(Romulus POV)
Zafira's death should have brought silence to my mind.
It did not.
The palace had returned to order with frightening speed. The harem moved as if a diseased limb had been severed—clean, efficient, and without ceremony. Her name vanished from ledgers. Her chambers were sealed, stripped, repurposed. Even the women who once whispered her name as if it were a charm against misfortune now avoided the sound of it, as though it might summon her ghost.
The empire was efficient when it wished to forget.
And yet, as I stood alone in the high solar overlooking Atenisia, the city gleaming beneath the desert sun, I felt no relief.
Only irritation.
Only a dull, persistent sense that something essential remained unfinished.
Zafira was dead.
But the threat that had sharpened her ambition still breathed.
