn’t turn. Her arm remained extended, her hand curled into a claw, and I could see the muscles in her shoulder trembling with effort. "What should be done."

Johann’s face turned purple. His eyes bulged. He thrashed in the air, his body rotating slowly, and the wet sounds of his straining became the only noise in the courtyard.

"Stop this," I demanded, moving toward her. "You’ll kill him."

"That’s the fucking point."

"You’ll be executed," I warned, reaching for her shoulder. "They’ll burn you for killing a prince. Think about this."

She laughed, and the sound sent ice through my veins. "Who cares. Let them. But now... at least now they can see what happens when you push someone too far."

Her fingers closed into a fist.

Johann’s body jerked, his back arching, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. The bubbles around his throat pulsed, constricting, and I saw his tongue beginning to swell, his eyes rolling back.

"Die," she whispered.

Then she screamed it. "Die!"

Her feet left the ground then.

She rose six inches, then a foot, suspended by the same invisible force that held Johann aloft. Her hair lifted around her face, floating as though underwater, and the light in the courtyard seemed to bend toward her, drawn into the vortex of her rage.

I lunged for her.

A force hit me in the chest like a battering ram, throwing me backward. I hit the platform steps with my shoulder, rolling, scrambling upright in time to see Fia stepping forward, her own hands raised, her face pale but determined.

"Bonnie," Fia called out, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "Stop."

Bonnie’s head snapped toward her. Her eyes were white around the edges, the pupils dilated to pits. "Stay out of this."

"I can’t." Fia moved closer, circling to the side, her posture defensive but her expression open, pleading. "I understand that rage. I understand wanting to tear the world apart because it keeps taking from you. I understand believing that justice only comes when you take it with your own hands."

"You understand nothing," Bonnie snarled, and Johann dropped six inches before catching again, suspended between life and death.

"I understand that you’re hurting," Fia continued, undeterred. "I understand that you trusted someone and you believe that they failed you. I understand that those men died because of politics and pride, and that the person responsible is floating in front of you, and you want more than anything to make him pay."

"Then why are you stopping me?"

"Because he is a prince," Fia answered, her voice dropping lower, gentler. "Because he did not break the law, no matter how unjust that law might be. Because if you kill him like this, in front of all these witnesses, you will not walk away. They will not let you. Even with a regent’s protection. Perhaps this is what they want."

Bonnie’s feet touched back down to the stone, but the force holding Johann didn’t waver. He spun slowly, his struggles weakening, his consciousness fading.

"I do not care," Bonnie stated, each word clipped and precise. "Step away, Fia. Or I will fight you."

Fia didn’t move. She stood her ground, her hands still raised, her chin lifted. "I won’t."

Something cracked in Bonnie’s expression. A fissure of pain, of betrayal, of exhaustion so deep it seemed to hollow her out from the inside. She stared at Fia, really stared at her, and I saw her throat work, swallowing down grief or rage or both.

"You’re supposed to be a friend," Bonnie whispered.

"I am," Fia promised. "That’s why I can’t let you do this."

Bonnie’s face went blank. The emotion drained away, replaced by a cold resolve that terrified me more than her screaming had. "So be it."