The Reckoning at Dawn
The travel from The Hunting Lodge’s Great Room to The Lodge Cellar and Main Floor consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The cellar smelled of earth and old wood, the damp cold seeping through the stone walls. Xavier pressed Iris and Jace behind him, his back against the far wall, ears straining for the sounds above. The lodge had been built by his grandfather—a hunting retreat with hidden passages, false walls, and a root cellar that doubled as a panic room. He had shown Iris the entrance the night before, after Owen had reported the Blackthorn convoy approaching from the northern road.
The gunshot had come first. Then the splintering of the front door.
Now silence.
Iris’s hand found his in the dark. Her fingers were cold but steady. Jace stood between them, his small body pressed against her legs, one hand gripping the hem of her sweater. The boy had stopped crying ten minutes ago, after his mother had knelt beside him and said, in the voice she used for nightmares and thunderstorms, *We are going to be very quiet and very brave.*
Xavier counted the seconds. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
Above them, the floorboards groaned.
He had left Owen and four men stationed in the main hall, with two more covering the rear entrance. That was six against however many Dorian had brought. The Blackthorn family kept a private security detail that rivaled the palace guard—former military, all of them, paid handsomely for their discretion and their aim.
The floorboards creaked again. Closer to the kitchen. Closer to the trapdoor beneath the braided rug.
“He knows,” Iris whispered.
Xavier did not contradict her. Dorian Blackthorn was not a man who entered a house without knowing its floor plan. He had come for Jace, and he had come prepared.
Jace tugged at Xavier’s sleeve. “Papa? Is the bad man going to find us?”
The word hit Xavier in the chest. *Papa.* The boy had never called him that before. He had been *Your Majesty* or *Mr. Winslow* or, in moments of shy curiosity, *the king who found me.* But never *Papa.*
He knelt, bringing himself to eye level with his son. The cellar’s faint light from a single oil lamp carved shadows across Jace’s face. Those were Iris’s eyes—dark, watchful, unafraid in the way that children are unafraid until they learn to be.
“He is not going to find us,” Xavier said. “Because I am going to make sure he doesn’t.”
Jace considered this with the gravity of a six-year-old who had already learned that adults sometimes lied. Then he nodded once, sharply, and said, “Okay.”
Above them, a door slammed against a wall.
Then Owen’s voice, muffled through the floor: “Your Majesty! They’ve got the east stairwell. Three men down. I need you to stay put.”
Xavier was already reaching for the Colt revolver he had tucked into his belt—the one Owen had pressed into his hands before the front door had splintered. The weight of it was unfamiliar. He had fired a pistol twice in his life, both times on a firing range, both times under the supervision of a man who had sighed and said, *Perhaps stick to the crown, sir.*
He checked the cylinder. Six rounds.
“There’s a secondary exit,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Behind the wine racks. Leads to the old hunting trail. If I can draw them to the main floor, you take Jace and—”
“No.”
Iris’s voice cut through the plan like a blade. She stepped around him, her face catching the lamplight. She was pale but composed, her jaw set in that particular way he had learned to recognize over the past weeks. It was the look she wore when she had already made a decision and was merely waiting for him to catch up.
“You’re not drawing them anywhere,” she said. “You’re staying with your son. I’ll go with Selene.”
“Selene is—”
“Upstairs. I know. She’s the only one who knows the lodge’s original layout. The chimney flues, the servant passages, the coal chute. She told me last night.”
Xavier opened his mouth to argue, but the floor above him shuddered with the impact of bodies colliding. A shout, cut short. Glass breaking.
Then Selene’s voice, high and clear: “Kitchen clear! Owen, I need thirty seconds!”
Iris was already moving toward the ladder that led up to the trapdoor. She paused, looked back at Jace, and said, “Stay with your father. Do exactly what he says.”
Jace nodded, his small hands balled into fists at his sides.
Xavier caught Iris’s arm before she could climb. “If you die, I will spend the rest of my life finding a way to bring you back just so I can kill you myself.”
She almost smiled. “Romantic.”
