Chapter 190: Perfect Preparation 3

BRADLEY

The words came to me without effort. I had repeated them so many times that they no longer felt like a vow. They were a reflex, as automatic as breathing, ingrained through years of training until I could summon them without considering what they demanded of me.

Yet, standing alone in that corridor with a dead man’s blade against my ankle, I began to understand how much their meaning had changed.

For most of my life, the Kingdom had meant the crown, the law, and the order that kept our world from descending into chaos. It meant serving the Alpha, protecting the succession, and trusting that the men who ruled us understood what it took to preserve what they had inherited.

Now it meant Lysander.

A young man sitting in a throne he had not expected to inherit, trying to govern a kingdom he was only beginning to understand. A man who had refused to sacrifice frightened people simply because their deaths would have been convenient. A man who still believed that doing the right thing mattered, even when the wrong thing would have been easier.

He had no idea that his most loyal servant was preparing to destroy himself in his name.

And if he knew, he would never allow it.

That was the cruelest part. Lysander would order me to stand down. He would tell me to trust the law, to give the Elder Circle a chance to act, to believe that the truth would prevail if we pursued it through the proper channels. He would mean every word, and I would understand why he believed them.

But I had spent too many years watching how power worked to share his faith. The law could be manipulated. The courts could be persuaded to look elsewhere. Men who had sworn to protect the Kingdom could convince themselves that almost anything was justified if they believed the alternative was worse.

Cornelius had understood that world better than anyone. Perhaps that was why he had made his final arrangements in secret, placing the burden on a monster like me.

I could not bring myself to believe that he had done it without reason, even now, when the order he had left me threatened everything I had spent my life protecting.

A good man could lead a kingdom. He could inspire loyalty, make difficult decisions, and give people a reason to believe in the crown. But goodness alone could not protect him from those who saw it as something to exploit.

Someone had to anticipate the threats he could not bring himself to imagine. Someone had to be willing to make the choices he would never willingly make.

Someone had to stand in the dark and do the things that made the light possible.

I had always believed that was what it meant to be a Beta.

And if carrying out Cornelius’s final order meant becoming the sort of man Lysander would never want at his side, then perhaps that was the price of serving him.

I picked up the box and started down the corridor, the knife pressing against my ankle with every step.

I had spent my life believing that loyalty meant obeying the man I served.

Now I had to discover whether I could still call myself loyal if I did what he would never forgive.

The corridor was long, and the box was heavier than it had any right to be.

By the third turn I had already shifted my grip twice, wedging the corner against my hip, then under my arm, then back to both hands when the lid started to slip. It was not weight so much as awkwardness. The box had been built for a man to carry from a shelf to a table, not for a man to walk half the estate with while his hands decided they could no longer be trusted.

Somewhere past the third window, where the corridor narrowed and the lamps were spaced too far apart, I stopped.

I needed a hand free.

I set the box on the sill and let go of it slowly, waiting to see whether it would sit still. It did. The moon was out on the other side of the glass, thin and pale, and for a moment the box looked like something abandoned rather than something carried.

I pulled out my phone and looked at the time. Late enough that the house would be quiet. Early enough that she would not yet be asleep.

She never slept well when I was not home. That was one of the things she had never said out loud.

I pressed the house line rather than her mobile.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey."

There was a brief pause. I heard her shift in her chair, followed by the familiar creak of the one by the window, where she liked to sit when she read.

"You called tonight."

"I did." I swallowed. "I missed your voice."

"Is everything all right?"

She had learned to ask that first. She had learned it years ago, after the first time I came home with blood on my clothes and told her it was nothing. Since then, she had developed an instinct for the things I left unsaid, though I had never made it easy for her to understand them.

"Everything’s fine," I said. My eyes drifted to the box on the windowsill. "Everything’s been handled."

"That’s not the same thing."

"No," I admitted. "It isn’t."

She waited. She had always been good at waiting, at giving me the space to speak without making me feel cornered. Living beside a man who couldn’t explain half of what happened to him required a particular kind of patience, and over the years, I had given her plenty of reasons to develop it.

"How are the girls?" I asked.

"Asleep. Both of them, for once. The little one tried to stay up for you, but she only made it to nine before she gave up. She’s got that book you bought her, the one about the bear."

"Hmm." I rubbed my thumb against the edge of my phone. "Maybe she’ll want to read it to me when I get home."

"She will. She’ll be insufferable about it, actually. She’s been practicing the difficult words."

"Good. Let her practice."

"And your nephew," she continued, and I could hear the small smile in her voice, the one that always appeared when she talked about him. "He fixed the garden gate. Took him all afternoon, and he wouldn’t let me hire anyone to help. He insisted on doing it himself."

"Sounds like him."

"It does. Unfortunately, the gate is crooked."

"Is it?"

"Crooked in a way that’s going to make it very difficult to complain about his hard work."

I laughed. The sound surprised me, small and genuine, and for a moment the corridor seemed impossibly far away. I could almost picture our house on the east side of the estate, the garden beyond the windows, and my nephew standing beside his handiwork while my wife tried not to smile at him.

For a few seconds, I could pretend that was where I was.

"Are you coming home soon?" she asked. "Or is this going to be one of those nights?"