Later that night, in the heart of the family wing, the world was reduced to firelight and shadows.
Lady Roseline sat near the window.
The door to their chambers opened and closed softly.
Duke Aster moved into the room like a man carrying stones.
He shed his formal coat, letting it fall over a chair.
He didn’t speak.
He came to stand behind her, his large hands coming to rest on her shoulders.
His touch, usually so sure, was hesitant.
.
His face, usually so composed, was etched with lines of pain she hadn’t seen since the war years.
His eyes were dark, haunted.
“He has your eyes,” she whispered, the words escaping before she could stop them.
Aster’s hands tightened on her shoulders, just for a second.
“Don’t.” His voice was rough, scraped raw.
“I can’t *not* see it, Aster.”She turned on the stool, forcing him to look at her.
She took his hands in hers.
They were cold.
“Every time I look at him… I see you.
A younger, softer you.
It’s like a ghost has walked in.”
“He is not a ghost.
He is a weapon.
The Emperor’s weapon.” Aster tried to pull away, but she held on.
“Is he?”.Her voice was soft, urgent.
“Did you see him tonight?
Kalgen tried to use him as a cudgel against our sons, and he… he just stepped aside.
He didn’t take the bait.
He didn’t fight.
He just made Kalgen look like a fool by being kind.”
“A tactic,” Aster growled, but the conviction wasn’t there.
He’d seen it too.
The flawless, disarming deflection.
It wasn’t the move of a blunt instrument.
“What if he’s just a boy, Aster?” Roseline’s voice broke.
.”A boy born from a horrible thing done to you.
What if he’s as much a prisoner of this as we are?”
Aster closed his eyes.
A muscle worked in his jaw.
“It doesn’t matter.
His existence is a threat.
To our family.
To Alex’s birthright.
To the stability of the North.
The Emperor did not send him here to be cared for.
He sent him here to be a crack in our foundation.
To make us look at each other with doubt.”
He opened his eyes, and the agony in them stole her breath.
“And it’s working, Rose.”
“What should I look at him with?” she challenged, tears welling.
“Hatred?
For something he had no part in creating?
He didn’t ask to be born from… from that.”
The unspoken word—rape—hung between them.
Aster sank to his knees before her.
He rested his forehead against their clasped hands.
His broad shoulders shook, once.
“I feel sick when I look at him,” he confessed, his voice muffled.
“I see my own failure.
I see the night my control was stolen, my trust violated.
I see the proof that I was unfaithful to you.”
Roseline freed a hand and cradled his head, her fingers threading through his dark hair.
“You were not unfaithful.
You were assaulted.
There is a difference.
A vast, unforgivable difference.” She said it fiercely, willing him to believe it.
He was silent for a long moment, breathing her in, the familiar scent of winter rose and vanilla that had always been his sanctuary.
“What do we do?” he asked, the mighty Duke brought low by a single, pale-haired boy.
She had no answer.
Only a mother’s heart, torn in two.
“We protect our sons,” she said finally.
Meanwhile in Ace’s rooms were never still.
Even at night, they seemed to hold the echo of his energy—a discarded jacket over a chair, a pair of daggers left on a side table instead of their rack, the lingering scent of black cherry and smoked cedar, restless and warm.
Tonight, he was a caged wolf.
He paced.
His boots were silent on the thick fur rug, but his thoughts were a deafening roar.
That face.
That fucking face.
It wouldn’t leave him.
The white hair.
The glasses.
Those eyes—their father’s eyes, looking out from a stranger’s delicate, sorrowful mask.
The absolute, infuriating calm of him.
Ace replayed the moments in the courtyard, in the hall.
The soft voice.
The slight bows.
The way he’d turned Kalgen’s petty insult into a plea for shelter.
It was masterful.
It was sickening.
He stopped at the window, glaring out at the dark.
His own reflection glared back—handsome, sharp, all coiled tension and ruby-fire eyes.
A Valebane.
Born and bred in this stone and ice.
He’d fought for his place, bled for it.
And that… that *poet* just wafted in with the snow and made it all look like crude theater.
“Beauty and elegance,” Ace muttered, mimicking Kalgen’s slimy tone.
He slammed a fist softly against the cold stone wall.
The pain was a bright, clean thing.
Better than this churning in his gut.
It wasn’t just anger.
It was something uglier, scratching beneath the rage.
Jealousy.
The thought was a poison dart.
He tried to shrug it off.
Jealous of what?
A bastard?
A pawn?
A pretty Omega with no real power?
But he’d seen the way some of the younger staff had looked at Jade.
A flicker of awe.
Of pity.
He’d seen the calculating interest in the ministers’ eyes—not respect, but the kind of attention you give a new, exotic piece on the board.
And he’d seen, worst of all, the torn, haunted look in his mother’s eyes.
He was the second son.
The spare.
The wild one.
He’d carved out his own space with charm and cunning and sheer, reckless force of will.
He was Ace Valebane, the Smiling Knife, the one who made the rules as he went.
And this Jade… he followed rules Ace didn’t even understand.
Rules of soft words and softer smiles.
And it was working.
Ace spun away from the window, his chest tight.
He grabbed a half-empty bottle of amber liquor from a cabinet and drank straight from the neck.
It burned, but it didn’t calm the storm.
He thought of the rumors.
The poet.
The delicate Omega.
What was he really?
Behind the glasses and the gloves?
An idea, dark and tempting, coiled in his mind.
He couldn’t fight him openly.
Not without looking like the brute Kalgen accused him of being.
He couldn’t out-manner him—the very thought made him sneer.
But he could unmask him.
Everyone had a pressure point.
A crack in the porcelain.
His father’s was guilt.
His mother’s was compassion.
Alex’s was duty.
What was Jade’s?
That serene kindness had to be a facade.
Underneath, there had to be ambition, or fear, or greed.
Something real.
Something Ace could grab and twist.
He set the bottle down with a hard *thunk*.
The winter festival was coming.
The whole keep would be full of people, rituals, noise.
A perfect stage.
A perfect hunting ground.
A slow, familiar smile spread across Ace’s face—the one that didn’t reach his eyes.
The Smiling Knife.
Fine.
Let the poet have his gentle words and his winter lilies.
Ace would find the real man beneath.
He’d peel back that pretty layer by layer, until everyone saw the same scheming pawn he did.
And if he happened to enjoy rattling that perfect composure along the way?
If he could make those sorrowful crimson eyes flash with real, hot emotion—anger, fear, anything but that damned quiet—then all the better.
He wasn’t just protecting his brother’s inheritance anymore.
This had become personal.