Edgar did not sleep.
He had sat back at his desk until the candle drowned itself in wax.
When the room darkened, he simply lit another.
By dawn, papers were stacked into neat, weaponized order. Names aligned. Probabilities assigned. Rage converted into math.
It should have been enough.
But it wasn't.
Because the map was wrong.
Not in its accuracy.
But in its audacity.
That pin. That château silhouette in the margin. The casual violence of it.
As if the Kaiser had driven iron through Edgar's skull and expected him not to feel it.
Edgar dressed in silence.
Buttoned cuffs.
Smoothed his coat.
Restored the crown prince to his proper shape.
Then he went back.
Not to the war study.
That would be noticed.
To the archive corridor that ran behind it, where old campaign maps slept in drawers and the walls listened like elderly servants.
The locks knew him.
The castle always did.
He found the drawer marked BORDERLAND ESTATES and slid it open.
Maps breathed out dust.
And there it was.
A small stamped inventory note, carelessly clipped to the corner of one chart.
A crest. A château outline. A location.
The same.
Edgar's vision narrowed to a point.
His fingertips brushed the paper, and the world broke open.
At first it was only a sensation.
Cold marble under bare palms.
Velvet dragging across his knuckles.
A laugh, too close, too pleased.
Then the memory did what memories did when they were done being caged.
It flooded.
He was seven again, and sickly, and too thin for the ceremonial coats they tried to hang on him. Eighteen children in the Wolfenstein bloodline, scattered like shrapnel across the palace, all of them born from separate women who were never allowed the dignity of permanence.
Eighteen chances for the Kaiser to replace a weakness.
Eighteen mouths that could become knives.
They were segregated young. Not sent to tutors, but to training halls that smelled of iron and wet stone and fear. The "education" was an elimination program wrapped in patriotic language, military discipline delivered like scripture.
They called it refinement.
It was slaughter with paperwork.
The first lesson was simple:
Failure meant death.
Not always with a blade. Sometimes with exposure. Sometimes with starvation disguised as "endurance testing." Sometimes with an accident that only happened to the child whose score dipped too low.
Edgar learned to stop coughing where others could hear it.
He learned to smile while fever shook him.
He learned to hide the trembling in his hands by keeping them busy, always adjusting cuffs, always folding paper, always controlling the smallest visible thing.
He learned the second lesson quickly:
Strength was not muscle.
Strength was leverage.
He watched siblings with broad shoulders die because they charged like bulls. He watched clever siblings die because they trusted the wrong ally. He watched the sweetest ones die because sweetness was a liability the program did not forgive.
Edgar did not die.
He lied.
He listened.
He made other children fight battles for him, then took the credit with a gracious bow.
He fed one brother false information about an exercise route, and when the boy disappeared into the forest and never returned, Edgar kept his face perfectly still.
That night, he vomited behind the barracks and then went back to bed, because being alive required discipline.
The third lesson arrived like a knife pressed politely to the throat:
The Kaiser was watching.
Always.
Pride was earned by survival. Love was earned by usefulness. Childhood was a story other people told.
Edgar's body remembered all of it before his mind dared name it.
Then the memories shifted, years skipping like stones.
He was older. Harder. Not healthy, never that, but honed into something sharp enough to cut even when it bled.
The program ended, officially, when the council "elected" him heir at eighteen. But the testing did not stop. The palace simply changed costumes. The knives became pens. The field operations became politics. The corpses became quieter.
And somewhere in that transition, a new variable entered the board.
Not a sibling. Not a tutor. Not a general.
A boy, two years younger than him, from the enemy side of the map who appeared where he should not have been.
At first it was a rumor in the training yards. A French shadow. A courier that wasn't on any list. A thief with too much audacity for his age.
Edgar caught a glimpse once, years ago, between torchlight and fog: wine-red eyes in a doorway, amused, unafraid. A ridiculous strip of false facial hair clinging to a too-youthful face, as if the disguise were an insult offered on purpose.
Then he was gone.
The memory snapped forward again.
Edgar was twenty-two.
Lucien was twenty.
Adults, finally. Dangerous in ways the program had tried to grind out of him.
The château.
The same borderland estate. The same marble. The same velvet. The same bergamot in the air like a signature.
Edgar remembered arriving there without guards, without banners. He remembered doing it because he had reached a point where the only way to breathe was to choose a danger of his own.
Lucien met him in the hall like a host greeting an honored guest.
No false beard that time.
