Chapter 264 The Kitchen’s List - Amelia’s POV

Chapter 264 The Kitchen’s List - Amelia’s POV
The kitchen had a list.
A thorough, mildly terrifying list of foods Queen Amelia Brecc could tolerate without vomiting on several thousand pounds’ worth of burgundy silk. Dominic carried a copy, every guard on food detail had memorised it, and another had been laminated above the royal kitchen’s central workstation because Dominic Frost believed in redundancy the way other people believed in oxygen.
I was profoundly grateful. At twelve weeks and five days pregnant with twins, hunger no longer arrived as a suggestion. It declared war on my digestive system and expected immediate surrender.
The promised chocolate-and-cherry pastry appeared on a silver tray carried by a woman in palace livery. I vaguely recognised her from the security briefings: dark hair, controlled posture and the strained composure of someone vetted three times who was still nervous about serving a queen. She offered the tray with an efficient bow.
“Your Majesty. From the royal kitchen. Chocolate and cherry, as requested.”
I took the plate. The pastry was still warm, its flaky layers covered in dark chocolate glaze. My mouth watered before I tasted it. The kitchen knew what it was doing. The alternative was Dominic standing over the royal stove with a clipboard and an expression capable of freezing mercury, and nobody wanted that.
Aleksandr stood less than fifteen metres away, accepting congratulations from a silver-haired alpha whose name I had already forgotten. Beneath his black suit, his shoulders remained alert while his attention travelled across the ballroom in measured sweeps. His guards maintained their perimeter without crowding him. The distance between us felt deliberate: close enough to reach, wide enough that we were not performing as a single organism.
I bit into the pastry.
Chocolate arrived first, rich and dark, followed by the sharp sweetness of cherry. For one second, the pastry was exactly what I had hoped for. Then the aftertaste cut through it.
Wrong. Not sour or spoiled. Metallic, almost, with a bitterness no amount of chocolate should have hidden. My body recoiled before language caught up, recognising danger in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
I spat the bite onto the burgundy carpet. Under any other circumstances, that would have been humiliating. Here, it was the only sensible response.
Numbness spread from the tip of my tongue towards my throat, heavy and deliberate. Heat followed, invasive rather than comforting, travelling downwards with the efficiency of something designed to move fast.
I turned. Dominic stood two steps to my left, already watching me with a beta’s instant understanding that something had gone wrong.
I offered him the plate. My arm trembled badly enough to rattle the china. The half-eaten pastry looked harmless beneath the chandelier light, but Dominic’s composure cracked the moment he saw my face.
“It tastes wrong,” I tried to say. The words slurred around a tongue that no longer obeyed me. Dominic’s expression changed from alertness to horror.
Then the floor moved.
Not the floor. Me. My knees folded without warning, and the ballroom tilted in a slow arc. Burgundy carpet rose towards me. Chandeliers wheeled overhead. Someone screamed, then several voices joined, distant as sound heard underwater.
Dominic caught me beneath the arms before I struck the carpet. The plate slipped from his other hand and shattered. China cracked, pastry scattered, and both seemed irrelevant compared with my body abandoning instructions as basic as stand and breathe.
Consciousness loosened in pieces. My limbs receded first, heavy and unreachable. Vision narrowed next, reducing the ballroom to a tunnel of crystal light. Music and voices faded until my own uneven breathing became the only sound left.
Through it all, Kaela screamed.
Not a sound, but a raw force tearing through our shared mind. Kaela hurled herself against the limits of my consciousness, teeth bared, furious at being trapped inside a failing human body with no enemy she could reach.
‘NO,’ she roared. ‘MATE. PUPS. NO.’
Her panic became a second pulse inside me, frantic and useless. I tried to reach for her, for Aleksandr, for anyone, but even thought had grown slippery.
The mate bond snapped open under pressure. Aleksandr’s alarm struck through it before I could form his name, a hard flash of recognition from across the ballroom. He was moving. I knew that much, though the narrowing tunnel of my vision no longer showed me where.
Dominic lowered me carefully, one arm braced behind my shoulders while guards surged around us. Orders travelled above me, clipped and overlapping: seal the exits, secure the food, call Sylvia. The gala dissolved into a security operation before the final note of the quartet had faded.
I wanted to tell them about the numbness, the heat, the bitterness beneath the cherry. My mouth would not cooperate. The details remained trapped behind my teeth while darkness gathered at the edges.
One thought survived the collapse intact: the pups. Terror gathered around them, primal and absolute. I tried to place a hand over my abdomen, but my arm no longer seemed attached to me. Kaela answered the intention with another violent cry.
Then Aleksandr reached us. The bond flared with his presence, fear stripped of every royal layer. Dominic shifted away as stronger arms lifted me from the carpet, careful despite the urgency shaking through him.
Around us, guests retreated under guard direction, gowns and formal jackets becoming a shifting wall of colour. No one left. Dominic had rehearsed this response until every guard knew which door to seal and which corridor to clear. The speed should have reassured me. Instead, it confirmed that the danger was real.
I felt Kaela searching for the pups through instinct alone, unable to hear heartbeats or sense movement from this early in the pregnancy. Her terror latched onto every silence. I tried to tell her that Sylvia would help, that Aleksandr was here, that we were not alone. The reassurance dissolved before it became words.
The last thing I registered was warmth: solid arms, the familiar rhythm of Aleksandr’s movement and his voice saying my name close to my ear.
Darkness closed over the ballroom, leaving Kaela’s rage and the faint line of the mate bond as the only proof I had not disappeared entirely.