I know whatever they’ve doused the material with is a sedative. As soon as I lose consciousness, I don’t know when—or if—I’ll wake up.

I try to hold my breath, but it’s a lost cause. I last for maybe a minute and a half before I’m forced to breathe in a deep lungful. I breathe in another. And another.

The soldiers are lowering me to the ground, and someone’s brushing my hair back. I follow that arm to its owner. My husband truly appears upset.

Is there no room for my own suffering in that heart of his?

The drug’s beginning to affect me. My focus drifts, and when I move, the colors of my surroundings blur for a second too long. But I haven’t passed out yet.

A surge of anger has me redoubling my efforts against the hands that hold me down, but I’m too weak and too outnumbered to make much headway.

Still, I don’t stop fighting.

“Serenity,” Montes says, continuing to pet my hair. “I would never hurt you. It’s going to be okay.”

Those five lying words. I’ve said them to soldiers as their lifeblood drained from their veins and their souls slipped from their eyes. It’s a statement you say to someone who’s lost hope, a lie you voice to make yourself feel better. But the person who is forced to hear it? They alone know the truth.

Sometimes, there is no hope to be had.

An angry tear trickles out. I can’t tell if my rage comes from this strange betrayal or from what will happen to me once I’m unaware.

Montes’s eyes focus on the tear, and the bastard strokes it away with his thumb. “Don’t cry, nire bihotza,” he says, his voice hoarse—as though this is tough for him. It makes me want to scream.

He has absolutely no idea what pain and loss feel like. The narcissist in me hopes that the king cares for me enough to regret this mistake for a very long time.

But I’m not counting on it.

“This isn’t forever,” the king says.

My eyes try to focus on him, but the sharpness of my reality is slipping away. I don’t know how much time has passed—minutes maybe—but I can tell the drug is working. Darkness is licking the edges of my vision.

The last thing I see is the king’s face, and the last thing I hear is his voice. He leans over me, and I feel a hand stroke my face. “We’ll only be apart for a short while. Once we cure your sickness, you’ll be mine again.”

EPILOGUE

The King

1 week later

I TELL THE world she’s dead.

My enemies don’t believe me, but it doesn’t matter. She’s locked away in the Sleeper far below the surface of the earth, the machine healing her advanced sickness one malignant tumor at a time.

My fierce, violent queen.

I ache for her. This is different from the other times she’d been hospitalized. Now I know she’s not coming out until we cure her cancer. That could be years, decades even. That entire time I have to endure it with one side of my bed cold. I have to carry this nation solely on my shoulders after catching a glimpse of what it would be like to have a true partnership with the woman I love.

I gaze into the window of the Sleeper and press my hand against the glass. She looks too serene. I’m used to my queen’s frowns, her glares, her narrowed eyes. The way she studies things with cool detachment, the way those old soul eyes of hers assess the world.

This woman does not look like my wife.

I don’t think I can bear staring at her face much longer. It’s cruel to want something and know you can’t have it.

Serenity believed that I never felt the wounds of my war. That I was above it. If only she knew how goddamn bad my heart hurts. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath under the weight of all this grief. I lost my closest advisors, my oldest friend, my child, and the love of my very long life all within months of one another.

The world doesn’t realize just how fragile their immortal king is at the moment.

But my enemies do. Of course they do.

6 months later

THEY STILL MOURN her, my people. They hated her while she was alive, but her supposed death has made her a martyr. It helps that the rebellions in the West are responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities to date. The devil the people know is better than the one they’re learning about, the one the Resistance is regretting aligning with.

It also helps that I’ve encouraged Serenity’s martyrdom. I’ve leaked a series of clips, much the same way the Resistance once did. But rather than degrading her character, these video segments show the world the Serenity I knew—a woman who wore violence alongside benevolence. I have clips from her interrogation, security feeds from the palace, even rare footage from her time as a soldier and an emissary of the WUN.

They’re scrubbed down and shortened so that they cast her in a positive light, and they do the trick. Too late my people want to know about this woman that fought for them, who not only claimed to be one of them, but was one of them. And they love me for loving her.

I watch the clips over and over, until I’ve memorized every word, every expression, every movement of hers.

I’d hoped it would bring me peace.

It only brings more heartache.

2 years later

“CHRIS KLINE, YOU are a hard man to track down.”

The man in question currently wears shackles and sits sullenly on one of my couches. He’s much rougher around the edges than when I first met him. Hiding does that to a man. Makes him lean and shifty-eyed. But the former general’s sanity is still intact, and I can see he’s just as hardened as ever.