Chapter 4

CELENE

The royal court of Valdoria did not look like a place where anyone had died. It looked like a place where nothing bad had ever been allowed to happen, all marble and gold leaf and windows tall enough to swallow the sky.

I had walked these halls before, in another face, in another life, and some part of me kept expecting the floor to recognize my footsteps even if no one else did. It did not. The stone stayed silent under Celene Gray's borrowed shoes.

"Lady Gray." The steward at the door read my false name off a false…