More than an hour had passed since Bors Lothian's death before a soft knock sounded at the door of the marquis's office.
"You may enter, quietly," Owain said without rising from the chair behind the stately oak desk.
He'd cast aside the blanket his father draped over the chair in his final days, and he'd lit a pair of oil lamps beside the desk to make it easier to read through the stacks of documents and decrees that littered the desk but the office itself was still shrouded in dark, dancing shadows that the light of the hearth could never fully banish.
On the walls, the preserved heads and polished skulls of more than a dozen demons, taken as trophies by generations of Owain's predecessors, stared down at the man sitting behind the desk in silent judgment. In the flickering light of the hearth, the gruesome trophies looked larger than life and more menacing than they ever would in the light of day.
