Chapter 61 Prague

Chapter 61 Prague

Scarlett’s POV

Damien.

He looked wrong in Prague out of context, like a soldier in a cathedral. He had my mother’s men pinned in the way of someone who had been inside too many of their rooms. He wore the same expression: tired, raw around the edges. When his eyes found me they went cold, not the kind of cold that kills feelings but the kind that freezes them into shapes you can no longer recognize.

For one careless second I almost smiled. He folded there, as if the world asking him to choose had finally broken his back. He had done what he said he wouldn’t do: he had stepped into the tangle of my life.

The room smelled like whiskey and old promises. Maria’s presence was not a scent or a rustle; it was a tension, an expectation. She wasn’t there yet, but I could feel the way the air braced itself, like a body about to take a blow.

“Kade,” I heard him say, smoothly. “She’s arrived.”

Kade’s gaze cut to me, assessing, as if a new toy had been presented. He smiled at me too bright, too sure and for an instant I felt the old pull of his dangerous charm. It was a first draft of seduction. I folded it away quickly.

We sat. Formalities exchanged like currency. Names dropped; alliances hinted. I played the role Maria had trained me to perform pliant, fierce, shrewd. Men leaned in; men fell into my net.

And then the lights dimmed. The screens that lined the room flickered alive.

A camera feed unraveled across the wall: footage of my childhood. A younger version of me had hair scraped back, face unlined playing in a garden. My father was there in a slow, laughing moment. Maria stood on the edge of the frame, hands folded, watching with something like calcified affection. The room held its breath. Someone laughed, but it sounded like a cough.

Maria walked in then, not with the swagger of a ruler but with the practiced calm of a woman who had been playing the long game for years. She wore black silk; the firelight from the screen painted her face in a cruel gold. She moved like a ghost who had learned not to startle.

“You finally came,” she said, voice velvet. “I was beginning to think the phoenix forgot how to fly.”

My mouth shaped a response that was neither question nor accusation. “You set this up,” I said.

She smiled, and the room narrowed to the space between us. “Of course.” She turned to Kade. “Sit, love. You’ll ruin the moment.”

Kade obliged. He was a man who appreciated spectacle. He folded his hands and watched me the way a man watches a coin he plans to toss.

Maria’s eyes found mine and she opened her arms both an offering and an accusation. “Scarlett,” she said. “Look how beautifully you’ve learned to burn.”

My hand curled around the edge of my chair. “What do you want?”

We all knew the answer. She wanted the crown she’d been denied. She wanted the chaos she’d sown to kneel before her and look pretty. She wanted me to kneel before her and say thank you for my life.

Instead she slid a manila envelope across the table. “Proof,” she said. “You deserve to know your place. Damien’s loyalty? It’s always been transactional.”

A video started this time, footage I’d never seen. Damien in a grey apartment, speaking on the phone, voice low. He was not the man who had kissed me; he was the man who’d once taken orders. My breath came out small and thin. He had always been both. The screen blurred because of the way my eyes wanted to deny what they saw.

I turned to look at Damien. The color had drained from his face. His mouth was a thin line.

“You were right to want proof,” Maria said softly. “You wanted to be free. So I thought I should grant you the truth.” She smiled, and the smile was a closing door.

“Why?” I asked. “Why bring this to me? To make me hate him?”

She shook her head. “To make you remember. To make you strong.”

Then the room shifted. The doors locked with a soft, inevitable click. A detail small, clinical brought my vision into sharp, dangerous focus.

“You always loved the drama,” I said. “But you’ve forgotten one rule. If you set a stage, you must be ready for the curtain to fall.”

Maria’s smile didn’t waver. “Do you think I’m not ready? Do you think I didn’t plan for everything?”

A movement at the side of the room caught my eye. I felt it before I understood it: Damien, slipping a hand inside his jacket. He moved like a man who had already made one choice and was making another. Speed, a muscle memory of survival.

But the wrong man lunged.

I heard the sound like a twig snapping an unexpected footfall. Leone moved first, pushing himself between Damien and someone who’d meant to put steel between his ribs. The room erupted into motion: men grabbing, shouting; a tray overturned; a glass shattered. Kade laughed, sharp and delighted by the chaos.

Someone fired. The shot rang like a bell. I saw Damien stagger, one hand pressed to his chest. He didn’t fall. He looked at me with a look that took my breath: apology braided with command.

“Go,” he mouthed. He didn’t have to shout. The room, for all its noise, heard only that.

Everything else condensed to a decision I had no business making: run or stay.

I chose the wrong thing.

I moved toward him toward the man I still loved, toward the man who had still been the first to step into danger to buy me a second because my hands were traitors and my heart an idiot. I reached him, hauled his weight into mine, tasted blood and copper and the raw truth of him.

Leone hauled us apart with savage efficiency. The world was a blur of leather and faces and the smell of spilled whiskey. Kade’s voice sounded somewhere far away like an executioner announcing the time of the fall.

And then the lights died.

Black swallowed the room like an animal. In the dark, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor no, several things reverberated. I heard running feet, a mechanical grind, and, impossibly, a soft voice: Maria’s, close enough to warm my cheek with breath. “You wanted everything,” she whispered. “You wanted to see the world your way. Now you will.”

When the emergency lights flickered back on, the scene had shifted. Men lay on the floor, some groaning, others unmoving. Guards moved like marionettes, some I’d thought loyal to me, others brandishing the old queen’s insignia. Leone was on his knees, hands bloodied. Damien was still upright, but his face had the hollow look of a man someone had finally broken.

And across the far wall, a new screen blinked to life. On it, coordinates scrolled in a line like an accusation. A map of the city, the numbers locking onto a grid pattern like teeth closing.

My phone buzzed with a message I felt before I read it:

> Unknown: You made a move, Scarlett. Now the board plays back. The first piece falls at midnight. Be where the map says if you want to keep the next one alive.

The screen showed an address in the old quarter. My safe houses were traced in red. Maria was smiling from the centre of the wall, all calm cruelty and patient hunger. Kade clapped slowly then, as if to celebrate a perfect meal.

Damien’s eyes found mine in the chaos and I saw in them a decision too sharp to live beside: surrender, to keep me breathing; betrayal, to keep a code intact; or both.

He mouthed something I could not hear.

I knew, in that moment, precisely how little room I had left to stand and be human. Maria had wrapped me in a net of logic and menace, and every tug tightened the ropes around someone I loved.

The sirens came. The room dissolved into shouting factions of men in suits and men in armor, lines forming and breaking like tides. Leone looked at me with such a raw, betrayed expression that I felt the knife in my own hand.

I slid the flash drive into my palm like a hot coal. It was little more than a token now: proof, bait, map. It could ignite a war or a funeral. I didn’t know.

When the doors finally gave way, punctured by the heavy soles of armed men, Kade rose, smoothed his suit, and bowed like a man presenting the world with its cause.

Maria stepped forward, eyes like a judge. She held out her hands. “Choose, Scarlett,” she said, and her voice was terrible with patience. “Will you pick the board? Or the pieces?”

Damien’s hand closed over mine firm, sure, with a pressure that said both sorry and stay and for all the brokenness, for the business of lies and blood and empire, I understood one thing with lethal clarity:

In Prague, under the rusted angels of an old city, I had to decide whether to be the heir who inherited a throne built on ruin or the woman who walked away and took the burning with her.

The lights flashed again. Footsteps thundered from the staircase. Shadows poured into the room, and at the top of the steps, a silhouette stepped into the frame, small, deliberate, an interruption to the calculus.

It wasn’t Maria.

It was someone I’d thought dead.