The scream tore through the stone corridors like a blade, sharp enough to shear the night in two. Doors flew open. Footsteps thundered. The ducal household surged toward the source—the elder uncle's private chamber—fear and curiosity dragging them by the throat.
When the door was wrenched wide, the air itself recoiled.
What had once been a man lay in ruin. Flesh raked into ragged ribbons. Blood flung in long, sick arcs across the plaster and brocade. One arm bent back at an angle the body was never made to bear. The face—half-shredded, half-sculpted into a final, open-mouthed plea—seemed to stare from every surface in the room. The smell of iron and tallow crowded the lungs; candles guttered in their sconces as if the room refused to keep breathing.
Servants buckled at the knees. One of the younger cousins clapped a shaking hand to her mouth and ran. Someone whispered a prayer that came out like a sob.
"Back," said the former Grand Duke, his voice hard as a drawn wire.
Meliny had made it as far as the threshold, drawn by the torrent of footsteps and the crack of panic in the air. She couldn't see, but she could hear the wet hush of blood dripping, could smell the metallic sourness, could feel the chill that pooled around the doorway like a shadow with weight. Her hand lifted, searching.
Her grandfather's palm—large, calloused—found her shoulder first. "Not here." He turned her gently but firmly away, steering her down the corridor without letting her go. She swallowed.
"Grandfather… what happened?" Her voice was small, steady by force.
"An accident," he lied, the word clean and blunt, meant to close the subject like a door. His grip tightened, almost imperceptibly. "You do not need to know."
Behind them, the household murmured and trembled. The name no one dared to say hung unsaid in every throat.
Druvok.
He stood farther down the corridor, a huge, unmoving shape leaned into shadow. He did not speak. He did not look at anyone. The candlelight found the edges of his jaw, the hard cut of muscle along his neck, and could make nothing of the expression in his eyes. He was too still. Far too still.
The former Grand Duke didn't spare him so much as a glance. He walked Meliny to her chambers as if shepherding a child through a battlefield, letting the weight of his presence do what words could not. When he shut her door, the corridor breathed again—shallow and fearful.
Leonardo arrived a heartbeat later, boots dark with rain from the courtyard—he'd been summoned by the first scream. He took in the ruin with a steady gaze, the faintest quirk in one corner of his mouth not quite a smile, not quite anything human. He did not speak to the gathered relatives. He did not ask who had found the body first. He did not ask who was missing from the scene.
He didn't need to.
A memory slid into place, neat as a blade returning to its sheath:
Earlier that evening, a low knock on his study door. A servant, pale and sweating, had bowed to the floorboards.
"My lord… Lady Meliny was insulted by Lord Frederick in the garden. He called her…," the man had swallowed, "…a shame upon the house."
"And the goblin?" Leonardo had asked then without looking up from his papers.
"Silent, my lord. He took Lady Meliny away. Calm." A tremor on the last word. "Too calm."
Now, in the doorway of the slaughtered chamber, the pieces aligned with a quiet, clinical certainty. Insult. Restraint. Retaliation elsewhere, unseen. Leonardo's gaze slid—just for a breath—down the corridor where Druvok lingered in the dark like a storm that had already broken.
(So. You finally chose brutality. It suits you.)
The thought curled through Leonardo's mind, cold and approving. He let no trace of it reach his face.
"Seal the room," he said mildly to the steward, as if discussing a scuffed carpet. "No one enters without my leave." Then he turned away, robes whispering, and vanished toward his study.
The castle itself seemed to tense. Servants carried buckets of water that no one dared set down. Nobles huddled in pairs, speaking in strangled whispers that said nothing and everything at once. Everyone knew who had done this. Everyone knew no one would say it.
The former Grand Duke returned from Meliny's door and stood for a long moment at an intersection of halls, listening, weighing the silence like a judge. His face was carved from old iron. If grief stirred in him, it did so in private, under layers of duty and calculation. When his gaze passed the corridor where Druvok waited, it did not stop. Permission, in its purest form, is sometimes nothing more than the refusal to forbid.
Outside the estate, the empire rioted with a different scandal—the Crown Prince rumored with the Queen, pamphlets shrieking treason, taverns bloated with gossip. Inside, the Drime household cultivated a more intimate chaos: a sanctioned terror, a private law written in blood.
In her chamber, Meliny sat on the edge of her bed, fingers twined so tightly her knuckles ached. She could not see the nightmare she had been saved from, but the castle had a way of speaking—through breath, through the tremor of floorboards under running feet, through the way voices lowered against doors. She drew in a breath and caught the faintest trace of iron under the lavender her maid had burned to soothe her.
"What happened?" she whispered to the dark.
On the other side of her door, Druvok leaned his back to the wall and closed his eyes. His breathing was even, his hands clean. But the night clung to him, and the night always told the truth.
He waited there—wordless, unmoving—as if his shadow alone could keep harm from crossing the threshold. And the household, moving in wary circles around him, understood with a clarity that made their bones cold:
A line had been crossed, and no one would cross it back.