The silence of the mansion rushed back in, cold and suffocating. Ren sat there for a long moment, staring at his own reflection in the dark glass. The warmth he had felt hearing Toby’s voice had solidified into a sharp, jagged edge of pure, unfiltered resolve.

He stood up, his face hardening. Every minute he spent in this house, letting the opportunity to kill Cilian slide, and every indignity he suffered under Cilian, was for that boy.

And right now, that meant getting the truth.

Ren turned toward the guard, his gaze lethal. "Take me to the basement. I have an appointment with a traitor."

The heavy iron door groaned on its hinges, a sharp, metallic shriek that echoed off the damp concrete walls of the sub-basement. The air down here was different—cold, stale, and smelling faintly of mildew and old copper.

Ren stepped into the center of the room. The single, flickering bulb overhead cast long, jagged shadows against the salt-stained stone. In the middle of the floor, bolted to a heavy wooden chair, sat Dennis.

He was blindfolded and gagged, his head lolling against his chest. His grey suit was ruined, sodden with rainwater and dark, crusting blood from the gunshot wound in his thigh. He looked exactly like the traitors Ren had seen Cilian break in the early days of his captivity. But this time, Cilian wasn’t the one holding the blade.

Ren didn’t say a word. He walked to the small table near the wall and picked up a pair of heavy leather gloves, pulling them on with a slow snap. He felt a strange, detached clarity. The sound of Toby’s voice—the innocent, heartbreaking confusion of a six-year-old—was still ringing in his ears, fueling a cold, focused resolve.

Ren reached out and ripped the gag from Dennis’s mouth.

Dennis let out a pathetic, wet gasp, his lungs seizing as he tasted the air. "Ren? Ren, is that you? Please... I’m losing so much blood. I need a doctor. If you help me, I can tell you where the others are! I can give you the names!"

Ren didn’t respond. He moved behind the chair and untied the blindfold.

Dennis blinked rapidly, his eyes stinging in the harsh light. When his vision finally cleared, and he saw Ren standing over him—not with tears, but with a gaze that was utterly devoid of mercy—the man’s remaining courage evaporated.

"Ren... your eyes..." Dennis whispered, his voice trembling. "You... you don’t look like a Pierce anymore."

"A Pierce would have given you a trial," Ren said, his voice flat and terrifyingly calm. "But my family is dead, Dennis. And the man standing in front of you doesn’t believe in trials. I want the names. Not the Mordecais—I already know who they are. I want the names of the people inside the house. The ones who looked my father in the eye while they sold him out."

"I... I can’t," Dennis sobbed, his head shaking frantically. "If I tell you... They’ll find me. They’re everywhere, Ren. Even in the Vane estate! You don’t understand the scale of it!"

Ren didn’t hesitate. He leaned down, grabbing the edges of the chair and bringing his face inches from the advisor’s. "I understand that my nephew thinks his father abandoned him because he’s a ’bad boy.’ I understand that I am wearing a collar because of a blueprint you drew. You have exactly ten seconds before I start treating your leg wound with the same ’kindness’ you showed my family."

The interrogation was brutal. Ren didn’t use Cilian’s theatrical flair; he used a surgeon’s precision. He knew exactly where to poke, exactly how much pain the human body could endure before the mind shattered.

By the time an hour had passed, the floor was slick with more blood than what was probably left in Dennis’s body.

Dennis was a broken shell, his breath coming in ragged, wet hitches. "Stop... please... I’ll tell you. Two... There were two of them. Old associates. Men, your father... called brothers. Mark and... Anderson Pierce. "

Ren’s heart cracked as the names fell from Dennis’s blood-stained lips. They were names he had loved. Names of men who had tucked him into bed when he was a child. The betrayal went deeper than the Mordecais; it went to the very roots of the Pierce tree.

"And the third?" Ren hissed, leaning in. "There was a third man at the north gate. Who was he?"

Dennis looked up at him, his eyes glazing over as his body finally began to give up the ghost. A small, terrifying smile touched his lips—a final act of spite from a dying rat.

"The third..." Dennis wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "He... he’s the one... you’re living with."

Before Ren could scream at him to clarify how Cilian was the third when he was the intruder, Dennis’s head fell forward. His heart stopped, the silence of the room returning with a deafening weight.

Ren stood there, the names of his ’uncles’ burning in his brain, and the final, unspoken accusation against Cilian chilling his blood.

He didn’t clean the blood off his gloves. He simply turned and walked out of the cell, the iron door groaning shut behind him.

Ren climbed the stairs from the sub-basement, his boots feeling heavier with every step. Then, he pushed open the heavy doors to the master suite. The room was dim, illuminated only by the soft glow of the medical monitors he had attached to Cilian and the pale moonlight filtering through the curtains.

Cilian was still under. The sedative had smoothed the sharp, predatory lines of his face, making him look almost human. Almost. His chest rose and fell in a slow, drug-induced peace.

Ren walked to the edge of the bed and stood there, staring down at him. His heart felt like stone in his chest. He looked at the man who had systematically dismantled his life, and for the first time, he found himself truly asking why.

"Why did you do it?" Ren whispered into the silence.

He thought of the Pierce estate—the wealth, the influence, the ancient lineage. If Cilian had wanted power, there were easier ways to get it. If he had wanted the Pierce assets, a hostile takeover would have sufficed. There was no real benefit to the carnage, no logical reason to turn a prince into a slave and a home into a graveyard.

Unless Cilian wasn’t looking for a kingdom. But then, what was he looking for?

It was the ultimate truth he wanted to hear from this man, but he was so stubborn and refused to speak.