The royal palace had never felt so alive, and yet so fractured.
The halls pulsed with whispers, corridors bloomed with gossip, and every noble, servant, and soldier seemed caught in the whirlwind of the chaos that had just unfolded in the courtroom. News spread like wildfire: Prince Heiko's execution had been halted, not by the mercy of the Council, but by the intervention of Queen Alia and a girl they had once dismissed as a mere omega—his mate, River.
And then came the bombshell: The Code of Hammurabi.
The law that no one had dared utter in generations had been invoked before the entire kingdom. People were shaken—not just by its existence, but by what it revealed: that the Council had chosen to ignore ancient legal doctrines to push their own sentence. And now… everyone wants to know
