The door to the study opened with a sigh, as though the room itself had been holding its breath, waiting.
August stepped inside like a prince returning to a kingdom he no longer recognized—regal, composed, and utterly haunted. The morning light stretched long fingers across the mahogany floor, crawling up the ivory of his trousers, the hem of his coat, the pale curve of his jaw. His heels clicked softly, like punctuation in a room that had only known silence.
The study welcomed him with papers stacked like altars—an empire of ink and urgency. Letters sealed with wax. Maps with fraying edges. Orders unsigned. Secrets stitched in handwriting that looked too hurried to be anything but dangerous.
He sat.
Not collapsed, not settled—but sat, deliberately. As if lowering a wounded cathedral onto a velvet throne. His luxurious chair creaked beneath him, a low murmur of memory and leather.
And then he felt it.
A trembling pulse in his belly, a ghost-ache stitched into the marrow of his bones. The dream still lingered like heat beneath snow—his cheeks were flushed, a traitor's shade blooming quietly over porcelain skin. He adjusted in his seat, lips pressed together, knuckles whitening around the edges of a paper he wasn't reading.
It wasn't just shame.
It was sensation.
Still there. Still alive.
And yet—the true wound wasn't between his legs or in the curl of remembered breath on his neck. It was in his chest. In the name still echoing through the hollows of his mind like a church bell underwater.
Maralise.
The word clanged through his ribs.
A name, but more than that.
A lock. A key. A reckoning.
She wasn't just a ghost someone else carried.
She was his.
Not a distant name buried in some nobleman's scandal or a faded sketch in Elias's memory. She had lived in his own periphery, shadowed him in dreams where the veil was thin. The curve of her cheek. The timbre of her voice. The way Elias had once—just once—looked at her portrait too long and said nothing.
She had always been there.
And now August saw it. With aching, merciless clarity.
Elias's mother.
That veiled figure, the woman who'd once held August's gaze like a mirror too old to reflect the truth… had spoken. Had named herself. The dream had not hidden her behind riddles this time. There had been no metaphor, no symbol, no flame-draped memory cloaked in silence.
She had told him.
And August—
August, who spent a lifetime threading together broken glass, who had stared so long into the past it left scorch marks behind his eyes—
He had not seen it.
Not until Elias, bare of armor, had whispered it into the dark like a confession sharpened by grief.
The papers on his desk blurred. His gaze drifted, no longer anchored in the room, no longer ruled by light or shadow.
Instead, he was pulled inward—
Back to Elias's voice.
Back to the timbre of it just before the dream twisted everything.
Back to that name—
"She was my mother… Maralise."
And suddenly, all the missing pieces bled gold in his hands. The letters that never came. The portraits with scrubbed-out faces. The noble family name that Elias never dared to speak aloud. All of it—a puzzle shaped like a person.
It had never been about vengeance. Not truly.
It was legacy.
It was blood.
It was a boy ripped from fire and thrust into silence.
It was Elias.
And that made everything more dangerous. Not because Elias was suddenly foreign, but because he was now familiar. Tangled, irrevocably, in August's past. In his pain. In his future.
August's fingers hovered over the parchment, but he could no longer read the words. They were ants beneath his gaze, crawling, meaningless.
"You've always been part of this," he murmured to no one, to paper, to air.
To the dream.
No wonder the vision had come with teeth and hands and breath. It wasn't just lust. It wasn't just the fever.
It was prophecy.
A collision foretold in flesh.
And shame, though it lingered like fog on his shoulders, could not fully drown the truth swelling in his gut.
He had dreamed Elias into the shape of a lover.
But before that—
The world had already shaped them into something far crueler:
Foils. Mirrors. Orphans sewn into opposite sides of the same war.
He leaned back in his chair, the leather exhaling beneath him. His arms folded across his chest, as if trying to keep his ribs from splitting wide open.
The study pressed around him with velvet silence. No sound but the gentle flutter of parchment in a breeze that didn't come from any window.
The roses still clung faintly to his skin beneath the lace—ghost-scented petals of a bath meant to cleanse a dream. But some stains don't lift in water. Some truths aren't spoken. They're felt.
August would not weep.
Not now.
But a storm brewed again behind his eyes, quiet, waiting.
A different kind of storm this time.
He looked down at the document in his hand. It bore the crest of the northern outpost. Reports of movement. Of shadows gathering. Of messages intercepted.
This wasn't just paperwork.
This was war.
And Elias's name wasn't just carved into August's dream—it was stitched into the very heart of this unraveling.
He set the letter down.
This mission… this tangled web of politics, prophecy, and blood… it wasn't just his. Not anymore.
It belonged to both of them now.
To the fallen mother.
To the boy born of fire.
To the dreamer haunted by hands that never touched him.
And August would see it through.
Blushing or not.
Trembling or not.
Because sometimes, shame is the seed from which resolve blooms.
And he was done hiding.
Even from himself.
Not long ago—mere minutes, perhaps, or eternities stretched thin across the delicate bones of time—August had been working as usual. The scratch of his quill was steady, elegant. The ink bled across the parchment like quiet veins mapping out a war he refused to lose. His spine held straight, shoulders poised, breath tempered.
And then—
A sound.
A voice.
His voice.
Low. Familiar. Threaded with sunlight and smoke.
It drifted through the corridor like incense—soft, sacred, unbearable.
"i was just asking "
The name alone was enough. Spoken just outside the door, not shouted, not stern—just there—and suddenly the study collapsed around him like a cathedral struck through the heart.
His breath snagged.
His heartbeat stuttered.
The quill in his hand faltered, dragging a blot of ink like spilled blood across the page.
He froze.
That voice.
Elias.
It rang in his ear like a ghost still warm from sleep, like a memory not yet given permission to fade.
