The Author's Extra: My SSS Skill Turns Souls into Anything!

The word bounced off the cell walls and came back empty.

Alden lifted his head. His eyes were tired and heavy and there was blood at the corner of his mouth, but there was no fear in them.

That quiet made the anger worse. Alistair had expected something. Tears or pleading or rage or at least the right kind of fear. He had not expected quiet.

"Why are you not saying anything?" Alistair’s voice had lost its authority. It sounded like something raw and lost under the anger. "Say something!"

Alden took a slow breath. His voice came out dry and rough.

"Because there is nothing I can say that brings him back."

Alistair froze.

The cell went completely still.

Whatever he had been bracing himself against, it was not that. The words were too simple. Too honest. They landed in the middle of his grief and did not give him anywhere to push against.

Then his face twisted back into rage because grief with nowhere to go always becomes rage.

"Do not speak like you understand my pain!"

He pulled the whip back for another strike.

The guard at the door reached out with one hand. "Your Highness, if this continues much longer he will not survive until tomorrow’s hearing—"

"I DO NOT CARE!" The roar filled the cell and came back off every wall. "He chose this. He made this choice the moment he touched my son!"

He raised the leather high.

WHOOSH.

A green vine cut through the air from the doorway behind them. It wrapped hard around the whip and yanked it away before it reached Alden.

Alistair stared at his empty hand. Green mana shimmered faintly along the vine’s surface.

"What is the meaning of this, Your Highness?"

Alistair turned. The guards at the door had gone rigid and straight. Four figures stood in the corridor entrance, and at the front of them was Isabella, her white coat untouched by the damp and dark of the cell level, her eyes taking in the scene without rushing to any expression.

Alistair opened his mouth and then closed it.

"Mi... Miss Isabella."

Alistair stared at Isabella. His chest was still heaving. The muscle in his jaw kept twitching.

"What are you doing here, Miss Ashford?"

"ALDEN!" Footsteps answered before she could. Fast and overlapping, coming hard down the stone corridor. Nicholas, Leon, and Roselle burst into the cell block with panic written across all three of their faces.

Isabella did not move. Her eyes moved from Alden’s face to the king’s hand and the whip still in it, and her expression stayed exactly as it was.

"Have you forgotten there is a formal hearing tomorrow?"

Alistair’s grip tightened on the leather. "I am making him understand what he did to my son."

"By hitting a chained student in a dark cell?" Isabella said it the same way she said everything. Which somehow made it land heavier than shouting would have. "Or by putting your grief somewhere it is easier to aim?"

Alistair’s mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

He stood there with his jaw working and a whip in his hand in front of a king’s worth of guards and family, and he did not have anything to say.

Isabella took one step forward.

"Whatever you are feeling right now, you have no legal right to do this before his trial. He has rights before the court until a formal judgment is spoken." She glanced at Alden once, then back at the king. "From this moment on I am personally supervising his custody."

Alistair looked at her for another few seconds. Then he looked away, his head snapping sideways like the effort of holding her gaze had become too much.

"Fine." The word came out thin and bitter. He threw the whip at the nearest guard’s feet. "Remove the restraints."

The guards moved fast. The anti-mana chains came loose with a heavy clatter against the stone floor, and without them holding him up, Alden’s legs went out from under him all at once.

THUD.

Leon caught him before his face hit the ground. Both arms going under Alden’s, taking his weight, pulling him sideways toward the low iron bed in the corner of the cell.

"Are you okay? Can you stand? Don’t try to stand, just sit. Here, here—" Leon got him down onto the edge of the mattress carefully, his hands moving fast and gentle. "Sit down. Just sit."

Alden sat. His breathing was shallow. His shirt was gone. The marks across his back and sides and jaw were the kind that had already started setting into bruises, raised and dark against his skin. He leaned his weight against the wall and said nothing.

Roselle turned on Isabella.

"Was this necessary?" Her voice shook with it. "He saved us. He saved all of our lives when we couldn’t save our own, and now he is sitting in a dark cell being beaten and you are just standing there following your orders—"

Isabella raised both hands, palms out, patient. "Listen, my little brother’s date. If I wanted to make his situation worse, I would not have brought the three of you down here the second you asked to see him."

Roselle shut her mouth. Her chest was still moving fast.

"I am not the enemy in this room," Isabella said, quieter now. She looked at Alden again. "And I would not have come down here to stop what was happening if I did not intend to stop it."

Roselle’s shoulders came down slowly. The anger did not leave but it shifted into something smaller and more desperate. "He’ll be free tomorrow though? Once the court hears everything?"

Isabella’s expression did not change but something behind it did. A shadow of something she was choosing not to say.

"I cannot promise that," she said. "The supreme royal council will decide."

Roselle looked at the floor.

Leon had gotten a worn blanket from somewhere and draped it over Alden’s shoulders. He was adjusting the corner, fussing with it. "Are you sitting alright? Do you need to shift?"

Alden shook his head. The motion made him wince. "I’m fine."

He said it like he meant it. Like the word fine was not sitting right next to a map of welts across his skin and a court date in the morning that could end in his execution. That unbothered calm was the same one he’d had in the mountain pass, the same one he’d had in the arena against Augustus, and Leon hated it a little right now because it made him feel like the one falling apart.

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