Chapter 180: Denial
Aveline could sense it before she fully understood it.
It was not the same sensation she had grown used to when she bent shadows, that quiet, inward pull of something cool and elusive responding to her will.
This was different. Hotter. Wider. It surged through her in a rush so sudden it almost felt like recognition, as though something hidden deep inside her had awakened the moment the fire came for her and decided, without hesitation, that it would not let her be harmed.
She blinked, staring down at her own hand, then at the stance Lucien had taught her only because she had insisted on learning everything he would let her touch.
Her fingers were still arranged exactly as he had shown her, her body balanced without her needing to think about it, as if some instinct she had never trusted before had reached up and taken control for her.
The fire had not struck her. It had split around her. Not with the cool evasiveness of shadows, but with something far more forceful and alive, as though the flame itself had been forced to recognize a boundary it could not cross.
Lucien’s face softened immediately.
"Of course you did it, Leveret," he said with a proud smile that looked so natural on him it almost did not belong to the same man who had once seemed all sharpness and old secrets.
Aveline’s expression changed at once. The triumph that had flashed through her a heartbeat ago slipped into something quieter, more uncertain.
She looked down at her hands again, as though trying to catch the shape of what had just happened before it could disappear from memory. Her throat tightened slightly. She did not yet know what this meant, and that ignorance left an uneasy weight in her chest.
Could she be one of them?
Could she be a descendant of the Caelvaris family?
The thought forced itself into her mind with relentless persistence. It was the kind of conclusion she had resisted from the beginning because it was too inconvenient, too strange, too tangled in history and rumor and things people had preferred to bury.
And yet the more she felt, the harder it became to dismiss. The fire had answered her. Not clumsily, not by accident, but with a kind of obedience that suggested familiarity. That alone was enough to make suspicion coil tighter around her thoughts.
She was from Aurelmont. Her parents were nobles from Aurelmont.
She did not belong to Greenvale. She had no connection to this kingdom, no bloodline here, no reason at all to be tied to the family Lucien had belonged to. That had to be the truth. It had to be. The alternative was too enormous to settle comfortably in her mind.
Aelion, still hidden among the cages, watched her with growing intensity.
Lucien reached out and patted her hair, pleased and entirely unbothered by her stunned silence.
"Why are you surprised?" he asked. "Of course, you can manipulate fire."
Aveline stiffened.
At the touch, she absentmindedly pushed his hand away. It was not a rude gesture exactly, only one made by instinct, by the faint discomfort that came whenever someone reached too openly for her after she had already started to feel exposed.
Her thoughts were still racing. She had no idea what she had just done or how she had done it, only that something in her body had answered the fire before fear could.
Aelion watched all of it from the dark, his mind shifting quickly to the practical consequences.
He needed to meet his uncle today.
He needed to tell him about her.
If the legends were right, if there was even the smallest chance that she was what they thought she might be, then they could not afford to let anyone else claim her first. Not the Crown Prince. Not the King. Not even Lucien himself, if their plans were to succeed. Aveline had to be brought to their side, and soon.
The side of justice.
The thought settled over him with grim resolve.
It would not be simple. It might not even be easy. But whether the road was difficult or not did not matter now. If she truly was connected to the blood they needed, then everything hinged on her. The future of Greenvale itself could shift depending on which hand she chose to trust.
And Aelion, stubborn as he was, had every intention of making sure it was theirs.
Aveline, meanwhile, was still trying to catch her breath.
That was when the creature behind her shifted.
The sound was small, but in the tense hush of the dungeon it landed like a warning.
Lucien reacted immediately.
His body snapped toward the movement at once, his expression sharpening with the instinct of someone who had spent too many years around dangerous things to ignore even the slightest rustle.
Fire gathered almost reflexively in his hand, and the air changed around him in an instant, turning tight and dangerous again.
Aveline snapped out of her thoughts.
She moved before he could throw the strike, stepping between him and the creature with surprising speed.
"How is your wife doing, old man?" she asked.
Lucien froze.
The question was so unexpected that it seemed to knock the fire clean out of him.
"Wife?" he repeated, his brows drawing together. "What is wrong with Leone?"
His tone changed immediately, and Aveline could see it in the set of his shoulders and the concern that flashed over his face before he could control it. He had gone from ready to attack to deeply worried in the space of a single breath.
That, more than anything, told her how real his feelings were. The question had not sounded like a performance. It had sounded like a man hearing that someone important to him might be in danger and reacting before pride or confusion could get in the way.
"I heard she fell down," Aveline said, looking toward Aelion, who had now begun to emerge from the shadows.
Aelion’s expression shifted at once as he stepped forward.
"She hit her head," he said carefully. "I heard she was unconscious for a day."
Lucien turned toward him, visibly shaken now.
"Why did you not tell me, Adrian?" he demanded.
The anger was there, but so was the fear, the kind that always made anger feel brittle around the edges. For a second, he looked ready to abandon everything else and rush off at once. He turned as if to leave, already forgetting the creature, already forgetting the dungeon, and everything else.
Aveline watched him leave. This was not the man who did not care for his wife. This was a man who thought his wife as a part of himself.
Did he really have a mistress?
Lucien almost reached the exit, but then he stopped.
Something in him seemed to catch.
He turned back.
And walked to them in a hurried way.
