Chapter 189: Perfect Preparation 2

BRADLEY

But Lysander had proven me wrong, and something inside me had loosened. Something I had kept locked away for years, something that looked suspiciously like hope.

And now I held the order that would grind it to dust.

I looked down at my phone. The lock screen lit up briefly, then faded into darkness.

Perhaps that’s why Cornelius left me a recording instead of a conversation. So there would be no question. And perhaps that was why this came to me instead of the new Regent. He had known Lysander would refuse. He must have. He had known the kind of man his nephew was, the kind who would rather endure the consequences of a difficult decision than take the easy way out by sacrificing innocent lives.

Perhaps that was precisely why he had chosen Lysander to inherit the throne. A good man to wear the crown, but one who might hesitate when the crown demanded something unforgivable. Cornelius had accounted for that hesitation and found a way around it. He had arranged for someone else to carry out the deed, someone Lysander would never think to suspect because I would be standing at his shoulder when it happened.

It was cruelly efficient. It was exactly the sort of plan Cornelius would have devised.

My thoughts returned to the dinner table, to the way Edelina had held her wineglass and watched my face as though she were waiting for a crack in my composure. Then I thought of Johann’s DNA report, folded against my ribs, the ninety-nine percent match that proved the boy was Cornelius’s blood and had every right to claim his place in the succession.

And I thought of Cornelius himself, a man who had lied to me about his own son’s paternity, who had concealed the truth for months, and who had apparently decided that the only way to protect the realm was to have his own blood maimed, if not killed.

I could not make sense of it. Perhaps I never would. But I understood what it meant to carry a secret that could destroy everything around you, and I understood the kind of man who would choose to bear its weight alone.

Cornelius had known he was going to die. He had prepared for it, arranging the pieces long before anyone else realized there was a game to be played. Lysander would take the throne. The circumstances surrounding Cornelius’s death would leave no obvious culprit for his murder, no convenient trail for us, the authorities, to follow. And Johann, the boy whose blood gave him a legitimate claim to the crown, would be removed from the succession before anyone could in good faith challenge the arrangement.

It was thorough, patient, and ruthless. Every piece served a purpose, and every purpose led back to the same conclusion.

Cornelius had not trusted the law to stop his wife and son.

He had not trusted the Elder Circle, the courts, or the carefully maintained rules of succession. He had looked at the woman he had loved and believed she would find a way through every legal barrier placed in her path. So he made his own arrangements, creating a solution beyond the reach of the law and leaving a man he trusted to carry it out.

Me.

Perhaps that was why he had placed so much faith in me. He knew my training, my loyalties, and the years I had spent proving that I could carry out an order without allowing my personal feelings to interfere. He knew I understood what was at stake, and he had counted on that understanding to keep me obedient even after his death.

He had given me a purpose and made me believe that purpose was loyalty to him.

And now, with his final order in my hands, I could not escape the thought that I had already failed him.

I had failed to protect him while was alive. I had failed to understand what he was trying to accomplish until it was too late. And perhaps, worst of all, I had begun to question whether the man I had served for years deserved the loyalty I had given him so freely.

But if Cornelius had trusted me to finish what he had started, then what did it mean to refuse him now?

That was the real weight beneath everything else, the truth I had been avoiding even in the privacy of my own thoughts. I had not been there when Cornelius needed me most. When the shot was fired, I had been on the other side of the estate, chasing some bullshit that led nowhere. By the time I reached him, his body was already growing cold.

And every day since, I had told myself that my duty had not ended with his death. I could still serve him, still prove my worth, still be the man he had trusted me to be.

Now I had my chance.

It was not exactly a chance to atone. Atonement suggested a debt I could repay, a mistake I could correct if I suffered enough for it. Nothing I did would bring Cornelius back or change the fact that I had failed to protect him.

But I could carry out his final order. I could finish what he had started, and in doing so, give some meaning to the loyalty I had continued to offer him even after he was gone.

It was more than most men were ever given: one last opportunity to prove that their service had meant something.

I stared at the darkened screen, my reflection barely visible against the glass.

For the first time, I could not tell whether carrying out his final order would be an act of loyalty or the final proof that I had never understood the man at all.

I picked up the feather at last.

It was warm.

The sensation startled me, just as it had in the mortuary. The heat was unnatural, too pronounced to be explained by the warmth of my hand. I turned the feather beneath the corridor lights, watching the faint sheen along its black surface. For a moment, I thought I saw something move deep within it, something like the distant beat of a wing against an endless darkness.

I stared at it until the impression faded, then placed it back in the box.

My phone buzzed against my leg.

I flinched before forcing myself to relax. It was only a message from one of the night sentinels asking where he should position the additional guards for the Regent’s trip to Lily of the Valley. An ordinary logistical question, the kind that would have occupied my attention without a second thought yesterday.

I typed my reply with steady thumbs.

Double the escort. Choose men who haven’t been in the infirmary. All reports should come directly to me.

The response arrived within seconds.

Yes, High Beta.

High Beta.

I read the title again, and a bitter laugh almost escaped me. My entire life had been shaped by those two words, by the burden of standing second to a man whose authority reached into every corner of the kingdom. From boyhood, I had been trained to understand that a Beta was not meant to stand apart from his Alpha but to extend his reach, to become the hand that carried out what the Alpha’s position or conscience would not allow him to do himself.

Cornelius had been my Alpha. His sons would have been my Alphas, and their sons after them. I had accepted that arrangement as naturally as a river followed its course, never questioning the banks that kept it in place.

Then the line of succession had broken, and I had found myself serving a young man who looked at me as though I were more than the rank I carried.

Lysander asked questions. He listened to answers he disliked. He treated my judgment as something worth considering rather than an inconvenience to be overcome. There were times when he even seemed to forget that I had been trained to, at the end of the day, obey him.

I had no idea what to do with a man like that.

I rose slowly, wincing as the stiffness in my knees caught up with me. When I bent to gather the box, my hands began to tremble again. I curled my fingers around the first item I touched and waited until they steadied enough to continue.

I collected the shoes, the rings, and the other belongings scattered across the floor. Last, I took the knife tucked into Cornelius’s boot, its worn grip familiar beneath my fingers. I placed everything else in the box and closed the lid over the feather.

The knife, I kept.

For a moment, I stood with it in my hand, tracing the familiar grooves worn into the grip by years of use. Cornelius had carried it through wars, political upheavals, and more council meetings than I could count. It had outlasted men who had once believed themselves untouchable, and it had remained with him until the end.

I slid it into my own boot. The handle settled against my ankle, its weight strangely reassuring.

Anything for the Kingdom.