Page 81 of The Vespertine Treaty

I pushed the door open.

The room was pristine. Too pristine. The bed was made, the velvet duvet smoothed to an unnatural flatness. The fire in the hearth had burned down to cold, grey ash, suggesting it hadn’t been fed in hours. The wardrobe doors stood slightly ajar, a mockery of domesticity.

I stepped inside, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

The scent of her was fading. That was the first thing that hit me—a physical blow to the sternum. The notes of jasmine and rain that usually saturated this space were thinning, dissipating into the drafty air of the corridor.

"Ophelia."

I checked the bathing chamber. Empty. The stone was dry.

I checked the balcony. The doors were unlocked, swinging gently in the biting wind.

And then, the realisation hit me. Not a slow dawn, but a lightning strike.

Gone.

The thought failed to register at first. It bounced around the iron walls of my mind, finding no purchase. She couldn’t be gone. I had wards. I had guards. I was Cain Alistair, the monster of Aeternia, the shadow that swallowed realms. People did not simply vanish from my grasp.

Unless they really wanted to.

The thought turned the blood in my veins into acid.She ran.

The betrayal was immediate and absolute, a jagged knife twisting in my gut. After everything? After the moments where the fear in her eyes had been replaced by something softer? After she had let me touch her?

Rhana appeared to my side, her lip curled in a sneer that mirrored my own internal darkness. She sniffed the empty air, her golden eyes flashing with cynical validation.

"I told you she was flighty,"Rhana’s voice was a cold, sharp hiss in my mind."Aenites have no stomach for the dark. She ran back to her nest the moment you showed your teeth."

Then, the poison of the afternoon seeped in. The hallway confrontation. The scent of Rosette on my clothes.

She had looked at me with such raw, unadulterated disgust.“You reek of her cheap perfume.”

She hadn't run because of the Treaty. She hadn't run because of politics.

She ran because ofme. She ran because I had dragged my mistress into this house and shoved the insult in her face. The realisation was a nauseating cocktail of guilt and fury.

"She ran," I whispered, the words tasting like bile.

“Good riddance,”Rhana snapped, pacing the room with agitated, jerky movements."If she chose to leave, she deserves the cold."

The viscous shadows of my corrupted core erupted.

They didn't just spill from me; they exploded, shattering the windows of the bedroom outward in a shower of glittering dust.I didn't feel the glass. I didn't feel the cold. I felt only a red-hot, blinding inferno of rage.

I stormed out of the room, the door splintering off its hinges as my contamination lashed out, uncontrolled. The corridor blurred as I moved, my stride eating up the distance, every step cracking the stone floor beneath my boots.

She thought she could leave? She thought she could escape me because her pride was wounded?

I would hunt her to the ends of the earth. I would burn every forest, drain every ocean, and when I dragged her back, I would chain her to my side so thoroughly she would forget the meaning of the word door.

I reached the dining hall. The table was set for two. Crystal goblets, silver cutlery, the candlelight flickering innocently against the polished mahogany. It was a domestic scene that mocked the chaotic storm tearing me apart from the inside out.

A roar tore from my throat—a sound so raw and guttural it didn't sound Dyadic. It sounded like a beast dying.

I grabbed the edge of the heavy table, a slab of wood that took four males to move, and I flipped it.

The sound was cataclysmic. Crystal shattered, silver rang out like chimes of war, and the wood groaned and snapped as the table crashed into the far wall, taking some of the wallpaper down with it.