Page 50

“And the one who began all of this?” I said at last, when I could trust my voice again. “Demetrios. He fled the throne room before my blade could find him a second time. What did the two of you learn about him out there?”

Aster and Lazaros exchanged a glance, and something in it made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“That,” Aster said carefully, “is the part you are truly not going to like.”

“I haven’t fucking liked any part of this morning since I left my woman sleeping,” I snapped. “So, speak of it!”

Aster seemed to weigh his words, which alone was enough to set me on edge. Aster did not weigh words. He flung them.

“In the visions she was given,” he said slowly, “the ones that showed her Demetrios pulling Lazaros’s strings, she saw his face. His true face.” He paused. “And she… well…”

“Spit it out, Aster.” He took a pause, closed his eyes and released a deep breath before rocking us to our core.

“She believes he is your brother.”

The room went utterly silent.

I looked at Lazaros, and our eyes locked.

“That’s… that’s impossible,” we said, almost in the same breath.

“We have no other brother,” Lazaros added, frowning, shaking his head. “We would know. Our mother, our father, there was no…” He stopped, his jaw tightening. “It’s impossible, Aster.”

“Why?” I asked, ignoring him, fixing Aster with a stare. “Why does she believe such a thing?”

“Because of what she saw.” Aster held my gaze, steady and unflinching. “In the vision, the man behind all of this looked like the pair of you. Not similar. Not a passing resemblance, a person might shrug away. The same jaw. The same eyes. The same blood, written into his face plainly enough that she swore to me it couldn’t be a coincidence.” He shook his head. “She is not a woman given to flights of fancy, Atlas. If she says she saw your blood in his face, then she saw it.”

“Then she is mistaken,” Lazaros snapped, pushing off the desk, agitation rolling off him in waves. “Because I have seen Demetrios. He has served at my side before he infected me with his darkness. I have looked at that man’s face every day for longer than I care to remember, and he looks nothing like us. Nothing. Darker. Harder. A stranger from end to end.”

“As have I,” I said, my own voice low. “In the throne room. When I put a blade in his shoulder, I saw him clearly enough. Lazaros is right. Whatever Alexandra saw, the man who walks this world wearing the name Demetrios bears no resemblance to either of us.”

“No,” Aster agreed quietly. “He doesn’t, and that is what I told her, knowing his face as well.” And there was something in the way he said it that made the dread coil tighter in my gut.

“Go on,” I said. “For I know you are not finished.”

“No.” He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees once more. “Because she has a thought on that, too. She believes the face you’ve both been looking at all this time isn’t his at all. That he wears a glamor. A mask of magic, worn so long and so well that no one ever thought to question it.” His gaze moved between the two of us. “She thinks he hid his true face from the both of you, from me, from everyone on purpose. So that neither of you would ever look at him and see the one thing that would have made you stop and wonder.”

The blood we share.

Neither of us said it.

We did not have to.

I sat very still, the implications crashing over me one after another, cold and relentless as a stormy tide. A brother. A third son, hidden, unacknowledged, raised in shadow and resentment. One who had spent only gods knew how long walking among us behind a borrowed face. Who had earned Lazaros’s trust, turned my own brother into a weapon, opened a Rift between worlds and drowned two of them in darkness. All the while smiling at us from behind a mask.

If it were true, then this was no mere war. No simple grab for a throne. No, this was a wound that had been festering in my own bloodline for longer than I had been alive… if he had been born first.

“It isn’t possible,” Lazaros said again, but the conviction had drained out of it now, leaving only something small and frightened underneath. He had heard the same thing I had. He had felt the same horrible, fitting logic of it settle into place.

“Perhaps not,” I said quietly. “But she has been right about a great many impossible things of late.”

And every one of them had cost us.

I dragged a hand down my face, the weight of everything pressing on my chest. A hidden brother wearing a stolen face was a horror I would have to take apart slowly, carefully, when I had the men and the wits to do it properly. It was a thread I intended to pull until the whole rotten tapestry came apart in my hands.

But not yet.

Because there remained one more thing she hadn’t told me. One more shadow that had passed behind her eyes the day before. One, where I had asked the wrong question, and she had looked away rather than answer. I had taken her sorrow for my answer then and let it lie, because I had not been able to bear pressing her further.