"Let's make a deal," Camilla said, her voice stripped of its tremor, now cool and precise as a blade. She gestured to the crate of dark bottles. "The person who drinks the most… will…"
Tiberius stared at her. For a second, there was only the drip of moisture in the corridor outside. Then a snort escaped him. It grew, bubbling up from his chest into a full, rolling laugh that echoed off the stone. This was the celebrated Crown Princess Camilla? The poised, impeccable future queen? She was proposing a drinking contest in a cellar, looking like a drowned, furious kitten.
"Will…" she pressed on, ignoring his laughter, her blue eyes glinting with a dangerous light, "…do anything the other wants." She thrust her hand out, ungloved now, for a shake to seal the wager.
Tiberius wiped a tear from his eye, his laughter subsiding into drunken, wild chuckles. "What if," he mused, leaning back in his chair and regarding her with open mockery, "I don't want anything from you? What could you possibly have that I would ever want?"
The air between them crackled. Camilla didn't lower her hand. She leaned forward, the firelight catching the fierce determination in her face.
"I want you."
The three words flew out, stark and stupid, cutting through the tavern-like atmosphere of Get Lost.
All laughter died in Tiberius's throat. The drunken mirth vanished from his eyes, replaced by a sudden, sobering intensity. His gaze locked onto hers, searching, calculating. The shift was immediate and total. The room seemed to shrink, the shadows pressing in.
Then, she delivered the remaining part of her sentence, her voice dropping to a low, deliberate murmur that was somehow more intimate than a shout.
"…to eat every last one of the growing grasses in my private garden."
A beat of silence hung in the air, thicker than the wine fumes.
A slow, incredulous smile began to spread across Tiberius's face. It wasn't the wild laugh of before. This was something darker, more appreciative. She hadn't proposed something lewd or political. She had proposed something utterly, brilliantly insulting. To make a prince, a son of the king, get on his hands and knees and graze like a beast. It was a punishment of pure, undiluted humiliation.
She didn't want his influence or his secrets. She wanted to break his pride.
He looked from her unwavering, outstretched hand to her defiant face. The Crown Princess was full of surprises.
"You have a deal, Princess," he said, his voice a low rumble. He reached out and clasped her hand. His grip was firm, warm, and startlingly real in the gloom. "But when you lose—and you will—I won't make you eat grass." He leaned closer, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. "I'll make you tell me what you're really doing here."
He passed her a fresh bottle, its glass slick and cold. Camilla took it, her fingers trembling only slightly. She lifted it, closed her eyes, and—in a moment of desperate strategy—pinched her nose shut with her free hand. She tilted her head back and drank. The vile liquid flooded her mouth, a tidal wave of bitterness and fire. Her throat convulsed, trying to reject it. She felt the heat surge into her stomach, a heavy, nauseous anchor. But she maintained. She swallowed, gasping as she lowered the bottle, her eyes watering.
Tiberius watched, then took up his own bottle. No hesitation, no dramatics. He simply put it to his lips and drank, his throat working in steady, practiced gulps. He didn't shake, didn't flinch. He set the empty bottle down with a definitive clink.
The competition began with a brittle confidence on her part, a cool arrogance on his. But as bottle after bottle was drained, that confidence began to fade, replaced by something more primal and stubborn.
The room began to tilt. The torchlight blurred and swam. The sharp edges of the stone walls softened. Time stretched and contracted in strange ways. They drank in near-silence, the only sounds the glug of wine, the thud of empty bottles hitting the floor, and their increasingly ragged breaths.
It went on for what felt like hours, a slow, sinking duel. Her sips became desperate gulps; his steady consumption began to show its first, slight staggers. Her world narrowed to the next bottle, the next swallow, the next fight against the rebellion in her gut. His laughter lost its sharp edge, becoming a low, continuous rumble of drunken bemusement.
"Ha... ha... haaaaaa!"
The sound tore from Camilla's throat—a ragged, triumphant cry that was half-sob, half-hysterical laughter. She slammed her final bottle onto the table, empty. A wave of fiery accomplishment washed over her, immediately drowned by a physical revolt so violent it doubled her over. Her stomach felt like a overfilled wineskin, stretched and burning, on the verge of splitting open.
The triumph lasted a heartbeat. Then her body betrayed her utterly. She slumped to the side of her chair, a hand flying to her mouth too late. A guttural, wrenching sound escaped her as she vomited onto the cold stone floor, the expensive wine now a wasted, sour puddle.
Through the swimming haze of his own intoxication, Tiberius saw her fall. A great, rolling bark of laughter erupted from him, unsteady and genuine. He wasn't laughing at her misery, but at the sheer, absurd spectacle of it all. The mighty princess, brought to her knees by his cellar swill. With a flourish that almost sent him toppling, he raised his own final bottle—the one that made the count uneven, that made him the victor—and drained the last dregs.
