"ANSWER ME."

His voice was low. Controlled in the way a blade is controlled: held steady only because releasing it would end the conversation permanently.

Odette’s head bounced off the stone. Her eyes watered. She blinked twice, rapidly, then did the last thing Asher expected.

She laughed.

Quiet at first. Then louder. Her head tipped back against the wall, hazel eyes glittering with tears that could have been pain or amusement or both, and she laughed with the abandon of a woman who had been caught and found the relief of it funnier than the consequence.

"You’re hurting me, Asher."

"I’ll do worse. What is this." He squeezed tighter. Between her fingers was a glass vial with a sharp tip meant for piercing.

"An herb," she said, still smiling. "For your bedroom performance. Or lack thereof. I thought I’d help."

"Bullshit."

Her smile widened. She looked at him with a clarity that stripped away every pretense they’d maintained for months, every polite dinner, every shared corridor, every night spent in the same bed facing opposite walls.

"I’ve always been a ghost in this marriage, Asher. You know it. I know it. Every servant who’s ever changed our sheets knows it." She tilted her head. "You’ve never loved me. In all the months, all the nights, you’ve never once looked at me the way you look at her."

"No," he said. "I haven’t."

The honesty landed between them like a dropped weapon. He didn’t soften it. He was done softening things for a woman who had just tried to inject him with whatever was in that vial.

"And you’ve never loved me," he continued. "You loved this." He released one hand to gesture at the corridor, the castle, the crown. "The title. The proximity to power. The fact that the man beside the throne was too grief-sick to notice what you were doing."

Odette’s smile didn’t falter, but something behind her eyes shifted. A recalculation. The face of a woman whose mask had been ripped off and was deciding whether to put on another or finally stand bare.

"Yes," she said. "I loved power. I’m good at it. Better than you, if we’re being honest."

"What is in this vial, Odette."

"I told you. An herb."

He slammed her into the wall a second time. Harder. Her breath left her in a sharp hiss.

"What. Is. In. It."

The smile died.

"You won’t believe me."

"Try."

She held his gaze for five full seconds. Then her chin lifted, and she spoke with the cool precision of a woman presenting closing arguments in a trial she’d already lost.

"There was never a fated matebond between us."

The words dropped into the corridor and detonated.

Asher’s grip loosened. His face went blank, the specific blankness that precedes an explosion, the dead air before thunder.

"False Mate Tincture," she continued, watching his expression cycle. "Administered at the ball. In your wine. Your glass was switched before the herald announced my arrival."

His hand released her wrist entirely. He stepped back. One step. Two.

"You felt a pull because the tincture manufactured one. Your wolf recognized it because the tincture mimics the fated signature. It was designed to be indistinguishable from the real thing."

She rubbed her wrist where his fingers had left red marks.

"I needed a throne. You were available. And Natalia was kind enough to remove herself from the equation before I had to."

The younger Asher stared at her. His face didn’t move. His body didn’t move. The stillness was so complete it looked like a painting of a man, brushstrokes frozen mid-crisis.

Then something behind his eyes, something fundamental, something load-bearing, collapsed.

"Who." One word. A whisper.

"Does it matter?"

"WHO."

He took the vial from her fingers. Looked at it. Turned it in the torchlight.

"And this?"

"Fertility tonic. Dark magic variant. Overrides biological incompatibility." Her voice was flat. "A king without an heir is a king on borrowed time. I was securing our future."

"There is no our."

"There hasn’t been for a while," she agreed. "But the court doesn’t know that, and perception is governance."

✦✦✦

The memory lurched. A door slamming. Shouted orders. Guards mobilizing in corridors.

Then Odette was gone.

Dexmon watched his younger self stand in the great hall as a lieutenant reported her departure. A horse taken from the eastern stable. A portal opened at the border by a mage whose loyalty had been purchased months ago. She was through it before the alarm reached the gate.

"Pursue?" the lieutenant asked.

The younger Asher was silent for a long time. His jaw worked. His hands were fists at his sides.

"Let her go."

The words made no sense. The current Dexmon, watching, felt them land wrong, like a note played in the wrong key. There was something missing. Events between the confession and this moment that the memory had skipped, a gap filled with decisions he couldn’t see but could feel in the exhaustion etched into his younger self’s face.

He let her go. He let the woman who had fabricated a fated matebond, drugged him at a ball, destroyed his relationship with Natalia, and spent months sleeping in his bed while planning to dose him with dark magic fertility tonics, walk out of his castle unpursued.

There was a reason. He could feel it. A political calculation, a strategic concession, a promise made to a party he couldn’t see. Pieces were missing, and the memory refused to fill them in.

✦✦✦

Ronan found him on the rampart.

The night air was cold. Asher was leaning against the stone, looking at nothing, the vial still in his hand.

Ronan didn’t ask what happened. He already knew. News moved through a castle the way blood moves through a body: fast, everywhere, and impossible to contain once the wound was open.

He stood next to Asher. Close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The same distance they’d maintained since they were boys. Close enough to be there. Far enough to let the other man hold himself up.

"I’m sorry, brother." Ronan’s voice was quiet. Genuine.

He clapped Asher on the back. Once. Firm. The gesture of a man who had spent a lifetime standing beside this particular human being and knew that the right words didn’t exist, so the right hand on the right shoulder would have to do.

Neither of them said what lived underneath the apology.

Ronan didn’t say: I know you’re still in love with her.

Asher didn’t say: I know. I’ve been in love with her since a chandelier and a three-legged chair and a leaf in my hair she never told me about.

Natalia was mentioned by neither of them. Her name sat between them like a held breath, a shared understanding that acknowledging it would require confronting something they had both chosen to survive instead of solve.

Ronan loved her. She loved Fin. Asher loved her. She loved Asher, quietly, in the spaces he wasn’t supposed to see but always did.

And Asher would swallow it. He would swallow it tonight, and tomorrow, and every day after, because Ronan’s face was soft when she was near, and Asher had sworn, in a corridor that smelled like wisteria and the wreckage of his own matebond, that he would never rob his brother of that softness.

"I’m all right," Asher said.

The biggest lie either of them had ever believed.