The Wolfenstein Castle loomed unchanged, all stone and iron and ancestral arrogance, as if it had not nearly lost its heir to a man who laughed while bleeding.
Edgar crossed the threshold alone.
His coat had been changed. His wounds were cleaned. His expression restored to something passable as princely composure. Only the tightness in his jaw betrayed him now, a fracture in the marble mask.
The Kaiser was waiting.
Not in the throne room, nor the council chamber, but in the war study, maps spread across the central table like flayed skin. Candles burned low. The air smelled of wax, ink, and old ambition.
"You're alive."
The Kaiser said at last, without looking up.
Edgar stopped just inside the door.
"You're disappointed."
He replied evenly.
The Kaiser's hand stilled over the map. Slowly, he turned.
For a moment, they simply looked at one another: father and son, ruler and weapon, architects of the same empire standing on opposite sides of a line neither had named aloud.
"You were given a challenge."
The Kaiser said.
"You failed to contain it."
Edgar smiled, sharp, without warmth.
"You sent Lucien Bastille into my hands."
He said.
"And expected what, exactly? That I'd break him like a common courier?"
The Kaiser's eyes hardened.
"I expected you to prove your worth."
"I did."
Edgar replied calmly.
"I survived him."
That landed.
Bastille's name hung between them like a live wire. The Kaiser's jaw flexed, the barest admission of a miscalculation he would rather swallow than speak.
Edgar stepped closer to the table, gaze flicking over the inked routes and pinned lines. Bordeaux troop movements. Mercenary corridors. Supply arteries that suddenly meant more now that Edgar had seen the man who could pinch them shut with a whisper.
Then his eyes caught it.
A pin, driven into the map with casual violence, marking an estate on the borderlands. A château silhouette sketched in the margin, annotated in a neat hand.
Edgar's breath hitched.
For a heartbeat, the war study vanished.
Moonlight on marble. Velvet drapes. The taste of bergamot in the air, like a promise. A laugh in the dark that made his skin tighten. A hand at his throat, not choking, guiding. A voice in his ear, low, amused.
Not fear.
Not mercy.
The thrill of the risk.
Edgar's fingers curled against the edge of the table until the wood creaked.
The Kaiser's eyes narrowed.
"What is it?"
Edgar forced his lungs to work. Forced his face into neutrality. But the memory fragment clung like smoke, suggestive and wrong, as if his body remembered something his mind refused to name.
He straightened, voice steady by brute force.
"You knew who he was."
Edgar said, each word placed carefully.
"You knew the servant was bait. You knew what Bastille represents politically. And you still ordered me to interrogate him."
"It was a test," the Kaiser snapped.
"No."
Edgar said softly.
"It was a gamble."
He leaned one hand against the table, palm flattening over Bordeaux's converging lines. "You wagered that Bastille would break. Or that I would. Either outcome benefited you."
The Kaiser did not deny it.
"You wanted leverage."
Edgar continued.
"And if I died, you would have had a martyr instead of a problem."
Silence.
Then, quiet and dangerous:
"You used me."
The Kaiser straightened.
"You are the heir. Everything you are is meant to be used."
Something glacial settled behind Edgar's eyes.
"Then understand this."
He said.
"Your challenge has consequences."
His fingers drifted, almost without permission, toward the pin again. He stopped himself at the last moment, as if it burned.
"Bastille is alive because killing him would have been strategically unsound."
Edgar said.
"He destabilizes Bordeaux more alive than dead. He fractures loyalties. Disrupts timing. Forces mistakes."
He let his gaze linger on the supply lines, on the mercenary routes, on the thin arteries that kept an army breathing.
"A dead myth becomes a banner. A living man becomes a problem Bordeaux has to keep feeding."
The Kaiser studied him now, not as a father, but as a general reassessing a blade he had forged too sharply.
"And you let him go."
The Kaiser said.
Edgar's smile returned.
"I let him believe he escaped."
A pause.
"Lucien Bastille now knows two things."
Edgar went on.
"That I am not expendable. And that I am paying attention."
The Kaiser's fingers curled slowly into a fist.
"You're playing a dangerous game."