Then she was up the ladder, her footsteps soft on the cellar stairs, and the trapdoor closed above her.
The cellar fell silent.
Xavier counted. One. Two. Three. Four.
Above him, the house began to scream.
—
Selene had not slept in thirty-six hours. Her eyes burned, her hands shook, and she had a bruise spreading across her ribs from where she’d slammed into a doorframe during the first volley of shots. But she knew this lodge. She had spent every summer of her childhood here, playing hide-and-seek in the maze of servant passages, memorizing the way the heat rose through the flues and the way the coal chute opened into the garden.
She had also known, the moment she saw Dorian Blackthorn step through the front door, that no one in this house was going to survive unless someone changed the rules of the game.
So she changed them.
The main chimney ran through the center of the lodge, supporting four fireplaces across three floors. It was built of fieldstone and mortar, original to the structure, and it had one vulnerability: the secondary flue, which had been sealed off in a renovation thirty years ago, now served as a direct conduit from the kitchen hearth to the attic.
Selene had spent the night prying open that seal.
In the kitchen, she found what she needed: a can of kerosene, a box of matches, and a handful of rags. She soaked the rags, stuffed them into the secondary flue, and lit them.
The fire caught immediately, feeding on the decades of creosote lining the flue. It roared up the chimney with a sound like a beast waking from a long sleep, and within seconds, the entire central stack was burning.
Smoke billowed into the main hall.
Selene ran.
The first man she encountered was Dorian’s, a hulking figure in tactical gear who had been guarding the east corridor. He saw her, raised his weapon, and then the smoke hit him—thick, black, acrid—and he staggered back, coughing, his shot going wide.
Selene kept running. She didn’t look back.
—
Iris found her at the base of the grand staircase, coughing into her sleeve, eyes streaming.
“The chimney,” Selene gasped. “It’s going to bring down the—”
The floor above them groaned. A section of the ceiling cracked, and black smoke poured through the fissure like water through a breached dam.
Voices shouted from the west wing. Dorian’s voice, sharp with fury: “Find them! Find the boy!”
Iris grabbed Selene’s arm and pulled her toward the cellar door. But Selene shook her head, her face set with a terrible resolve.
“No. I’m the diversion. You get Xavier and Jace out through the coal chute. It opens into the ravine. There’s a car waiting at the bottom—Owen arranged it before dawn.”
“Selene—”
“I’m not a fighter, Iris. I never was. But I know this house.” She pressed something into Iris’s hand—a key, small and brass, worn smooth by years of use. “The chute locks from the inside. Use this. Don’t wait for me.”
Iris looked at the key. Looked at Selene. Saw in her friend’s eyes a decision already made.
She kissed Selene’s cheek, quick and fierce, and turned toward the cellar.
—
The smoke found Xavier before the men did.
It seeped through the floorboards, gray and choking, carrying the acrid smell of burning stone. Jace pressed his face into Xavier’s coat, and Xavier covered the boy’s mouth with his hand, using the other to count the seconds between sounds.
Footsteps. Many of them. Converging on the kitchen.
A voice: “The trapdoor! It’s under the rug!”
Then the trapdoor flew open, and light flooded the cellar.
Xavier raised the revolver.
The man who came down the ladder was not Dorian. He was younger, leaner, with the hollow eyes of someone who had done this before and would do it again without losing sleep. He saw Xavier, saw the gun, and smiled.
“Your Majesty. Put it down. Mr. Blackthorn wants you alive.”
Xavier fired.
The shot went high, punching into the man’s shoulder. He stumbled, swore, and fell backward off the ladder. The revolver kicked in Xavier’s hand, harder than he had expected, and the sound of it in the enclosed space was deafening.
Jace screamed.
Xavier grabbed the boy and ran.
The coal chute was at the back of the cellar, behind a stack of old wine crates. Xavier shoved them aside, his hands raw and bloody from the rough wood. The chute was a narrow iron door, locked. He fumbled for the key, found it, twisted it into the lock.
The door swung open.
Darkness. A steep tunnel, angling downward, just wide enough for a man to crawl.
