They Drugged Me Into Darkness, Now I Am Its King novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: The Permission That Cuts

The travel writ landed in Aquas's palm with the weight of a blade.

It was sealed with Lucien's own signet, black wax pressed deep into the parchment, and it named the border crossing at the seventh gate.

The gate that opened south.

Aquas did not close his fingers around it.

He let it sit there, open on his hand, while Captain Durn watched from the gatehouse table with her arms crossed over her chest and her face unreadable.

'You wanted a road,' Lucien said. 'There it is.'

His voice was flat, the way it always was when he was giving orders, but there was something underneath it now.

Something Aquas could not name.

'The writ is yours,' Lucien said. 'On two conditions.'

Aquas waited.

The dark prince stood one step behind him, close enough that Aquas could feel the cold edge of his shadow against his back, and the torches in the gatehouse burned steady and low.

'You remain my husband,' Lucien said.

Not a question.

A fact, laid down between them like a stone.

'And you accept my escort.'

Aquas looked at the writ.

Then at Durn.

The dwarf captain did not blink.

She had pulled every sealed war map from the succession vault and spread them across her worktable for him, and now she stood in the gatehouse watching her prince hand over a road that led straight into the dead lands.

'That is not a request,' Lucien added, quieter.

Aquas turned the writ over in his hand, slowly, and read the route named in the document.

Seven watchtowers.

A river of black sand.

The solar wastes beyond.

The words sat there in official script, dry and precise, and Aquas memorized every one of them.

The guards assigned to ride with him were listed at the bottom.

Four names.

He filed them away without moving his lips.

'I accept,' Aquas said.

Lucien's shadow stilled behind him.

'You accept,' the dark prince repeated.

'Yes.'

Aquas folded the writ once, neatly, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his robe, over his heart, where the silver vial lay hidden under silk.

He did not argue.

He did not ask what the conditions meant, or whether escort meant protection or surveillance, or whether husband meant anything at all to a man who had married him while he was drugged.

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