Edgar cut in, polite as a knife.
"I am correcting your mistake."
The candles guttered.
The Kaiser broke eye contact first.
"Leave."
Edgar did not move.
"One more thing."
He added mildly, voice deceptively calm.
"You will not test me like that again."
The Kaiser's voice dropped to iron.
"And if I do?"
Edgar's gaze flicked, just once, to the pin on the map. To the château. To the phantom scent of bergamot that still sat at the back of his throat like a secret.
"Then next time,"
Edgar said quietly,
"I won't clean up the mess."
He turned to go.
The Kaiser's voice followed him, flat and final, like a chain snapping taut around his ankle.
"Edgar."
He said.
"Do not mistake tonight for freedom. You will still enter an arranged marriage, to whom I deem suitable."
Edgar paused at the threshold.
The smallest fracture passed through his composure, gone so fast it might have been imagined.
Then he left without another word.
Behind him, the Kaiser stared at the maps, at the altered lines of war, and understood something far worse than rebellion.
His son had not broken.
He had adapted.
And somewhere out there, Lucien Bastille was laughing.
_ _
Lucien tasted smoke the way other men tasted wine.
Sweet. Bitter. Expensive.
He slipped through the night on a half-limp and sheer spite, blood drying under his collar, laughter still caught in his throat like a hymn. The estate behind him burned in bright, greedy tongues. Bordeaux had always been so fond of spectacle.
He adjusted the edge of his coat and felt the familiar comfort of a small, hidden blade. Then another. Then another.
Redundancy was devotion.
A shadow detached from a stand of trees. A figure in gray, face down, hands open.
No words. Just a lantern shielded under cloth, a horse waiting, and a satchel that smelled faintly of antiseptic and gunpowder.
Lucien smiled anyway.
"Awfully punctual."
He murmured, voice roughened with blood.
The agent did not answer. They never did. His network was built on obedience, fear, and the quiet thrill of being useful to a legend.
Lucien mounted with a wince that turned into a pleased little breath. He liked pain. Pain meant the world was still listening.
As the horse cut through the snow, Lucien's thoughts returned, inevitably, to Edgar.
To the blade at his chest. To the way Edgar's eyes had sharpened when the manor shook. To the way he had chosen efficiency over vengeance.
To the way his hands had trembled when he ordered a medic.
"How polite."
Lucien whispered, and laughed under his breath.
He pulled a sealed note from inside his sleeve. Bordeaux wax. High council mark. Too crisp, too clean, too confident.
He broke it with his thumb and read by lanternlight.
Short. Furious. Controlled.
Bordeaux had heard.
Bordeaux had expected him dead.
Bordeaux did not like surprises.
Lucien folded the note neatly and tucked it away as if it were a love letter.
In Bordeaux, men in velvet would be standing from their chairs too quickly. Ministers would be reaching for scapegoats. Generals would be tightening their borders and their throats at the same time, pretending control while the myth refused to die.
They would issue orders dressed as patience.
They would circulate his name again like a prayer.
They would offer gold to anyone with the imagination to call it loyalty.
"They're going to panic."
He said softly, to no one at all. "They will call it a setback. They will call it a humiliation. They will tighten their grip until their own fingers go white."
He tilted his head back, letting cold air burn his lungs.
"And Edgar."
He murmured, almost fond.
"Edgar will do what he always does when cornered."
Adapt.
Lucien's smile sharpened.
He did not know, not yet, whether Edgar had truly remembered.
But he had seen something in Edgar's face, a fracture that looked too much like recognition and too little like confusion.
If Edgar had found the pin, if Edgar had felt the chateau in his bones, then the past was no longer buried. It was awake.
Good.
Lucien leaned forward, whispering into the horse's mane as if confiding in a priest.
"Run."
He breathed.
"Bordeaux will snarl. Wolfenstein will sharpen. And the heir will start pulling at a thread he does not yet understand."
The horse surged into the dark.
Behind him, the estate burned.
Ahead of him, councils would convene, armies would shift, and a prince in a stone-and-iron castle would begin to unravel.
Not from weakness.
From the scent of bergamot, and the terrible certainty that some risks tasted like desire.