Xavier pushed Jace into the opening. “Go. Don’t stop until you feel grass.”
Jace looked back at him, his face streaked with tears and soot. “What about Mama?”
“She’s right behind us. Go.”
Jace went.
Xavier followed, pulling the iron door shut behind him, and the dark swallowed them both.
—
They emerged into dawn.
The ravine was cold and wet, the grass slick with dew. The sky was the color of a bruise, pale purple at the edges, gray where the smoke from the lodge climbed into the clouds. Xavier crawled out of the chute on his hands and knees, his lungs burning, his vision swimming.
Jace was already on his feet, staring up at the lodge.
It was burning.
Flames licked out of the windows on the second floor, and the roof was beginning to sag. The central chimney had collapsed inward, taking half the main hall with it. Smoke poured into the sky in a black column that could be seen for miles.
Xavier pulled himself upright. He searched the ravine, looking for the car Selene had promised.
It was there—a black sedan, parked under the cover of the trees, its engine running.
And standing beside it, Dorian Blackthorn.
He emerged from the driver’s seat, his pistol raised, his fine coat smudged with ash. He looked at Xavier, at Jace, and smiled the smile of a man who had already won.
“Your Majesty. You’ve made quite a mess of my father’s hunting lodge.”
Xavier placed his hand on Jace’s shoulder, pulling the boy close. “It will be the least of your concerns, Dorian.”
Dorian laughed. “Bold words for a man standing in a ravine with no army, no guards, and a revolver that’s now empty.”
Xavier did not look down at the gun. He did not need to. He knew.
“You came here to kill my son,” Xavier said.
“I came here to erase a problem. Your son is a problem. Your queen’s bastard is a problem. And you—” Dorian stepped closer, the pistol never wavering. “You are a king who forgot that kings are only as strong as the secrets they keep.”
From the shadows of the trees, a voice spoke.
“And you, Dorian, have forgotten that kings are also fathers.”
Flynn Blackthorn stepped into the clearing.
He was older than his son, gray at the temples, his face carved by decades of power and calculation. He wore a dark suit, immaculate despite the hour, and he carried no weapon. He did not need one.
He looked at Xavier, then at Jace. His gaze lingered on the boy, taking in the dirt, the tears, the small hands clutching the king’s coat.
Then he spoke.
“I will give you one chance, Xavier. Renounce the boy publicly. Turn him over to my custody. I will see that he is raised quietly, somewhere far from the capital, and your throne will remain secure.”
Xavier felt Jace’s grip tighten.
“And if I refuse?” Xavier asked.
Flynn’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Then I will burn every bridge, every ally, every institution that stands between you and ruin. I will turn the Church against you. I will turn your council against you. I will turn your own people against you. By the time I am finished, you will not be a king. You will be a memory.”
The silence stretched.
Then Iris stepped out of the coal chute.
Her dress was torn. Her hands were black with soot. She was powder burns and sweat and determination in human form. And in her hand, she held a folded piece of parchment, sealed with crimson wax.
“I believe,” she said, her voice steady despite the smoke and the fear and the exhaustion, “you are forgetting something, Mr. Blackthorn.”
She walked forward, past Xavier, past Jace, and stopped in front of Flynn.
“Before she died, the queen wrote a letter. She acknowledged Jace as her grandson. She named him heir to the throne in the event of Xavier’s death. She sealed it with her own hand, and she entrusted it to a priest who had the courage to hide it from you.”
Flynn’s expression did not change. But his eyes flickered, a crack in the armor.
“A dead queen’s word,” he said, “is worth nothing.”
Iris held out the letter.
“Read it,” she said.
Flynn took the letter. He broke the seal, unfolded the parchment, and read.
His face remained stone. But his hand trembled.
He looked up. He looked at Xavier. He looked at Jace.
And then he scoffed.
“A dead queen’s word? Worthless.”
But Xavier said, stepping forward, his voice carrying the weight of every king who had ever fought to keep his family alive, “It is not her word that binds us. It is the law of the blood—and the love of a father. You have no power here, Blackthorn. Only the crown does.”