"Have mercy on me, Your Highness. I pledge my loyalty to you." The man's voice cracked under the weight of his own desperation. "I just need to see my son. He is all I have left."
Kira looked at him for a long moment.
She recognised him, not as someone she knew well, but as someone she had seen before in the worst possible circumstances. Milo. The mate of the late Lara Vaughn, the woman who had poisoned her tea on the day of the queen's blessing ceremony.
She remembered him from that day, too, kneeling and pleading in much the same way, swearing loyalty if only she would spare him for the sake of his young son.
She had been so consumed by shock and anger then that she had barely registered Lara's death or Milo's desperate pleas for mercy.
But that was then.
She understood now, in a way she hadn't before, what it meant to be caught between loyalty to someone you loved and the consequences of choices that went wrong.