His fingers trembled around the quill as if it were suddenly too sharp to hold, a dagger of feather and iron. His other hand clutched the edge of the desk, nails pale and pressed deep into the wood.
No.
Not now.
Not after that dream.
The echo of breathless gasps still lingered in his lungs. The weight of imagined skin still bruised the memory of his ribs. His thighs—traitorous, trembling—clamped together as though they, too, remembered the fiction of Elias's touch.
August pressed both legs together, stiff and urgent, as if he could erase the phantom pressure blooming hot between them. His mouth parted, but no sound came—only a silent ache. He brought his hand to his lips, palm firm against them, as if to trap the name that threatened to escape like a confession into the air.
Don't say it. Don't even think it. Don't let it bloom.
Elias.
His name was a blade and a balm. A war cry dressed in the silk of kindness. And now it walked the hall just outside his sanctuary, unaware of the wreckage it had left in August's sleep.
Footsteps padded closer. Bootheels soft against polished floorboards.
They were innocent. So innocent.
Unlike August.
His chest rose in shallow, stuttering rhythm. His lashes fluttered down, trying to hold back a sudden tide of heat. His entire body felt like porcelain on the verge of a crack. Too much pressure. Too much presence.
He could feel Elias outside the door, the way a candle feels the moon—distant, unreachable, and yet blinding.
It was just a dream. Just a dream. Just—
But his body did not know the difference.
His thighs pulsed, breath caught somewhere between throat and sin, and still, he heard him.
He could hear the soft murmur of Elias speaking with a passing steward. The low timbre of his voice struck every rib like a mallet to chimes, ancient and echoing.
August swallowed, and it hurt.
He pressed his hand harder to his mouth, as if it could keep him from falling apart entirely.
This wasn't fear.
This wasn't shame anymore.
This was reaction.
An involuntary bloom.
A sinner's pulse pounding in a saint's cage.
He couldn't face him. Not yet. Not with the memory of that dream still etched so vividly across his senses, not with the ache still seated in his belly like a secret.
He looked down—his hands trembling over ink-stained pages.
What use were politics, orders, revolutions, when the war inside his body had already been lost to the echo of a voice?
The door did not open.
But the moment lingered.
And so did Elias's voice, now trailing away, a distant warmth flickering down the hallway like the last breath of candlelight.
Still, August did not move.
He sat there—quill abandoned, mouth sealed, legs locked. A prince wrapped in lace and paralysis.
The paper before him was blotched.
The air was trembling.
And his heart, traitorous as ever, still beat to the rhythm of a voice that did not know what it had done.
The ink had dried, but the tremor in his chest had not.
August remained seated, spine bowed, his breath shallow and quick like paper caught in a draft. His body was a cathedral of nerves, each limb tight with memory, each fingertip singing with phantom touch. The silence in the room pulsed with aftershocks.
And then, quietly—
He surrendered.
He let the quill slip from his fingers, the sound of it falling soft as a prayer unanswered. With trembling grace, he pressed his forehead to the cool wood of the desk.
It kissed his fevered skin like absolution.
The coldness was a mercy. The polished surface, unsympathetic and smooth, offered no judgment. Only stillness. Only silence. His breath fogged the lacquered surface, then cleared, then fogged again—like a ghost trying to return to its body.
He closed his eyes.
Shake it off.
Forget the dream. Purge it. Unwrite it.
But the pages of the night had already been inked.
His cheeks still burned, shame brushing him like the back of a lover's hand. He turned his face slightly, letting one flushed cheek rest flat against the desk, as if the cold might siphon away the heat blooming traitorously beneath his skin.
He stayed like that—still, taut, breath fragile—as though he could freeze time if he simply didn't move.
Then—
A soft knock.
Barely a sound. Polite. Cautious.
The door creaked open and a presence entered, careful as a sigh.
He didn't raise his head. He didn't need to.
He knew it wasn't Elias.
Elias would not knock so gently.
Elias would barge in like wind, or not at all.
It was the maid.
She bowed the moment she saw him, her posture low, her voice careful and bright like porcelain set on velvet.
"My lord," she said gently. "Your breakfast is prepared and waiting in the dining hall."
A simple sentence. A domestic rhythm. The kind that might tether a man to normalcy.
But August—
August could not face sunlight and eggs and cutlery clinking softly beside Elias.
He could not sit across from the boy whose phantom voice had coaxed him into ruin.
Not now.
Not with his body still remembering.
He lifted his head slowly, and the mask slid into place like a crown made of frost.
His expression became blank—elegant, distant, pristine. The kind of face carved for mourning statues or ancient kings. Eyes like smoke behind glass. Lips set in a line so perfect it bordered on cruelty.
The August the world was allowed to see.
"Thank you," he murmured, his voice calm, distant, burnished in silver. "But I won't be joining."
The maid straightened, hesitating.
"If it pleases you, my lord, shall I bring the breakfast here—?"
"No."
The word clipped through the air, soft but final.
Then—after a breath—
"Just… a glass of warm milk," he added, more gently now, almost apologetic. "That will be sufficient."
The maid bowed again. "Yes, my lord."
She turned and left with quiet grace, the door closing behind her with a sound too soft to echo.
August waited. He didn't move.
Only when he was sure he was alone again did he lower his head once more, cheek returning to the cold desk like a sinner kneeling before an altar.
The surface offered no warmth.
And that, somehow, was a comfort.
Because the heat that still curled low in his belly, that rose unbidden in his cheeks at the mere sound of his voice—
That was too dangerous.
Too loud.
This desk, this silence, this mask—these were his sanctuary.
The rest—
The dream, the blush, the ache—
They would not be allowed outside this room.
Not today.
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