WRATH OF THE ASHEN TWINS: REBORN IN BLOOD

Scars and Confessions

The blood on the marble floor didn't dry before the palace scrubbers arrived.

Long before the sun cracked the horizon, while the rest of the capital slept beneath a heavy blanket of fog and ignorance, the double doors of the grand dining hall swung open again. This time, there were no swords drawn, no masked guild killers slipping through the shadows. Just a half-dozen terrified kitchen maids and palace scullery workers dragging heavy oak buckets of lye, coarse salt, and steaming water across the threshold.

They moved in absolute, bone-chilling silence. They had been woken up in the middle of the night by panicked head servants and told to clean up a royal disaster. They didn't ask questions. They just dropped to their knees on the cold stone, scrubbing viciously at the dark, coagulated pools of red that stained the white marble.

One young maid—scarcely older than Cael, with grease smudged across her cheek—vomited quietly into a wooden bucket halfway through the job when her rag caught a thick clump of crimson near the base of a golden pillar. Another older woman grabbed her by the shoulder, yanked her back to work, and kept scrubbing. In this castle, survival meant ignoring the blood on the floor and pretending the walls weren't listening.

Upstairs, far away from the scrubbing brushes and the smell of lye, the real reckoning was taking place.

I sat in the dark corner of Cassian’s private study, arms crossed over my chest, watching the great prince of Cresthaven completely unravel.

There were no guards outside the door. Where were the palace guards during the massacre? That was the funniest part of the whole pathetic setup. The high council had quietly ordered the elite inner-guard rotation to stand down three hours before dinner, thinking the Crimson Vane assassins wouldn't leave a single witness alive anyway. They had engineered our execution, trusting dead men to keep their secrets. When the slaughter started, the few regular guards stationed in the outer corridors heard the screaming, took one look at the hallway, and decided their life expectancy was entirely too high to walk into that room. They bolted. Cowards, the lot of them.

Which meant Cassian was entirely unprotected. Completely alone with the ghost he thought he buried at the bottom of a ravine twenty years ago.

He sat behind his massive mahogany desk, his hands trembling so violently he couldn't even hold a quill. The expensive velvet doublet he had worn to dinner was still stained with splattered wine and dried blood from the floor downstairs. He looked twenty years older than he had three days ago. The crown on his head looked heavy, crooked, and entirely ridiculous.

"You didn't answer the door when the guards knocked," Cassian whispered, his voice cracking like dry wood. He didn't look up at me. He stared down at his blotter, his chest heaving. "I thought... when the guild took the contract... I thought it would finally be over."

"Over?" I let out a sharp, humorless bark of laughter that made him flinch. I pushed off the wall and stepped closer to his desk, my heavy boots clicking softly against the Persian rug. "Cassian, nothing is over until I decide it is. You don't get to throw me off a cliff, steal my life, build a shiny little kingdom on top of my grave, and then hire cheap cutthroats to clean up your mess when I come knocking."

He finally raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and swimming with a pathetic, sickening mix of terror and desperate grief.

"Sylas..." he breathed, his voice trembling as he stood up slowly from his high-backed chair, leaning heavily against the edge of the desk. He took a hesitant step toward me, reaching out a shaking, ring-adorned hand like he wanted to touch my face, like he thought we were still standing together under the stars before everything turned to ash. "I never wanted... gods, Sylas, I never wanted them to kill you. The council... they forced my hand. They said if I didn't marry Eleanor, if I didn't secure the bloodline, the whole court would tear us apart. I did it for us. For the future."

"Don't you dare," I hissed, stepping right into his space, the sheer fury burning in my chest hot enough to melt iron. "Don't you ever stand there and tell me throwing me off a cliff was for *us*. You did it because you were a coward who loved your golden crown more than you loved anything breathing."

He stopped, his hand hanging in the air between us. He looked at me—really looked at me—taking in the jagged scars mapping my face, the hard, unyielding line of my jaw, the rough leather armor caked with the dust of the Ashen Wastes.

His gaze dropped slowly down my right side, lingering on the heavy limp in my gait, tracking the subtle, unnatural hitch in my movement where the beast-rot had fused my muscle and bone together twenty years ago.

"Your leg..." Cassian choked out, a tear finally spilling over his eyelid and cutting a clean path through the sweat and grime on his cheek. His hand drifted downward, trembling uncontrollably as he reached out toward my right thigh, hovering inches above the old, ruined tissue where the flesh had healed into a permanent, warped knot. "Gods in heaven, Sylas... they hurt you. Down there. In that hell."

"Keep your hands to yourself, Cassian," I warned quietly, my hand resting naturally over the pommel of my hunting knife.

He didn't listen. With a sudden, broken sob, he closed the remaining distance, his fingers brushing lightly against the thick, hardened seam of my trousers over the old injury. The sheer heat of his palm radiated through the cloth. He dropped to his knees right there on the Persian rug, pressing his forehead against my hip, right over the crippled leg he had condemned me to.

"I'm sorry," he wept, his voice muffled against my clothes, sounding less like a prince and more like a broken boy. "I've missed you every single day of my miserable life. Every night in that bed with Eleanor, I closed my eyes and saw you. I'm so sorry, Sylas. Please... let me fix this. Let me make it right."

For a split second, his lips brushed softly against the thick fabric over my scar, a desperate, pathetic attempt at tenderness from a man who only knew how to betray.

I looked down at the crown slipping off his head, at the slumped shoulders of the man who had ruined my youth, and I felt nothing. Not love. Not even anger anymore. Just a cold, hollow satisfaction.

I reached down, grabbed a fistful of his expensive hair, and yanked his head back sharply, forcing him to look straight up into my eyes. He gasped, his lips parting, tears streaming down his face, looking up at me like I was his savior and his executioner all at once.

"You want to make it right, Cassian?" I whispered, leaning down until my mouth was an inch from his ear, my voice flat and lethal. "Good. Because the high council thinks they own this castle. Tomorrow morning, you are going to walk into the throne room, call an emergency assembly, and hand me the keys to the eastern treasury. You are going to sign every decree I put in front of you. And if you even think about blinking out of line..."

I let go of his hair, letting his head snap back against the desk with a dull thud.

"...I won't just kill you," I finished softly. "I'll let Vesper and Cael show your wife and kids what true hospitality looks like."

I turned on my heel, walking toward the heavy study doors without looking back. Behind me, Cassian stayed crumpled on the floor, weeping into the carpet, completely broken.

The castle was quiet again. Downstairs, the maids had finished scrubbing the blood. The marble was white once more, gleaming under the morning light. But it wouldn't stay clean for long. We were just getting started.