The ghost of his touch on my cheek lingered long after he had gone, a phantom brand in the cold air of the corridor. Elara. He had known. The calculation of it stole my breath. How long had he held that card? Since the balcony? Since the carriage? He had watched me play the part of Seraphina, all the while knowing I was an imposter. The Cold Duke was not just powerful; he was patient. And that made him infinitely more dangerous.
The encounter in the kitchen had been a gamble, but his reaction—or lack of a punishing one—told me I'd guessed correctly. Utility was the only currency that mattered here. Seraphina's beauty was a weapon for a different kind of war. The war here was fought with peeled potatoes and earned trust.
I did not return to the kitchens. I had made my point. Instead, I retreated to the castle's library, a vast, dusty sanctuary that smelled of old paper and beeswax. If I was to be useful, I needed more than just plot points from a novel I'd read. I needed to understand this world on its own terms.
The shelves groaned with histories of the Northern Border Wars, treatises on metallurgy and mining, ledgers detailing crop yields from the last century. This was not a collection for leisure; it was an arsenal of knowledge. I pulled a heavy volume on the geology of the Blackwood Mountains and settled into a worn leather armchair by a window overlooking the inner courtyard.
Hours bled away, marked only by the turning of pages and the slow march of shadows across the floor. I lost myself in charts of ore veins and accounts of long-dead Dukes battling invaders and insurrection. The history of this place was written in blood and ice, a relentless cycle of defense and hardship that explained the grim resilience of its people.
A particular passage caught my eye, buried in a personal journal of Lysander's grandfather:
"The rot does not sleep. It feeds on strain, on turmoil of the spirit. It is a parasite of power. The stronger we become, the more fiercely it fights to claim its due. The price of a Blackwood's strength is a Blackwood's peace."
My blood ran cold. It wasn't just a curse. It was a symbiotic nightmare. Their power and their affliction were two sides of the same coin. The "madness" wasn't a descent into incoherence; it was the loss of control over the very thing that made them formidable. This changed everything.
The library door creaked open. I looked up, expecting a maid or the stern Steward Valerius.
It was Lysander.
He stood in the doorway, still in his simple tunic, his hair slightly disheveled as if he'd been running a hand through it. In the soft, dusty light of the library, he looked less like a Duke and more like a scholar, albeit a weary and formidable one. His eyes found me immediately, noting the open journal on my lap.
"Finding more ways to be useful?" he asked, his voice quieter here, less of a weapon and more of a tool.
"Trying to understand the foundation I'm meant to stand on," I replied, carefully closing the journal. I wouldn't reveal my discovery about the curse. Not yet. That knowledge was too potent, too vulnerable.
He stepped fully into the room, his presence making the vast space feel intimate. He stopped before the shelves, his fingers trailing over the spines of books with a familiarity that was unexpectedly arresting.
"This was my sanctuary as a boy," he said, almost to himself. "The one place the… expectations… could not follow." He glanced at me. "I assume you did not have a library like this in your world."
The casual acknowledgment of my origin was another seismic shift. The pretense was fully gone. "No,"I said, my throat tight. "We had… other things. But nothing like this. This is a life's work." I gestured to the shelves. "Your family's history."
"A history of holding the line," he corrected, turning to face me fully. He leaned against a reading desk, crossing his arms. The casual pose did nothing to diminish his intensity. "A history of being the shield that breaks, over and over again, so the soft heart of the kingdom remains safe and ignorant."
There was a bitterness there, deep and old. A resentment I had not anticipated.
"They fear you in the capital," I said.
"They fear what they do not understand," he countered. "They fear the weapon they rely on. They send their emissaries not to build bridges, but to ensure the weapon is still pointed in the right direction." His gaze sharpened on me. "And now they have sent a spy they did not know they sent."
I held my breath. "Is that what I am?"
"You are a complication," he said, pushing off the desk and taking a step toward me. "A variable I did not account for. You have a name that is not your own, knowledge you should not possess, and a perspective that is… alien." He stopped in front of my chair, looking down at me. "You see the cracks in the foundation that everyone else has learned to ignore."
He was so close. I could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the tiny flecks of darker grey in his irises. The library's silence wrapped around us, thick and heavy.
"Why did you not reveal you knew?" I asked, the question I had been burning to ask.
"Because the 'why' of you was more valuable than the 'who,'" he said simply. "A desperate Seraphina was a predictable pawn. A woman from another world, desperate to survive… that was a puzzle. And I have always had a weakness for puzzles."
His admission was more disarming than any threat. He saw me not as a person, but as a problem to be solved. Yet, within that cold assessment, there was a sliver of… respect.
"And what is your solution?" I whispered.
He didn't answer immediately. His eyes dropped to my lips, then back to my eyes. The air between us crackled with the same unspoken tension from his study.
"I haven't decided yet," he murmured. "The puzzle continues to evolve."
He reached out, not to touch me, but to pick up the journal I had been reading. His grandfather's journal. His expression was unreadable.
"The foundation is cracked, Elara," he said, his voice low. "It has been for generations. Remember that before you decide how much weight you wish to place on it."
With that, he turned and left the library, taking the journal with him, leaving me alone with the dust motes dancing in the slanted light and the terrifying, exhilarating feeling that I was balancing on the edge of a precipice with a man who knew the ground was about to give way.