He was the winner. He was also profoundly, staggeringly drunk. His victory laugh mingled with the sound of her retching, a symphony of ruin in the hidden room called Get Lost.
"So," Tiberius slurred, the words thick and heavy on his tongue. His hand swung through the air in a loose, drunken arc, gesturing vaguely at her crumpled form. "Now you tell me. Why you're actually here."
Camilla blinked up at him from where she sat, slumped against the leg of her chair. A slow, lopsided smile spread across her wine-stained lips. "Ohhhh," she breathed, the sound a soft exhalation of surprise. "You were serious."
She pushed herself up, swaying slightly, her gaze drifting past him to the shadowed walls. The forced smile remained, but her eyes, those striking blue eyes, began to shimmer with a wet, unguarded brightness.
"I feel… great," she declared, the lie so transparent it was heartbreaking. "Tenebrarum…" She let his name hang in the sour air, a talisman of all her pain. "He doesn't love me. I've been his for… for a good ten years. Since we were practically children. And he has never, not once, looked at me the way he looks at that girl."
A single tear escaped, tracing a clean path through the faint dust and wine on her cheek. She didn't wipe it away. "The drink worked," she whispered, more to herself than to him. "I feel a little relief. Fun, even. Perhaps… perhaps this has been my most happy day."
She turned her shimmering gaze back to him, the ghost of that terrible, grateful smile still on her face. "Thank you."
Her words—raw, honest, and saturated with a decade of lonely anguish—didn't just land on Tiberius. They tore into him. They sliced through the warm, fuzzy blanket of his own drunkenness and found the old, festering wound beneath.
The laughter died in his chest. The mocking triumph over his drunken contest evaporated. He simply looked at her, really looked, seeing not the proud, irritating crown princess, but another soul left bleeding in the long, dark shadow of his brother.
A cold, sobering clarity pierced the haze in his mind, sharp as the dagger still stuck in the wall.
Why? The question echoed silently, painfully. Why has everyone been hurt by him?
He thought of his own life—a performance of wasted potential, lived in a deliberately darkened room called Get Lost. He thought of the seven brothers who gathered here, their bond forged not in fraternity, but in shared fear. He thought of Aurelia, wherever she was, marked and claimed and broken in different ways. And now Camilla, who had given her entire youth to a man who saw her as a piece of furniture.
Tenebrarum was a vortex. A devourer of light and love. And they were all, in their own ways, caught in his gravitational pull, orbiting a cold, dark star.
Tiberius didn't offer comfort. He didn't know how. Instead, he reached for the nearest bottle that still held a few mouthfuls. He didn't drink it. He pushed it slowly across the stone floor toward her with the toe of his boot, a silent, shared understanding in the gesture.
The words were a fragile bridge between them. "You're not like him. He'd really shout if he..." She picked up the bottle he'd nudged toward her, her fingers fumbling on the cool glass, but before she could take a sip or finish her thought, Tiberius moved.
It wasn't a graceful motion. It was a surge of drunken impulse, a collision of loneliness, pity, and a raw, aching need for connection.
He was on his feet, looming over her where she sat. Then he was bending down, his lips pressing hard, almost desperately, against her pink, wine-stained mouth.
The kiss was not tender. It was an attack, a silencing, a clumsy attempt to smother the shared pain she had just given voice to.
Camilla's eyes flew wide. A muffled sound of shock was trapped between their lips. "Tiberius, no!" The protest was a hot breath against his mouth.
She shoved against his bare chest with a strength fueled by panic and intoxication, slipping off the chair and stumbling back, catching herself on the edge of the table.
He reeled back as if struck, his own balance precarious. His chest was heaving, his breath coming in ragged, uneven gasps that echoed in the sudden silence. Shame, immediate and scalding, flooded his veins.
What had he done?
For a long, suspended second, they stared at each other across the space of spilled wine and shattered dignity. The air crackled with the violation.
Then, Camilla moved again.
It was not to flee. It was a second, more devastating surge.
With a soft, broken sound that was neither a sob nor a sigh, she closed the distance. Her hands came up, one tangling in the dark hair at the nape of his neck, the other pressing against the rough stubble of his cheek. And she kissed him back.
This kiss was different. It was not an attack, but a surrender. It was profound, searching, and desperate. Her lips moved against his with a hunger that had everything to do with a decade of loneliness.
She kissed him as if she could drink the very warmth from his lips, as if she could transfer all her hurt into him. It tasted of sour wine and salt tears and the bitter truth of their shared ruin.
It lasted for a heartbeat that felt like an age—a fierce, private war fought with mouths and breath.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended.
Camilla tore herself away, staggering back. Her breath hitched. Her wide, horrified eyes met his for one final, electric moment, reflecting the same shocked question burning in his own.
What have I just done?
Without a word, she turned. The heavy door of Get Lost groaned open and then slammed shut with a finality that shuddered through the stones, leaving Tiberius alone in the wreckage, the taste of her despair lingering on his lips like a curse.
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To be continued...