The carriage left Castle Elvenstone before the sun had cleared the mountains.
Cassian sat by the window, watching the dark pines slide past through a veil of grey mist.
He had dressed in a plain coat, dark wool without insignia, the same kind he had worn to Thornwood.
Beside him on the seat lay a fur blanket, untouched.
Across from him, Gerhardt sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at nothing.
Henrik rode ahead with two outriders.
The road east was narrow and poorly maintained, winding through hills that grew steeper with every mile.
Snow still clung to the shadows beneath the trees, though spring was beginning to soften the air.
The carriage wheels rattled over stones and frozen ruts.
Neither man spoke for a long time.
Cassian watched the landscape, but his mind was elsewhere.
A sister.
A ten-year-old girl named Seraphina, living in a village he had never heard of, raised by a mother who had been cast out of the castle before she was born.
His father’s child.
His father’s shame.
The old Cassian would have been angry.
The old Cassian would have seen the child as a threat—a bastard with Elvenstone blood, a complication to be managed or removed.
But the old Cassian was dead.
The man who sat in this carriage had spent fifteen years in a world where titles meant nothing, where blood meant nothing, where the only thing that mattered was whether you could survive the next day.
He had been a factory worker named Luca.
He had been nobody.
And nobody had helped him.
He would not be nobody to this child.
“Tell me about her,” Cassian said.
His voice was quiet, barely audible above the rumble of the wheels.
Gerhardt looked up, startled from his private thoughts.
“Your Grace?” “The mother.
Elise.
Tell me about her.” The old steward was silent for a moment.
Then he drew a long breath and began.
Elise had been the daughter of a farmer in the southern reaches of the duchy.
Her family had fallen into debt after a bad harvest—two years of blight, crops rotting in the fields—and she had come to the castle seeking work.
She was seventeen.
Quiet.
Hardworking.
She kept her head down and her hands busy, and for the first year, no one noticed her at all.
“Then your father noticed her,” Gerhardt said, his voice flat with old anger.
“He was not a kind man, Your Grace.
You know this.” Cassian said nothing.
He remembered his father—a cold man, distant, more comfortable with a sword than with his own son.
The hunting accident that had killed him had been almost a relief.
Cassian had felt nothing at the funeral.
He had stood at the grave with a face of stone and wondered why he could not cry.
“Elise became pregnant,” Gerhardt continued.
“When it could no longer be hidden, your father had her dismissed.
No money.
No provision.
No arrangement for the child.
Just…
gone.
I was the one who walked her to the gate.
She was nineteen years old, carrying a child, and she had nowhere to go.” “And you gave her coins.” Gerhardt looked down at his hands.
“Not enough.
Never enough.
She went to a village in the eastern foothills.
A place called Ashwick.
Her aunt took her in, but the aunt died two years later.
Elise raised the child alone.
She worked as a washerwoman.
She mended clothes.
She took in whatever work she could find.
She never asked for help.
Not once, in all those years.” Cassian turned his head and looked out the window.
The pines were thinning now, giving way to the rocky slopes of the eastern hills.
He thought of his mother, who had died when he was twelve.
He thought of the sword she had sealed with her own blood to protect him.
She had died not knowing that her husband would leave another child in the world, a daughter who bore her name.
“And the child?” Cassian asked.
“What is she like?” Gerhardt hesitated.
“I don’t know, Your Grace.
I have never met her.
I only know what Elise wrote in her letters—the ones I burned.” His voice caught on the word burned, but he pressed on.
“She said the girl was bright.
Curious.
She said she had her father’s stubbornness.
She said…” He stopped.
“What?” “She said the girl had her father’s eyes.
Grey.
The Elvenstone grey.
And every time she looked at her daughter, she saw the man who had destroyed her.” Gerhardt’s voice dropped.
“She loved the child anyway.
She said it was not the child’s fault, what her father was.” The silence in the carriage was absolute.
Cassian stared at the old steward.
Grey eyes.
The child had grey eyes.
Like his own.
Like the father they shared.
He thought of all the times he had looked in the mirror and seen those eyes staring back at him—cold, unyielding, the mark of House Elvenstone.
And now there was a child in a village called Ashwick who carried that same mark, who had been raised to fear it, who had no idea that the grey eyes meant something other than danger.
He thought of the stories Gerhardt had mentioned—the warnings Elise had given her daughter.
If the duke ever finds out about you, he will hurt you.
The child had spent ten years believing that a monster with grey eyes would come for her one day.
And now that monster was on his way.
“She will be terrified of me,” Cassian said quietly.
It was not a question.
Gerhardt did not deny it.
“She has been raised to fear the name Elvenstone, Your Grace.
She knows nothing else.” Cassian turned back to the window.
The road wound on through the hills.
Somewhere ahead, in a village too small for any map, a ten-year-old girl was about to lose the only family she had ever known.
And the wolf from her bedtime stories was coming to take her away.
“Faster,” Cassian said to the driver.
“We don’t have much time.” The village of Ashwick appeared in the late afternoon, a cluster of stone cottages huddled in a narrow valley.
Smoke rose from a single chimney.
The fields around the village were thin and rocky, the kind of land that yielded little and gave less.
A few sheep grazed on the hillside.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance, and then fell silent.
Cassian stepped out of the carriage and looked around.
The air was cold and damp.
The road through the village was little more than a mud track, churned by hooves and cart wheels into a mess of half-frozen ruts.
He saw a few faces in the windows—pale, watchful, disappearing as soon as he met their eyes.
Strangers were rare in Ashwick.
A carriage with an armed escort was rarer still.
“Which house?” Cassian asked.
Gerhardt pointed to a cottage at the edge of the village, slightly apart from the others.
It was small, its walls of rough stone, its roof patched with old thatch.
A thin plume of smoke rose from the chimney, barely visible against the grey sky.
Cassian walked toward it.
Gerhardt followed.
Henrik and the outriders stayed with the carriage, watching the hills.
The cottage was the last one before the land gave way to open moor.
It stood alone, as if the village itself had wanted to keep its distance.
The door was half-open, hanging crooked on its hinges.
The thatch was worn thin in places, patched with whatever could be found—scraps of old cloth, bundles of reeds tied with twine.
A single window, its shutter loose, rattled softly in the wind.
Cassian stopped at the door.
He could hear breathing inside—shallow, labored, the sound of someone fighting for every breath.
He pushed the door gently and looked inside.
The room was dark and cold.
A single candle burned on a wooden crate beside a narrow bed.
On the bed lay a woman—thin, grey-faced, her chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven gasps.
She could not have been more than thirty, but she looked sixty.
Her hands, resting on a rough blanket, were little more than bones wrapped in paper skin.
Beside the bed, on a low stool, sat a child.
She was small for ten.
Her dark hair was pulled back in a rough braid.
Her dress was patched and faded, and her feet were bare despite the cold.
She was holding the woman’s hand, her small fingers wrapped tightly around the thin, motionless ones.
When she heard the door, she looked up.
Her eyes were grey.
The Elvenstone grey.
Like Cassian’s.
Like their father’s.
They stared at him from a face that was thin and pale and terrified.
The child froze.
She knew his face.
Her mother had described it to him a hundred times.
The dark hair.
The sharp cheekbones.
The cold eyes.
The same grey eyes that looked back at her from the mirror.
Cassian stood motionless in the doorway.
He looked at the dying woman on the bed.
He looked at the terrified child clutching her hand.
He looked at the bare room, the candle, the cold hearth, the years of neglect and poverty and fear.
And then, very slowly, he stepped inside.