His brows lifted in surprise. “To save you? It’s all I have been trying to do from the moment you were taken. I searched for you everywhere, for months. Anywhere I thought you could be, I sent soldiers there.”

She knew that. She had met a few in the small village of Toleme before they had been wiped out by a twister she had accidentally called.

“And my mother? I do not think you were trying to save her by drugging her into unconsciousness.”

He took a step farther into the room, his long legs eating up too much space in that one stride. “I had nothing to do with that. It was my father, he—”

“Oh please. And Nova? Was it your father who had her imprisoned for my kidnapping too?”

Cassius gritted his teeth, the muscles in his neck jumping with strain. His eyes flicked behind her to where she knew Nova still stood. “No. That was me. I was trying to find out what happened to you, and—”

“I ran away because I did not want to marry you! There was no kidnapping. I left of my own volition because I saw just a glimpse of the coldness and cruelty you and your family are capable of, and I decided I deserved more. But I am the fool who did not realize until too late that I was leaving my mother at the mercy of wolves.”

“Aurora, I never meant for any of this to happen. I wanted to rule beside you, not let my father run another city into the ground. Once we were wed, I could prevent him from attempting a coup. I can still do that. My father could not stand against you and me together.”

Aurora gathered the dressing gown tightly around herself and shook her head. “I did not want to marry you then, and I will not marry you now. Not ever.”

“Then I guess there is no point in keeping you, is there?” The voice came from the still-open doorway, but when she looked no one was there. A moment later Cassius’s father leaned around the corner, his gaze hard, and his lips fixed in the same sneering smile she had seen on Casimir.

“Welcome home, Aurora,” he said, stepping into the room, and closing the door with a quiet snick. “You caused quite a stir with your disappearance, though I can’t say that I minded. It worked out rather well, in fact.”

“You are deplorable.”

The Locke patriarch shrugged. “Someone has to be.” Then he turned to his son and asked, “Do you want to kill her? Or shall I?”