A few days later, Cecil decided that if he could not meaningfully punish politics, biology, or Frederik’s infuriating reasonableness, he would instead punish the nearest available symbol of older-brotherly uselessness.

Which was how he ended up stalking down the eastern executive corridor of the imperial administrative tower with murder in his posture, two guards half a step behind out of pure instinct, and enough offended energy in his pheromones to make three junior aides flatten themselves against the ether-glass wall before he even reached the heir’s floor.

Frederik had said no with that maddening, measured certitude that made refusal sound like structural integrity rather than rejection.

’A hidden mark changes nothing important between us.’

That had been the problem.

Not because Cecil disagreed with the sentiment. In fact, that was exactly why it had made him so furious. Frederik had looked at him with those impossible silver eyes, calm as winter steel, and made it sound obvious that what existed between them did not require proof carved into skin, hidden or visible, because it was already there in every choice worth naming.

Which was true.

Deeply true.

Horribly, infuriatingly, insultingly true.

And because it was true, Cecil had not been able to argue properly without sounding like a man losing to his own devotion.

So instead of arguing with Frederik, which experience had taught him was both emotionally hazardous and rarely productive when Frederik entered his sensible phase, Cecil had done what any reasonable imperial son with too much pride and too little peace would do. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

He had redirected.

Toward Arik.

The heir’s executive suite occupied the northern corner of the upper administrative level, all black glass, pale ether lines, reinforced warding, and expensive silence. It did not look like a prince’s office in the ornamental sense. It looked like the command center of someone who signed military reports between breakfast and lunch and might, under sufficient irritation, still decide to annex a problem rather than solve it diplomatically.

Which was accurate.

The double doors recognized Cecil’s clearance before he reached them, the panel lighting blue, then white. The left door hissed open.

Cecil did not knock.

He walked in like indictment.

Arik looked up from behind a broad black desk lit from below by the pulse of a live ether display. Half the far wall was glass layered with warding and privacy filtration, the city below rendered in pale winter light and clean lines of traffic moving between the palace sector and the central ministries. The other half of the room held stacked tactical screens, floating projection files, and an interactive map of the western trade corridors with three highlighted red routes that suggested somebody, somewhere, was about to have an expensive day.

Arik himself looked exactly like the worst possible person to interrupt on purpose.

At twenty-six, he had only grown more difficult to look at safely. Black hair, gold eyes, Damian’s bone structure sharpened through something older and less forgiving, the kind of stillness that did not read as calm so much as violence with excellent manners. The Goliath in him had not made him less Arik. It had made him more exact. More merciless. More aware of what fear could be shaped into if one had time, resources, and the will to let everyone regret underestimating him.

He was in a shirt, suit jacket discarded over the back of a chair, one cuff unfastened, as if he had been halfway between signing a budgetary death warrant and reorganizing a border command.

Across from him sat a foreign trade envoy and one of the empire’s logistics ministers.

Both of them looked at Cecil.

Then at Cecil’s face.

Then, with the speed of prey recognizing weather, at Arik.

Cecil stopped two strides into the room and said, with no greeting whatsoever, "Why haven’t you married a crown princess yet?"

Silence hit the office like a dropped blade.

The trade envoy froze.

The minister stopped breathing so visibly that Cecil briefly wondered whether Gabriel was right about palace life requiring more preventative terror.

Arik leaned back slowly in his chair.

His gold eyes held Cecil’s face for one long second.

Then two.

Then he said, in a tone so level it looped around from calm into menace, "Get out."

Cecil folded his arms. "No."

The envoy looked as if he wanted to dissolve into ether and be piped harmlessly into the palace power grid.

Arik’s gaze did not shift from him. "I’m in a meeting."

"I can see that."

"Then your comprehension remains functional. Leave."

"No."

The minister, who had survived twenty-two years in imperial administration and was therefore not a stupid man, rose with such immediate and respectful speed that his chair barely made a sound. "Your Highness, perhaps we can continue the freight allocation discussion later."

"Yes," the envoy said at once, in the tone of a man who had discovered religion in real time. "Later would be excellent."

Arik did not look at either of them. "Go."

They went.

Not walked. Went.

The doors closed behind them with a sealed hush that somehow made the room feel less safe rather than more.

For three seconds nobody spoke.

Then Arik set down the stylus in his hand with awful care and asked, "Are you brain damaged?"

Cecil, still furious in that bright, unreasonable way Frederik’s refusal had left him, answered honestly. "Only emotionally."

"That is not my department."

"It is today."

Arik stared at him.

Cecil stared back.

The imperial tower hummed quietly around them, power cycling through refined ether lines beneath the floor and in the walls, the city moving below, ministries functioning, budgets being approved, convoys rerouted, civilization holding.

Inside the office, two sons of empire considered violence in different registers.

At last Arik said, "You interrupted a cross-border trade meeting to ask why I haven’t married a crown princess."

"Yes."

"Are you trying to get killed for variety?"

"No. I’m trying to understand why the rest of us are expected to suffer because you refuse to solve one obvious dynastic problem."

Arik’s face did not change.

That was the more alarming part.

"Explain," he said.