Seducing the Tyrant's Queen: The Apprentice's Revenge

Mora trains Raven in the palace practice hall, correcting her stance, her grip, the angle of her wrists. Raven takes the corrections without complaint, eyes down, voice soft. She came to the palace as a new apprentice with no family name attached and no history anyone bothered to check. Mora was once a Valkyrie Queen. Her powers are gone now, stripped from her by the man she married, who rules the household and the kingdom around it with the same hand. She answers to him in every room of the palace except the training hall, and even there she watches what she says. Raven is not what she appears to be. Under the quiet manner is someone who came into the palace carrying an old blood debt, and Mora is part of what she came to collect. She starts working on her teacher slowly, a comment here, a touch that lasts a second too long there, until the hierarchy between them stops running only one direction. By day the two of them keep to the rules, teacher and student, formal and correct in front of the staff and the guards. At night the arrangement reverses. In Mora's chambers, Raven stops asking permission, and Mora finds herself answering to the girl she is supposed to be training. What Raven wants is not only Mora. She is working toward the husband and the throne behind him, and the lies that hold the kingdom together under his rule. Mora, cold and controlled everywhere else, is the one part of the plan that keeps slipping out of Raven's hands and into something neither of them planned for.