Malvoria stopped in the doorway like she had walked face-first into a curse.
For one glorious second, Lara almost forgot that Sarisa was shaking with rage in her arms, that her own shirt was hanging off one shoulder in torn surrender.
Then Malvoria's eyes narrowed.
"What the fuck."
Lara, who had no defense worth offering, let out a breath that was half a groan. "That's about right."
Malvoria's gaze dropped to the remains of Lara's shirt and then rose again, red eyes glittering with the sort of delighted outrage only she could manage at this hour.
"Oh, no," she said, voice going sharp with interest. "No, no, no. I leave you alone for one evening and come back to this?"
She pointed at Lara's chest with the full authority of a demon queen catching someone misusing palace property.
"How did you get here?"
Sarisa, still breathing too fast, stepped away just enough to scrub a hand over her face. She looked murderous and embarrassed, which on her was a very dangerous combination.
Lara straightened the wreckage of her shirt with the dignity of a woman who had been denied angry sex and was not taking it well. "That's what I'd like to know too, actually."
Malvoria blinked. "You don't know?"
"I was busy being attacked."
Sarisa shot her a glare. "You were not attacked."
"You absolutely were attacking me."
"I was kissing you."
"With violent intent."
That did not improve Sarisa's mood.
Malvoria held up one hand. "Focus. How did you get here?"
Her gaze slid from Lara to Sarisa, took in the flushed cheeks, the wild eyes, the fact that Sarisa was in no version of her own royal bedtime clothes, and then something ugly and knowing sparked in her expression.
"Oh, gods," she said slowly. "Don't tell me."
Sarisa said nothing.
Malvoria's mouth dropped open in theatrical horror. "Elysia gave you a teleportation device?"
There was a brief, perfect silence.
Then, as if summoned by the accusation itself, Elysia stepped into the room carrying what looked like a folded blanket and the last shreds of plausible innocence.
She saw Sarisa.
She saw Lara's torn shirt.
She saw Malvoria.
And immediately tried to back out of the room.
Malvoria moved faster.
"Oh, absolutely not."
She caught Elysia by the arm with the easy inevitability of fate and dragged her two steps inside before the door could be shut again.
Elysia let herself be caught with the tragic dignity of a woman who knew she had been found out and still believed she was right.
"You," Malvoria said, pointing an accusing finger at her wife. "You gave her a teleportation device."
Elysia glanced at Sarisa, then at Lara, then finally at Malvoria's face, which was always a mistake because one look at Malvoria when she was offended tended to make lesser women confess to crimes they had not even committed.
"Well," Elysia said carefully, "she looked like she needed one."
Lara, despite everything, almost laughed.
Malvoria made a scandalized noise. "She looked like she needed one?"
Elysia lifted her chin. "Yes."
"That is your defense?"
"It is a very good defense."
Malvoria dropped Elysia's arm only to put both hands on her hips in full demon-queen disbelief.
"You armed my sister's exiled lover with illegal romantic mobility and all you have for me is 'she looked like she needed one'?"
Sarisa, leaning against the bedpost and trying not to look as though she might either cry or bite someone, muttered, "In fairness, I did."
Malvoria pointed at her without looking away from Elysia. "Not helping."
Elysia, utterly undisturbed, smoothed the sleeve Malvoria had wrinkled. "Would you prefer I had let her pace holes into the floor for another week?"
"Yes."
"You're lying."
"I am not."
"You are." Elysia turned to Lara, seeking corroboration. "She would have complained for two full days about how dramatic Sarisa looked and then spent the third muttering about how someone should smuggle her out of the palace."
"That is slander," Malvoria said.
"It is marriage."
Lara's mouth twitched helplessly.
Malvoria noticed and swung toward her. "Do not encourage her."
"I'm trying very hard to stay out of this," Lara said, which was a lie, because this was the most entertaining thing to happen in the last month that did not involve punching a prince.
Elysia folded her arms. "Honestly, love, just imagine not fucking with me for more than one month. You would die."
Malvoria stared at her.
Then she let out a strangled laugh that she clearly did not intend to give away.
"Oh, that is disgusting."
"It is true."
"You're impossible."
"And yet," Elysia said sweetly, "you married me."
Malvoria stepped closer until they were almost nose to nose. "I married you because you were threateningly beautiful and had excellent taste in chaos."
"You say that like it's past tense."
"It is not past tense," Malvoria snapped. "Do not make me compliment you while I'm trying to be furious."
Elysia's mouth curved. "You're doing terribly."
Lara crossed her arms over the torn remains of her shirt and looked at Sarisa, who was now watching the married disaster in the doorway with the stunned expression of someone who had arrived intent on catastrophe and instead found domestic absurdity.
Good, Lara thought. Breathe. Stay there. Don't set yourself on fire yet.
Malvoria was still arguing, because of course she was.
"It is the principle," she said. "You cannot just hand out teleportation devices to emotionally unstable royals."
Elysia raised one brow. "I did not hand it to just anyone. I handed it to Sarisa."
"That is not reassuring."
"It is very reassuring if you know her."
"I do know her. That is why I'm worried."
Elysia took the blanket she was still carrying and draped it over Lara's shoulders with absent efficiency. "Your shirt is embarrassing."
"It was murdered."
"Yes. I can tell."
Malvoria's gaze sharpened again at the sight of the blanket around Lara. "Wait." She pointed between them, recalibrating. "No. Back up. Why is she angry?"
That pulled the room's center of gravity back into place at once.
Lara went still.
Because that, she realized, was the one piece she still didn't have. Sarisa had teleported into her room furious enough to tear her shirt off and try to bully her into oblivion, and Lara had been so occupied with stopping her from setting them both on fire that she still did not actually know why.
Sarisa's face changed.
The flush in it cooled into something harder. More deliberate.
Malvoria noticed immediately. "What happened?"
For a second, Sarisa said nothing. Her fingers tightened around the bedpost. Lara knew that silence too. It was the silence before a wound was uncovered because keeping it covered was no longer survivable.
Elysia, all amusement gone now, stepped back from the center of the room and lowered herself to sit on the arm of the chair by the hearth, giving the moment room without making it formal.
Lara took one half-step toward Sarisa, the blanket slipping at her shoulders. "Hey."
Sarisa looked at her.
Then, in a voice so controlled it made Lara's skin prickle, she said, "My mother suggested that it might be easier if I let Aliyah stay with you permanently."
The room went dead.
Even Malvoria, who usually had a reaction ready for everything, simply stared.
Lara felt the words hit her chest like a kicked-in door.
What.
"She what?" Malvoria asked first, very quietly.
Sarisa let out a breath that sounded like it had been trapped inside her ribs for hours.
"In the carriage. On the way back. She said that now that you're gone from the realm, perhaps it would be better if Aliyah simply lived with you. Permanently."
Her mouth twisted. "As if my daughter were an inconvenient room arrangement."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of violence. Full of outrage.
Full of the terrible, shared realization that the queen had finally found a way to say something so monstrous it shocked even women like Malvoria and Lara into stillness.
Lara forgot all about the shirt.
Forgot about the argument in the doorway.
Forgot, for one red, blinding second, that she was supposed to be trying to keep everyone calm.
Because suddenly Sarisa's anger made perfect sense.