In the deep, forgotten belly of the palace, where the walls were damp with the breath of the earth and the only light came from guttering torches, there existed a room without a name on any map.
They called it Get Lost.
It was Tiberius's creation. A sanctuary. A war room. The one place where the seven princes of the blood, brothers united only by their shared terror and hatred of the eldest, could gather in the shadow of the crown prince they were sworn to one day obey.
Tonight, Tiberius was alone.
The usual cacophony of whispered plots and clinking glasses was absent, replaced by a silence so thick it pressed against the eardrums. He sat in the room's deepest chair, a monstrous thing of scarred oak and tattered velvet, swallowed by the dark. A bottle of Vinum Daemonium—the same poison their brother drank to forget—was clutched in his hand. He drank not to forget, but to remember. To fuel the cold, coiled thing in his chest.
His black hair, usually tied back with courtly precision, fell in a chaotic curtain around his bare shoulders. The fire in the hearth had died to embers, painting his torso in shifting patterns of orange and black, highlighting the tense lines of muscle and old, faint scars—souvenirs from a childhood spent dodging a brother's "lessons."
The king is dying.
The thought was a drumbeat in his skull, syncopated with each swallow of bitter wine.
The old lion fades. And the most vicious of his cubs will take the throne.
A vision flashed behind his eyes: Tenebrarum in their father's crown, the gold mask fused to it, his voice issuing decrees of blood and silence. Their kingdom, a gilded tomb.
A sudden, violent surge of fury tore through him. With a snarl that ripped from his throat, he launched the bottle from his hand. It didn't shatter messily; it struck the far stone wall with a sharp, decisive crack, exploding into a thousand glittering shards that rained down like poisoned hail. The smell of spilled spirits bloomed in the air, sharp and accusatory.
In the ringing silence that followed, he saw it.
A shift. Not of light, but of shadow. A deeper patch of darkness in the corner of the room, near the ancient tapestry depicting a forgotten hunt, moved. It was subtle—a coalescing, a thickening—as if the air itself had decided to take form.
Every muscle in Tiberius's body went wire-tight. The drunken haze burned away in an instant, incinerated by a hunter's instinct. He was on his feet in a single, fluid motion, the chair scraping back like a cry of alarm.
Shirtless, he was a specter of pale skin and coiled tension. His right hand dove to his left hip, where no scabbard hung. From a hidden pocket sewn into his trousers, his fingers closed around the cool, familiar hilt of a blackened steel dagger. He drew it in a silent arc, the blade catching a lone ember's glow, holding it low and ready—not for a ceremonial duel, but for the close, messy work of survival.
He did not speak. He barely breathed.
Then, the sound began.
It started as a texture in the silence—a soft, dry rasp, like silk dragging over stone. Then it resolved into something more distinct: the faint, deliberate scuff of a bootsole on grit. Another. The quiet, metallic chink of a buckle or a weapon settling.
Someone was in the room with him. Someone who had not used the door.
The sounds were not approaching. They were simply… becoming. As if a figure was assembling itself from the very darkness of Get Lost, stepping into reality from a place just beside it. The shadows in the corner pulsed, and a low, familiar voice, laced with a boredom that was more terrifying than any shout, flowed into the space.
The sounds were not approaching. They were simply… becoming. As if a figure was assembling itself from the very darkness of Get Lost, stepping into reality from a place just beside it.
He gripped the figure by the neck, his fingers biting into soft skin, not armor. The dagger in his other hand pressed against a slender throat. With one brutal motion, he slammed the intruder against the cold stone wall of Get Lost. A muffled gasp, a scent of jasmine and fear, filled the space between them.
"Ahhh!"
The cry was sharp, pained, and unmistakably a woman's.
Tiberius's rigid control shattered into confusion. He jerked back, releasing his grip as if burned. The dagger clattered to the stone floor between them. In the gloom, he tore the dark hood from the intruder's head.
A cascade of blunt-cut hair fell free, framing a face pale with shock and smudged with recent tears. It was Camilla.
He recoiled two full steps, his bare chest rising and falling with ragged breaths. The rage that had animated him evaporated, leaving behind a cold, prickling dread. This was worse than an assassin. He fumbled for the dagger, not to attack, but to hide it, shoving it back into the hidden pocket as if he could undo the last ten seconds.
"What do you want?" His voice was a harsh scrape, stripped of all its usual languid mockery.
Camilla pushed herself upright, one hand rubbing her throat. Her striking blue eyes, wide in the dark, didn't hold fear for long. They quickly hardened into something more familiar: a bitter, defiant pride.
"I heard," she began, her voice steadier than her hands, "that this place has the best wine to help people forget."
Tiberius stared at her. A laugh, sharp and utterly humorless, escaped him. "Who told you that?" The question wasn't curious; it was a demand, a threat. His voice echoed too loud in the confined space. In a flash of renewed fury—directed at the breach of his sanctuary, at his own mistake, at her very presence—his hand shot out.
He didn't touch her. Instead, he snatched another dagger from his pocket again and in one fluid, violent motion, threw it. It spun through the air, a whisper of polished death, and embedded itself in the wooden beam of the wall beside Camilla's head.
Wnack!
The hilt was vibrating an inch from her ear.
She didn't flinch. She simply turned her head, looked at the quivering blade, then back at him, her expression chillingly calm.
"I cannot drink in public," she said, as if explaining something simple to a child. "It would stain my name. A crown princess must be... impeccable." The word tasted like ash in her mouth. "Even when her betrothed publicly prefers a stray. Even when she is crumbling. So. I heard there was a place to get lost. I came to get lost."
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To be continued...