Chapter 206

OLIVIA’S POV I wanted to burn it all. Every golden scroll, every insult hidden behind velvet words, every law they twisted to control those like me. I had faced witches in battle and death without blinking—but the Royals? They slithered in with contracts and conditions, and I hated them more for it. I wanted to face them again, to storm into their precious court with flames licking my shoulders and tell them exactly what I thought of their decrees. But Dominic had other ideas. He wasn’t fire like me—he was storm and shadow, power that moved under the surface, quiet and devastating. Where I would have met the Royals head-on, Dominic chose to dig deeper, to dismantle the foundation of their strength brick by brick. And gods, I admired him for it. “The thing about Royals,” he had told me, arms crossed, voice like steel laced with calculation, “is that they love power more than anything. So we take it from them.” At first, I thought he meant retaliation—war, perhaps—but he meant something