When the door closed behind her, the room fell silent again.
The kind of silence that hums — the kind that makes you aware of every heartbeat, every ghost breathing between the walls.
Kael stood motionless for a long moment, staring at the door as if expecting her to walk back through it.
Then, finally, he exhaled — a slow, unsteady breath — and dragged a hand over his face.
The fire had burned low, light flickering across the desk where maps and sealed letters lay in disarray. He braced his hands on the edge, head bowed. The cold of the steel beneath his palms grounded him.
Zelene Evandelle was alive.
He had known — or told himself he had known — but knowing was different from seeing.
She looked different. Thinner, harder around the edges, as if grief had carved something sharp out of her softness. And yet… when she said his name, it had been the same.
That same quiet ruin.
Kael shut his eyes for a moment.
The Crown Prince.
The name alone tasted like poison.
He'd always known the man had ambition, but this? The slaughter of an entire noble house under the guise of rebellion? That wasn't the work of a prince drunk on power — that was orchestration.
Something else was moving the board.
He straightened, pacing the narrow length of his chamber, boots whispering against stone. Outside, thunder rolled faintly over the city, the rain tapping against the high windows like impatient fingers.
The Auryns.
Zelene had said it so easily, as if she were naming a place she'd already seen.
Most men dismissed the Auryns as myth — remnants of an age long dead. But Kael remembered the way Alaric used to speak of them, half-serious, half-distant, like a man who knew more than he dared to say.
If they were real, Kael thought, then Alaric's death wasn't a political purge. It was a warning.
He stopped pacing, his reflection flickering in the dark windowpane.
He remembered the last night he'd seen Alaric Evandelle. The man's voice had been steady, though his hands trembled when he clasped Kael's arm.
"Protect her, Lord Kael. No matter what comes — promise me."
And Kael had promised, because that was what loyalty meant back then.
But when Alaric had added the next words — about uniting their houses, binding Dravenhart and Evandelle through marriage — Kael had hesitated. It had seemed unnecessary. A move born of fear, not strategy.
Now… it made sense.
Alaric had known something.
Something that reached beyond court politics, beyond bloodlines.
Kael pressed his thumb to the bridge of his nose, the faint beginnings of a headache building behind his eyes.
Zelene wanted answers. He wanted the truth.
And between them stood an empire rotting from the inside.
A quiet knock at the door drew him back.
"Enter," he said, voice controlled again — the Duke returned to his armor.
Darius slipped inside, wet from the rain. "She's settled in the guardroom," he said. "No one saw her."
Kael gave a short nod. "Good. Keep it that way."
Darius hesitated. "She doesn't look like someone running from her past. She looks like she's walking straight into it."
Kael didn't answer at first. He looked toward the fire instead, watching the embers shift and collapse.
"Then she's more dangerous than she realizes," he murmured.
Darius tilted his head. "You think she's wrong?"
"I think she's right," Kael said softly. "Just not about who she should be afraid of."
Darius said nothing after that. The door closed quietly behind him, leaving Kael alone once more.
He stared into the dying fire.
Outside, the storm began to break.
And somewhere in the dark, far beyond the walls of Dravenhart, the first whisper of something older — something vast — began to stir.