Just that baby face made unsettling by the eyes, and the smile that promised ruin with perfect manners.
"You came," Lucien had said, soft with satisfaction.
Edgar had answered with a question instead, because he was still Edgar, still trained to keep his throat covered.
"Why here."
Lucien had stepped closer, slow, unhurried, as if time belonged to him.
"Because this place sits between borders," he murmured. "And you, mon prince, sit between roles."
Edgar remembered the way Lucien looked at him, not like a subject looks at a crown, but like a predator looks at another predator and recognizes an equal.
Edgar remembered hating how much he wanted that recognition.
He remembered Lucien's gloved hand sliding to his collar, not grabbing, not forcing, simply straightening it, as if Edgar were something worth perfecting.
"How do you stay so controlled," Lucien had asked, voice low. "Does it ever hurt."
Edgar remembered the answer leaving his mouth before he could make it safe.
"Always."
Lucien had smiled like he'd been offered a prayer.
"Good," he'd said. "Then you'll understand me."
The suggestive detail that had haunted Edgar since the war study sharpened now into clarity.
Lucien's mouth near his ear.
A whispered line that made Edgar's composure fracture like thin ice.
Not an admission of love. Nothing so clean.
A proposition.
A shared appetite.
A pact made of leverage and longing tangled together until they were indistinguishable.
Edgar remembered the way his own hand had caught Lucien's wrist, stopping him.
Not to push him away.
To hold him there.
To feel the pulse.
To confirm he was real.
And then the conversation had turned, as it always did, to the only thing both of them truly respected.
Power.
"The Wolfenstein house will devour itself," Lucien had said lightly, as if discussing weather. "It already has. Your father built an empire on elimination. He will keep eliminating until he is alone."
"And Bordeaux?"
Edgar had asked, because Edgar never moved without measuring the board.
Lucien's smile had sharpened.
"Bordeaux will choke on its own pride." He replied. "They love pageantry. They love war. They love the illusion that they are righteous."
Lucien had leaned in then, close enough that Edgar could taste bergamot and danger.
"What if…" Lucien had murmured, "we give them exactly what they want."
War.
Not as chaos, but as a tool.
Not as patriotism, but as a slow dismantling.
Edgar remembered the cold, terrible clarity of it. How the idea slid into his mind and clicked into place like a mechanism he'd been built to operate.
War did not have to be a disaster.
War could be a blade.
A long one.
One you could drive into both houses from the inside and let them bleed themselves dry.
Edgar remembered saying it, quiet.
"Steer it."
Lucien's eyes had brightened. Not with madness.
With devotion.
"Yes." Lucien had whispered, as if Edgar had just spoken his true name. "Steer it."
Edgar remembered the way Lucien's hand had found his throat again, not choking, guiding, and how Edgar had let him, just for one breath, just for one heartbeat, because Edgar had never been allowed softness and Lucien offered something worse.
Understanding.
He remembered the thrill of the risk.
Not as fear.
As relief.
Because if they were steering the war, then Edgar was not a victim of his father's cruelty.
He was an author of it.
And if the empire burned, it would burn on Edgar's terms.
The memory slammed back into the present with enough force to make Edgar's knees unlock.
He caught himself on the archive drawer, fingers white on the wood.
His stomach heaved, not from nausea, but from the sheer violence of recognition.
He remembered the program.
He remembered surviving it.
He remembered Lucien.
He remembered the château.
He remembered the vow.
And somewhere, deep beneath the shock, something else stirred. Not tenderness. Not romance in any gentle sense.
A dangerous, intimate certainty.
That Lucien had not taken him at random.
That the "servant" had not been coincidence.
That the war outside the walls was not simply happening.
It was moving along rails they had laid.
Edgar's breath came shallow.
He closed his eyes for one second too long.
When he opened them, the archive was still quiet. The castle still stood. The world still pretended it was stable.
Edgar straightened slowly, as if rising from a grave.
He replaced the paper in the drawer with meticulous care, as if tidying could contain what had just broken loose inside him.
He locked the drawer.
He pocketed the small inventory note with the château crest, because now it was no longer a clue.
It was a trigger.
A key.
A blade.
He turned and walked back toward the light.
His steps were steady.
His face was calm.
But inside, something old had awakened, and it was smiling.
Not because he was safe.
Because he finally remembered how to burn an empire without flinching.
And somewhere beyond Wolfenstein stone, Lucien Bastille was still breathing.
Which meant the next move was already in motion.