​Aurelian’s head turned just a fraction, his jaw tight. He knew exactly which ghost was about to be summoned.

​"The story goes like this," Julian continued, his tone mockingly light. "There was a tutor who participated in the Imperial Hunt. Through a stroke of terrible luck, he fell into a pit—pierced by a stake, bitten by a venomous snake. A tragic, lonely end for a scholar, wouldn’t you agree?"

​The nobles began to murmur, their fans fluttering like the wings of panicked birds. They remembered the rumors. Was that not the fourth master of House Astrea?

​"Come to think of it, the Marquis is not at the ball tonight. Was he even invited?"

"Perhaps he lacks the stomach to show his face after what befell his son."

​They gossiped even now, the habit of scandal outweighing the silver of the knife at their ruler’s throat. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

​"But do you know what’s truly tragic?" Julian’s voice dropped, dripping with feigned sympathy. "As this scholar lay in that pit, poisoned and bleeding out, he saw a light. He saw our very own Sun and believed, in his innocence, that he was saved. But the Sun... the Sun simply smiled at him. And then, he walked away."

​A collective gasp sucked the air out of the room. The silence that followed was heavy with disbelief.

​"Are you claiming the Emperor found the scholar and abandoned him to die?" Marquis Volvo dared to ask, stepping forward as all eyes darted toward him. "How can we believe something so patently absurd?"

​"Indeed," the Marquise added, snapping her fan shut over her face. "The Sun of the Empire is a just and merciful sovereign. This is nothing but the rambling of a madman."

​A chorus of noble voices rose to debunk the claim, their loyalty tied firmly to the pockets the Emperor kept filled.

​"Tsk, tsk, tsk... You are all so wonderfully ignorant," Julian shook his head, a flicker of genuine disappointment dancing in his amused eyes. He knew how deeply the brainwashing ran. They were blind to everything but status. "He knew you would believe him unconditionally. But try thinking with your heads for a heartbeat, and not your ledgers. Why did the relationship between the Grand Duke and the Emperor sour so suddenly after that hunt? Why did the Jaguar of the North storm into this very palace demanding answers?"

​A cold ripple of skepticism finally began to move through the crowd. The Duke’s public fury after the hunt was a matter of record—a crack in the Imperial facade they had all tried to ignore.

​"That was the birth of the Duke’s enmity," Julian cackled, his grip tightening on the knife. His other hand clamped onto Aurelian’s chin, forcing the Emperor’s head back so the crowd could see the blood on his neck. "And before you ask why your ’Just Sun’ would do such a thing, allow me to finish the story."

​"Julian, enough of this madness," Aurelian hissed, his voice a lethal vibration.

He hadn’t cared about the hunt—he felt no guilt for leaving a dying man in a hole. But as Julian moved closer to his ear, Aurelian felt a rare spark of genuine apprehension.

​"Madness?" Julian laughed, a jagged, hollow sound. "Is it madness to speak the truth? Or is the madness in how you’ve spent this past week? Tell them, Aurelian. Tell them about the scholar you kept in a cage of gold. Tell them how you summoned him to your private bathhouse like a common concubine. Tell them how you stripped him of his dignity just to see if he would shatter like cheap glass."

​The whispers turned into a low, horrified roar. The rumors of the ’Midnight Scholar’ had been dismissed as court fluff, but the raw vitriol in Julian’s voice made them feel sickeningly real.

​"He is obsessed," Julian announced, his voice dropping to a mock-confidential hiss. He leaned in close, almost like a lover sharing a secret. "He took the Amethyst necklace—the one that belonged to the late Duchess of the North—and forced the scholar to wear it. He had him pose for a portrait, draped in a dead woman’s jewels, all because he couldn’t stand that his own flesh and blood had chosen someone else. He wanted to rewrite the scholar into a replacement for a ghost."

​Aurelian’s eyes narrowed into slits.

​"But that isn’t the best part," Julian whispered, the sound carrying to the very back of the hall. "Tell them about the letters, Your Majesty."

​Aurelian scowled, his heart thudding against his ribs. The letters. He had made Julian read them in the suffocating privacy of the archive. How did this entity—this performer—know the details of a room where only two men had stood?

​"Ah, I see you’re all wondering," Julian grinned, his teeth white behind the mask. "What letters could possibly be so important?"

​"Enough!" the Emperor hissed, but the command was weak, drowned out by the predatory amusement of the man holding the knife.

"They are letters from that late Grand Duchess, Bellanora, that never made it to the war front. He besieged them all. He let the Grand Duke fight a war with a hollow heart, while he stole the letters. And as if stealing them wasn’t enough, haha, he made the scholar read them even if he didn’t want to. He listened to the scholar reading the final words of a dying woman for his own selfish amusement, just to prove a point!"

​"Is that true?"

​The voice didn’t come from a knight or a guard. It was a low, guttural boom that seemed to shake the very foundations of the palace.

​The crowd parted like the Red Sea. At the back of the hall stood Alaric, his charcoal-grey mantle disheveled on his shoulders, his chest heaving with a fury so primal it felt like the air around him was scorching.

He had been searching for Julian. Searching so desperately that he ended up back in the ballroom.

He knew Julian wouldn’t be here. If he had been taken, he would be hidden away, but the voice that boomed with amusement sounded too much like Julian’s that he had to see what was going on.

Only for him to come in and hear that his late wife’s letters had never gotten to him because of Aurelian, his brother.

He thought it had been the enemy. He thought they had set up troops to shoot down any messenger, but no.

It had been Aurelian this whole time.

He was the reason he had no clue what was going on in his Duchy while he fought like a beast in war.