The drawing room was quieter than usual.
No wine tonight. No velvet chaise. Just two chairs, pulled closer to the fire. As if either of them wanted warmth but neither would admit to needing it.
Valen sat with his hands steepled beneath his chin, eyes like old embers. Elias mirrored him, but not in deference. In defiance. He'd learned Valen's movements like scripture. Now he used them as armor.
"You look tired" Valen said.
"I'm not" Elias replied. "Just closer to clarity."
Valen's gaze sharpened. "Have you decided what you'll ask me tonight?"
"I have"
Elias didn't wait for the formal invitation. The game had rules, but he'd been bending them since the second night. And Valen… Valen had let him.
"Why" Elias began, voice low and measured "do you fear softness in yourself, but crave it in others?"
The fire popped.
Valen did not speak for a long time.
It wasn't the harshest question Elias had asked but it was the most dangerous.
He answered slowly.
"Because softness is the first thing taken."
He paused, voice steady.
"I've watched empires fall, watched lovers turn into corpses. I've been adored, hunted, worshipped, feared. But the one time I was loved, truly loved, it was ripped from me like a vein torn open."
Elias's face softened, but not with pity.
With understanding.
"And now you only take what's offered. Nothing asked for."
Valen looked up, eyes rimmed with something that wasn't quite regret.
"It's safer that way."
Elias nodded slowly. "That's not an answer. That's a cage."
Then he leaned back, the flicker of a smile ghosting his lips.
"Now it's your turn"
Valen's gaze darkened. "Why do you keep returning to me each night, knowing I can break you?"
Elias didn't hesitate.
"Because part of me wants to know if you will."
Silence.
Heavy. Tense.
Not with anger but inevitability.
Then Elias reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small leather-bound notebook.
He placed it on the table between them.
"For tomorrow" he said. "The last night"
Valen's brow furrowed. "You've already written it?"
"No. I'm giving you a choice." Elias stood. "I'll still answer your question tomorrow. But I want the seventh question tonight. I want to ask it while I still have time."
"Still have time?" Valen echoed, standing now too. "What are you talking about?"
Elias only smiled. "Let me ask, and you'll understand."
Valen stared at him, something uneasy curling in his chest. "That's not how this works."
"It is now" Elias said. "You said seven nights. Not that they had to be consecutive."
Valen hesitated. That same hesitation Elias had noticed the night before, the tell of a creature used to control and suddenly losing it.
"Fine" Valen murmured. "Ask."
Elias didn't move. Didn't blink.
His voice was like a blade drawn slow.
"Would you let me go, Valen… if keeping me meant destroying the only part of you that's still human?"
Valen stepped back.
Just a fraction. But enough.
Elias nodded once. He'd seen what he needed to see.
"I'll answer your last question tomorrow. Whatever it is."
He turned and walked out without waiting for a response.
Valen stood alone, breathless, though he had no breath to give. The notebook on the table stared up at him like a loaded gun.
And for the first time in a hundred years.
He didn't know if he wanted the truth anymore.
The fire had burned low. A single log hissed softly in the grate, casting long shadows over the grand hall where Valen stood, still barefoot, still half-dressed from the night before, still waiting for a man who was already gone.
Elias hadn't come down for breakfast.
Elias hadn't been in the library, the conservatory, or the chamber Valen had taken him in the night before. His scent had faded. His clothes were gone. The books he'd brought were missing.
Vanished.
The seventh night. And Elias had disappeared like mist.
Valen stood beneath the stained-glass window, the morning sun refracting across his pale skin in fractured reds and golds. But there was no warmth in it. Only stillness. Silence. Emptiness.
He clenched his jaw, fighting the dull throb behind his ribs. He wasn't supposed to feel this. Not for a mortal. Not anymore.
He had been ready to ask.
The final question.
The question he had never dared voice not in five centuries.
And now Elias was gone.
He didn't even realize he had moved until he was at the front door, fingers curling around the handle like he could tear the manor open and drag Elias back by the collar.
And then
A knock.
Sharp. Precise. Familiar.
Valen froze.
His heart, a useless thing, lurched.
And when he opened the door, it shattered.
Elias stood there. Rain-soaked. Windblown. Cold.
And utterly unfamiliar.
Not in face no, the face was exactly as he remembered.
But the eyes… the eyes were wrong.
Confused. Curious. Professional.
Not the ones that had looked at him for six nights like they saw through the centuries.
Valen's voice scraped out of him like dry bone.
"Who are you?"
The man blinked, clearly taken aback. "Elias Mercier" he said slowly, his tone polite but cautious. "You must be Lord Valen. I came as requested. Apologies for the delay, Verden flooded, and the roads were..."
"No" Valen said, his voice cracking like a branch underfoot. "You're not him."
Elias hesitated, then opened his satchel. "Your letter" he said, holding out the parchment. The wax seal was untouched. "You said you needed a scholar fluent in the old dialect. You wrote to the university. I'm here, as agreed."
Valen didn't take the letter.
His eyes were locked on Elias, this Elias, who smelled of rain and parchment and ink. The real scent. No rosewater. No blood. No fire.
Not his Elias.
Because his Elias had never existed.
And just like that, the truth pierced him.
The man he had spoken with. Fought with. Wanted. Held. The man who had laid himself bare beneath Valen's hands and asked for nothing but honesty in return.
That man had never truly been Elias.
And Valen, for the first time in centuries, had loved a lie.
The silence stretched so long that Elias shifted awkwardly on the threshold.
"I… is something wrong?" he asked, frowning now. "You look unwell."
Valen laughed. Just once. A bitter, broken sound.
"I am unwell" he said. "Fatally so."
He stepped back without another word, letting Elias enter, but something had already cracked in the walls of the manor, deep and invisible. The weight of those six nights returned, pressing on his spine like a cruel memory.
The laughter. The moans. The honesty.
All counterfeit.
He didn't know who or what had taken Elias's face and stolen into his bed.
But they had known everything.
His triggers. His games. His weakness.
They had known how to make him feel.
And now they were gone.
Just when he might've surrendered.
Just when he might've let himself be known.
Valen looked at Elias, this Elias, the stranger with the same eyes and felt cold for the first time in five hundred years.
Because the man who had undone him.
Had never even existed.