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Usually, she won. Usually, he was cajoled out of his anger by her laughter and delight in my escapades.

“The boy learns his limits—don’t discourage him.”

“Limits? He has no limits! He had two of the footmen attend breakfast naked.”

Standing across the room where he’d ordered me to stay until told otherwise, I smirked. The footmen had laughed at my attempts to charm a maid. So, I’d determined to embarrass them.

Mother coughed to cover a laugh, but Father slammed his drink down onto the walnut table next to his chair and pushed to his feet, crossing the room to stand over her. “It doesn’t matter how powerful he is if he learns no self-control! He’ll only destroy himself more quickly than he tears down others. Plus, he’s turning into an arrogant little prick. If he doesn’t pay some price, he’ll never learn how to truly lead—”

“We both know the power of an arrogant man,” Mother said in a low and strangely husky voice.

At twelve, I was beginning to understand a certain subtext—a scent in the room when men and women were together that prickled my skin and sent strange feelings to my belly, and my cock. I observed it between my parents before others, and saw it that night—a look that crackled between them at her words, and somehow made my father swell and soften in the same moment.

She had always awed me with her ability to shift a person’s posture. And even though she waved me off whenever I asked her how she did it, in moments like that one, I always caught her eyes flicking to me, to make certain I was watching. Observing. Learning.

As my father prowled closer to her, a strange intensity in his expression, my mother’s lips curled higher on one side.

“Vane, we’ll finish this discussion tomorrow. You may go to your room.” When my father went still, her eyes returned to him, though she continued speaking to me. “There will be no riding tomorrow, until you can stop treating the staff as your personal toys. They are people, son—don’t waste their goodwill on petty grievances. Let them owe you—and use them when you actually need it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, my heart beginning to race, because my father loomed over my mother, a strange, predatory expression on his face.

When I didn’t move, Mother broke his gaze and looked at me. “I told you, go to your room.”

I rolled my shoulders back. “Will you be safe? I don’t want to leave if—”

Mother actually laughed as my father whirled, his face twisted with incredulous irritation.

“Yes, Vane. But thank you for your concern. Such a good boy,” my mother said. But I didn’t understand, because her eyes had returned to my father, and she’d slipped a hand to his chest, pulling him back around to face her.

Squirming, half-enthralled, and half-terrified, I started for the door as my father stepped closer to my mother and she backed away—yet she smiled. As he stalked her.

Her shoulders came up against the wall just as I turned to close the door behind me. I froze with it still open an inch.

“You spoil him,” Father growled, grasping, lifting her hands, clamping her wrists in the grip of one large hand and lifting them over her head so she was arched back against the wall.

Something in my chest fluttered at that sight. Something I didn’t understand.

But when he leaned down as if he’d kiss her, she turned her head away—and her eyes caught mine, peering through that small gap in the door.

She smiled. “Not with an audience, my lord,” she said in that strange, husky voice.

My father’s head snapped toward the door. I leaped back, yanking the door closed, and sprinted deeper into the house, chased by my mother’s laughter, praying Father wouldn’t come for me.

He didn’t.

Later, I found that scene replaying in my mind over and over, because in those moments my parents were no longer my parents. Something happened between them, entirely separate from me. An exchange of power and strength I didn’t understand. But I desperately wanted to. They became people with an understanding of each other, secrets between them that they enjoyed.

What kind of secrets made a dark man smile?

I didn’t have an answer. But I determined I would find out. Even if I had to use the secret passages to do so.

Meanwhile, I continued stretching the limits of my ability to control or manipulate others.

It wasn’t until weeks later, when my parents joined forces—the two of them standing in unity over me—that I became uneasy.

I’d dared some of the younger children who were visiting the estate to bury each other, told them that there was power under the earth. But only in the dark.

One of them almost died.