Chapter 9 --9
"Eleana."
Just her name. No title. No softness. The sound of it made three knights flinch, though they didn’t dare lift their heads. Even the physician’s hands stilled over his leather case, frozen mid-motion.
She straightened by instinct, years of training pulling her spine rigid. "Father, this daughter—"
His eyes were on her now, and the rage in them was worse for how quiet his face stayed. No shouting. No theatrical gestures. Just that terrible, crystalline silence that pressed down on the room like winter ice.
"So you," he said, each word slow and heavy, measured like a judge’s gavel, "as the eldest sister... not only failed to care that your younger sister is sick and barely out of bed..." His gaze flicked once to Elara still on the floor, then back to Eleana with surgical precision. "...you also chose to ’barge’ into her palace without permission, and even raised your hand against her."
He did not shout. He didn’t need to. The anger was in the way the air thickened until breathing felt like work, in the way the tiles at his feet cracked hair-fine under his aura like spider-web fractures spreading through porcelain, in the way every man in the room tried to make himself smaller, shoulders hunching as if they could disappear into their own shadows.
Eleana’s fingers tightened in her skirt, nails digging into expensive silk. Heat crawled up her neck—shame, fury, disbelief all tangled together. "I did not strike—"
"The glom shows enough," he cut in, voice dropping colder, each syllable edged with frost. "Entrance without leave. A sick girl collapsing at your feet. Your hand raised. No one moving to help."
He let that picture hang between them, as sharp and inescapable as a blade held to the throat. The glom didn’t lie. Whatever her intentions, whatever words she’d meant to speak, the recording had captured what mattered: power imbalance, cruelty, a princess on the ground and another standing over her.