"God help Noah when she figures it out." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Gregoris’s mouth moved once at the corner, not quite amusement this time, but something close enough to suggest he had already measured that battlefield too and found it survivable only through Noah’s existing intelligence and Natalie’s continued affection.

"He appears aware of the risk," Gregoris said.

"That is not the same as safety."

"No."

Frederik looked at him for a beat longer, then let out a breath through his nose and stepped properly into the corridor before another revelation could be used against him.

The door sealed behind him with the soft sound of security and finality.

Inside, Gregoris’s office returned to command, reports, and the pending question of whether Lord Ilyan would survive his own ambitions with the lesson attached. Outside, the palace remained what it always was after dark: a machine fed by ether and discretion, its private corridors running in low white-blue lines beneath warded glass, tactical lifts moving silently between wings, security posts alive with hidden channels and polite danger.

Frederik, meanwhile, still had Cecil to deal with.

—

Elsewhere in the palace, Arik had a different problem.

Or rather, the same problem in a different suit.

The suite reserved for Lord Ilyan sat in the private consort wing adjoining the northern executive residence, separated from the main palace circulation by layered wards, silent lifts, and the sort of security architecture designed to make luxury look effortless while ensuring nothing entered or exited without the palace knowing exactly how, when, and why. The corridor leading there was quieter than the public wings, the walls darker, the ether lighting warmer and more expensive by design, the floor panels reflecting only a softened version of the movement above them.

Arik walked through it with the expression of a man headed toward a necessary inconvenience and not remotely interested in pretending otherwise.

His suit jacket was back on now, every line of him restored to heir-level composure. The civilization over him was so complete that anyone without survival instincts might have mistaken it for calm instead of what it actually was: control refined hard enough to survive private politics without becoming public murder.

Beside him walked Mezos.

Of all Arik’s men, Mezos alone had long since earned the right to stand this close without becoming decorative. Tall and lean, with fiery red hair cut in a long, deliberate mullet that should have looked ridiculous and instead looked like a challenge someone else had lost, he wore the dark palace uniform reserved for high officers - a structured coat, discreet rank lines, and the kind of tailoring that suggested violence with a government salary. An arcanist by training and talent both, he carried ether in the air around him differently from the others, with the dangerous poise of a man who could set half a hallway on fire and still have the manners to apologize for the smoke.

He glanced at Arik sideways. "You look delighted."

Arik did not turn his head. "You’re still here. That should answer your question."

"That is not an answer. That is an insult."

"It’s efficient."

Mezos’s mouth moved. "I liked you better when you occasionally lied."

"No, you didn’t."

"That’s true."

They continued down the corridor under the warm ether strips, passing one silent guard post and then another. The men stationed there straightened by reflex and then wisely pretended not to hear anything at all.

Mezos folded his hands behind his back with insulting leisure. "You could still cancel."

"And you could still keep your mouth shut. But it seems like neither of us is getting what we want today."

Mezos’s mouth moved at one corner. "That sounds almost wounded."

"That sounds like projection."

"No," Mezos said. "Projection would require me to care about your love life. This is me caring about scheduling."

Arik gave him a look.

Mezos remained entirely untroubled by it. Of all the men attached to the heir’s private security and command structure, he alone had survived long enough and was useful enough to develop this sort of insolence without being reassigned to a frozen border.

They continued down the corridor under the warm ether strips, passing one silent guard post and then another. The men stationed there straightened by reflex and then wisely pretended not to hear anything at all.

Mezos folded his hands behind his back with insulting leisure. "You could still cancel."

Arik did not look at him. "No."

"That was immediate."

"Yes."

"That usually means you should."

"That usually means I’ve already decided not to."

Mezos exhaled softly through his nose. "You really do make your own life worse on purpose."

"No," Arik said. "I make it functional."

That was, of course, the real obscenity of it.

Arik did not dread the suite because of sex. That was the least complicated part. With enough rut or heat in the air, with bodies already selected for compatibility, beauty, and obedience to arrangement, pleasure was easy enough to take and easier still to manufacture. He had never pretended otherwise. He liked sex when it suited him. He liked control. He preferred the quiet, blunt efficiency of accepting a thing for what it was and leaving it be.

What he did not like was the performance around it.

The management.

The smiling political softness of consorts who believed that proximity could be used as leverage if they wore it well enough.

The sex itself was simple. Pleasurable, even. A transaction with appetite on one side and utility on the other. Arik had no moral crisis about that.

The burden was everything attached to it.

He did not give them Arik.

Certainly not the Arik the family saw.

The consorts knew Arik in polished court skin: cold, composed, useful when satisfied, lethal when crossed, and impossible to read beyond the line he allowed. They got the heir as an arrangement, not the son. Not brother. Not the man who let Michel climb him like furniture or tolerated Ophelia treating his office as a temporary kingdom or, still, against every older instinct in him, stopped in private corridors when Damian crossed his path.

They got the weaponized version.

Mezos glanced sideways at him. "You know what’s funny?"

"No."

"You don’t even object to sleeping with them."

Arik’s expression stayed level. "I object to your continued existence as commentary."

Before Mezos could continue bantering and living off the adrenaline high of having, yet again, said something dangerously to Arik, Damian was already there.