Arik went still.

"The good cognac," Arik repeated.

"Yes."

Edward, after years of loyal service, administrative miracles, stress-induced near-death, and surviving Damian in his less civilized decades, had apparently concluded that the only defensible form of self-preservation left to him was strategic concealment of premium alcohol in places members of the imperial family were unlikely to inspect unless actively hunting.

Unfortunately for Edward, he served a household raised by Gabriel.

Which meant pattern recognition was hereditary and, mercy, unreliable.

Arik’s gold eyes narrowed slightly. "You know where it is."

Cecil crossed his arms, immediately smug. "I know where one of them is."

"One of them."

"Yes."

Arik stared at him for a beat, then another. "How many caches has he made?"

"I don’t know. At least three, maybe four. Edward stopped underestimating this family years ago."

"That was wise of him."

"That was necessary of him."

A silence stretched between them, no longer edged with irritation but with something much more dangerous: shared sibling interest in an administrative secret.

Then Arik said, very calmly, "And you were planning to tell me this when?"

"I wasn’t."

"That is vicious."

"That," Cecil said, "is compensation for today’s emotional damage."

Arik looked almost impressed. "Using Edward’s hidden cognac as reparations for your own love life is one of the more offensive things you’ve said in this office."

"Thank you."

"That was not praise."

"I know. It still counts."

Arik pushed away from the desk again, the trade meeting now fully doomed for at least another few minutes by bloodline and distraction. "Where?"

Cecil smiled in the deeply unhelpful way of a younger brother who had just rediscovered purpose. "Ah. No."

Arik laughed. "Fine, keep your secrets then."

Before either of them could continue the banter, the comm embedded into the desk chimed with a new schedule alert.

Not the soft blue pulse of internal updates.

Amber, that means priority.

Arik glanced down, reached out, and tapped the display awake with one finger.

The projected panel rose in clean ether-lit lines over the desk, sleek and polite in that deeply imperial way systems had when they were about to make a person’s life worse with perfect etiquette.

For one beat, Arik simply stared at it.

Then his expression went flat.

Cecil, who had known his brother long enough to distinguish between ’I am going to kill someone’ and ’I would rather be killed,’ leaned one shoulder against the side of the desk and said, "That looks grim."

Arik did not answer.

Cecil tilted his head slightly and read the relevant line upside down before the privacy filter adjusted.

’Ah. Well.’

That explained the face.

He raised a brow. "You have a meeting."

Arik’s gold eyes lifted to him with slow, unblinking displeasure. "Don’t."

Cecil’s mouth moved immediately at one corner. "I was going to be respectful."

"No, you weren’t."

"That is a deeply cynical view of my character."

"That is a deeply accurate one."

Cecil looked back at the hovering schedule. The wording, of course, was elegant enough to insult reality.

Private evening attendance. Consort reception suite. Lord Ilyan confirmed present.

Not date.

Not appointment.

Certainly not the omega your advisers helped select because his house gives the throne three different trade corridors, a voting bloc in the eastern chamber, and a tolerable public face for controlled companionship.

No. The palace called it ’attendance,’ because the palace preferred expensive lies to crude truths.

Cecil looked back at Arik and, despite the promise of mockery blooming in him, found himself briefly more amused than cruel.

Because Arik truly looked like a man who had just been informed that a tax audit required physical intimacy.

"You scheduled a consort-like freight review," Cecil said.

Arik dismissed the projection with one impatient movement. "I didn’t schedule him. The office did."

"That is somehow worse."

"It is efficient."

"That is not the word anyone would use from your face."

Arik said nothing.

Which, with Arik, was often louder than a full paragraph.

Cecil knew the arrangement. Everyone in the family with a functioning brain did. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Arik’s three consorts had been chosen with surgical political utility: one from an old banking family with cross-border leverage, one tied to a military bloc that preferred smiling proximity to formal alliance, and one - Lord Ilyan, apparently tonight’s burden - whose house sat in the middle of several trade and energy negotiations the empire had no intention of mishandling.

None of them were accidents.

None of them were love.

None of them, as far as Cecil had ever been able to tell, were even especially liked.

Arik had selected them the way other men assembled a controlled portfolio: with precision, detachment, and clear awareness of what each body in each room represented once the doors opened and the court began whispering.

It was ugly.

It was smart.

It was, Cecil thought, exactly the sort of thing Arik would do while insisting he had no romantic life worth public discussion.

"You look thrilled," Cecil said.

Arik’s jaw tightened. "I look employed."

"Do you at least enjoy the sex with them?" Cecil asked without an ounce of shame in his body.

Arik stared at him with the exhausted disbelief of an older brother being reminded, yet again, that whatever refinement Cecil displayed in public had always been partially fraudulent and entirely reversible in private.

"You really do share too much of Gabriel’s audacity and Damian’s timing," Arik said at last.

"That wasn’t an answer."

"It wasn’t meant to be."

Cecil folded his arms and waited with all the stubborn patience of a man who had no intention of pretending the question had been inappropriate merely because the answer might be inconvenient.

Arik noticed that too.

The office hummed quietly around them, ether lines running beneath the black floor panels and through the walls, the city beyond the warded glass moving in pale lines of winter traffic. On the desk, the reminder remained in the corner of the display for one more second before fading into a smaller icon, elegant and restrained and still, somehow, offensive.

At last Arik said, "With enough heat or rut pheromones, everything can be made pleasurable. What I don’t enjoy is babysitting them."

Cecil made a face at once. "Someone tried something again?"

"Yes." Arik’s tone did not sharpen. That was the problem. "Ilyan will find out soon that if he tries to play with my authority, death is the merciful punishment."

Cecil went still for a beat.

There were different kinds of danger in their family, and Arik’s was one of the least theatrical once he stopped being amused. Damian, when pushed badly enough, could become visibly catastrophic. Gabriel could dismantle a life with a sentence and a schedule adjustment. Arik, however, carried something older and colder under his skin. When his patience wore thin, what remained was judgement.

"What did he do?" Cecil asked.

Arik did not answer immediately. He looked at the dead display panel for a moment as if deciding how much of the mess deserved language. Then he said, "He tried to use my private access codes to route a request through one of the eastern procurement chains."

Cecil blinked. "What?"

"Yes."

"That is not flirting. That is attempted administrative suicide."

"That," Arik said, "is what I thought."

The horror of it bloomed beautifully.

Because private access codes in the imperial tower were not decorative inconveniences one touched with ambition and perfume. They were warded, logged, traced, cross-referenced, and protected by enough security infrastructure to make lesser people develop religious respect for interface panels.

And someone - Lord Ilyan, apparently, a beautiful omega consort and politically useful ornament with dangerous aspirations - had decided to test whether intimacy with the heir meant elasticity in command structure.

Cecil stared at his brother. "He used your codes."

"He tried."

"You’re still meeting him."

"Yes."

Cecil laughed once in open disbelief. "Why?"

"Because," Arik said, with the patience of a man forced to explain weather to the newly literate, "if I cancel now, he thinks he has destabilized the schedule. If I receive him exactly as planned, let him sit there, and then inform him in a calm voice that I know what he did, I get the truth and the lesson at the same time."

Cecil folded his arms. "That is monstrous."

"That is efficient."

"That is Gabriel."

"That," Arik said, "is survival with paperwork."

Cecil watched him for another second, then asked the obvious. "Was it him or his family?"

Arik’s mouth flattened slightly. "That is what I intend to determine."