Chapter 188: Perfect preparation 1

BRADLEY

The voicemail had ended eleven minutes ago, and I was still sitting on the corridor floor with my back against the cold stone wall, surrounded by the contents of Cornelius’s box.

I had picked up my phone twice since the recording stopped. Both times, I had stared at the screen before turning it face down on my thigh. There was no one I could call. No one I could tell without putting them in danger. The only man who might understand what I had just heard was the very man I had been ordered never to tell.

A black feather lay a few inches from my hand. I left it where it was.

You need to awaken that soulless nature you have when you carry my orders.

I read the words in my mind again, hoping they might mean something different the second time. They didn’t.

Soulless.

Cornelius had never called me that to my face. In all the years I had served him, he had called me steady, loyal, and, once, after a campaign that cost us forty good men, indispensable. He had praised my discipline, my ability to follow orders without hesitation, and my willingness to do what other men lacked the stomach for.

But it was as though he had known what I was beneath all that praise. A weapon with a pulse. A man he could point at a problem and trust to make it disappear.

The worst part was that I had once considered it an honor.

I had been proud to earn his trust, proud to be the man he relied on when a situation became too ugly for anyone else to handle. I had mistaken being useful for being valued, and now, sitting on the floor with his belongings scattered around me, I was beginning to understand the difference.

My family came to mind, as they always did when I felt the ground shifting beneath me.

My wife, who still left the porch light on whenever I worked late at the estate, even though I had told her a hundred times that I knew my way home. My two daughters, one of whom had only just learned to read last winter and now insisted on reading every sign she spotted whenever we went out together. My sister’s son, whom I had helped raise and who had grown so accustomed to calling my house home that I sometimes forgot he wasn’t mine to begin with.

They lived with me in the Beta residences on the east side of the estate, in a spacious, well-appointed house with polished floors, large windows, and a private garden my wife had filled with flowers and vegetables. My daughters had their own bedrooms, my wife had every comfort she could reasonably want, and we lived well enough that no one looking at our home would have guessed how much of my life was spent carrying out orders I could never discuss with them.

It was not the grandest of life, but it was ours. My daughters had a school to attend, my wife had a home she could take pride in, and we had enough to live without worrying about what the next month would bring.

Perhaps they had never needed to. I had given them no reason to question it, and I had spent years convincing myself that keeping the worst parts of my work from them was the same as protecting them.

Now I wasn’t sure I had protected them from anything.

Cornelius had ordered me to kill a queen.

Not a rogue who had threatened the pack, not a traitor caught plotting against the crown, not an enemy who had raised a weapon against me. Perhaps she was in fact all of those three. In my heart, I knew she was. But at the moment, she was the Queen herself. A woman who had presided over the royal court for thirty years, and whose death would shake the kingdom to its foundations.

And that wasn’t all he wanted.

He wanted Sterling Grivas dead, too. An Alpha with a pack powerful enough to demand answers, exact retribution, and refuse to let his death be buried beneath some convenient royal explanation. Then there was the boy, the prince, whom Cornelius wanted me to leave permanently maimed if not dead.

The thought made my stomach turn.

There would be no clean way to carry out such orders, no version of events in which I could return to my family and pretend nothing had changed. Even if I made it past the crown’s guards, men as blindly loyal to the throne as I had always been, and survived whatever vengeance Sterling’s pack unleashed, there would still be the Elder Circle to answer to. I could keep the prince alive, perhaps, but not without leaving him permanently scarred, as Cornelius had ordered. Sooner or later, the truth would surface, and the Elder Circle would come looking for the man responsible.

And when they found me, my family would pay for my crimes.

I knew how these things worked. The Elder Circle would not stop at a public execution. They could strip me of my rank, revoke my pension, seize my house, and leave my wife and children to survive without the protection my position afforded them. My daughters could lose their place in the world reserved for the privilege they were born into. My sister’s boy, who had already lost enough, could be dragged into a future none of us had chosen for him.

People liked to believe that punishment fell only on the guilty. In our side of the world, that was a comforting lie. Rank determined how far a man could fall, but it offered no guarantee that the people beside and beneath him would be spared when he did.

A Beta’s family could lose everything just as easily as an Omega’s could be sold into servitude. The only difference was how much they had to lose before the universe considered the lesson complete.

I had understood that for years. It was knowledge drilled into me from the moment I began my training as a Beta, reinforced through every lesson, every assignment, and every order I carried out. I had been raised for this life, bred to serve, to obey, and to understand that my rank came with responsibilities I could never afford to neglect. Loyalty was not merely expected of me. It was the foundation upon which my entire life had been built.

I had simply never imagined that Cornelius, even in death, would be the one to put me in this position.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and held them there until colors flickered behind my closed lids. For a few seconds, I tried to find a way out. A way to carry out his orders without violating the instincts and training that had been drilled into me as a Beta, while keeping my family safe from the consequences. I needed a way to fulfill my duty without turning my wife and children into fugitives, forced to abandon the life I had spent years securing for them. But every solution I considered demanded something I had never been trained to give: the freedom to choose which orders deserved my obedience.

Ane because of that, every possibility ended the same way.

My family would be caught in the middle, and I would be the reason they suffered.

I lowered my hands and stared at the phone resting on my thigh. The recording was still there, saved in my messages, preserving every word of the order as if Cornelius had wanted to make certain I could never pretend I had misunderstood him.

Then, at last, I allowed myself to consider the one person who might change everything.

Lysander.

He would never ask me to do this. Whatever else I knew about him, whatever doubts I had buried beneath years of loyalty to the crown, I could not imagine him ordering the murder of his aunt, and the deliberate maiming of his cousin.

He would hear the order and go pale. I could picture it clearly, the way his jaw would tighten, the way he would look at me with that terrible, level patience and ask whether I truly believed a dead man’s final command outweighed the law of the living.

I had watched him stand in that infirmary today and refuse a purge. He had instead chosen to let us send a witch to bind a dozen frightened people instead of ordering their deaths. He had looked at the easiest, quietest solution, the one his uncle would have chosen without a second thought, and demanded something harder.

Cornelius would have called that weakness. I had nearly agreed with him myself, standing there with blood still drying on my cuffs.