The seer glances over my shoulder, clasping her hands together and straightening her shoulders.
I swallow hard, steeling myself before turning around.
The man in the black-hooded cloak raises his head. Just a fraction. Enough for the candlelight to catch his bearded jaw, the line of his mouth.
My throat closes.
He lifts his hand in a single, smooth motion, grabbing the black fabric of his hood and pulling it back.
My knees nearly give out.
“No…” I whisper, but the word barely escapes.
He’s older, shadows etched beneath his eyes. But it’s unmistakably him.
My father.
Alive.
And in his eyes, there is no warmth. Only calculation and power and something that cuts deep.
Like betrayal.
I stagger back a step, my eyes welling with tears.
He is alive.
And he is the tsar.
I can’t feel my hands. My pulse thunders in my ears, drowning out the hiss of the candles and the cold that bites at my skin.
My father is alive. Not a ghost or a myth. Not some charlatan in disguise. He stands before me, the same jawline that appears in dusty portraits hung in Delasurvia’s castle halls. The same presence from my childhood that once made me feel safe.
But now, there’s a coldness behind those eyes that makes me feel sick.
I shake my head slowly, as if I could dislodge the truth and make it untrue again. “I thought you were dead.”
The words are so quiet, I’m not even sure I truly said them.
He regards me for what feels like forever before he finally speaks. “I was. In all the ways that mattered.”
My breath stutters. “No,” I say louder now. “No. You—” I step back, the stone floor solid beneath my boots, anchoring me before I fall. “You let the world believe you were gone. You letmebelieve it. And instead, you—” I gesture around at the fortress, the frozen rot of this place. “You became this.”
He doesn’t flinch.
“How could you be here all this time?” My voice trembles with anger. “Living all this time as the Shadow Tsar. I wanted to believe the tsar was just some monster. That it couldn’t be you. Because that waseasier than thinking my father would ever become something so… so—” I choke on the word. “Cruel.”
His expression barely shifts. A twitch of his mouth. Not quite a smile. “I became what was necessary.”
I stare at him, heart splintering, trying to reconcile the man I remember—golden and fierce and jovial—with the one in front of me now.
Torbin watches this exchange with thinly veiled satisfaction, clearly pleased with the drama unfolding—but I doubt he could understand the magnitude of this moment. How it’s breaking me. His gaze flicks between us, hungry for the next words.
I steady my breath, forcing steel into my spine. “What exactly do you need me for?”
The question falls like a gauntlet at his feet.
He steps closer, slow and deliberate. The candles flare as he moves past, catching glints of silver at his sleeves, the hint of a blade at his side.
