Edgar did not look back.
He left the war study with the Kaiser's last words still hanging like a chain around his ankle, cold and deliberate.
You will still enter an arranged marriage, to whom I deem suitable.
The corridor beyond was quiet in the way only old castles could be quiet. Not peace. Control. Stone swallowing sound, iron swallowing warmth. Torchlight guttered along the walls, turning gilded frames into watchful eyes.
He walked alone.
A pair of guards moved to fall in behind him out of instinct, then stopped when Edgar lifted a hand without turning. A simple gesture. Polite. Final.
He did not need an escort. Not tonight. Not after being reminded, in so few words, that the only thing the castle guarded was his usefulness.
His boots kept time on the flagstones. Measured. Even. The pace of a man who had not been dragged through smoke and blood an hour earlier.
His coat had been changed. His hands were clean. The shallow cut at his throat was hidden beneath a high collar.
Only the tightness in his jaw betrayed him, a fracture in the marble mask.
He passed a window slit and caught a strip of night beyond the walls. Snow caught moonlight and threw it back like powdered glass. Somewhere, out there, a manor burned itself to ash. Somewhere, out there, Bordeaux would be counting losses and recalculating their pride.
Somewhere, out there, Lucien Bastille would be laughing.
Edgar's fingers flexed once, slow, as if testing whether they still belonged to him.
Bastille alive destabilizes Bordeaux more than Bastille dead.
The thought came clean and simple, a line item on a ledger. It fit the map in the war study. It fit the Kaiser's gamble. It fit the way Lucien had leaned into a blade like it was a kiss and called it a thrill.
What did not fit was the way Edgar's body still remembered the chateau as if it had been carved into bone.
He turned down a side corridor and took the long route to his quarters, not because he was lost, but because he needed the extra minutes to assemble himself properly. The castle was full of eyes, even when the halls were empty. Servants with careful hands. Courtiers with hungry mouths. Spies in linen and lace. Men who could build a rumor out of a single unsteady breath.
He could not afford any evidence of fracture.
At the next turning, a tapestry hung heavy against the stone, crimson thread depicting a wolf tearing at a stag's throat. Edgar's gaze flicked over it automatically, cataloguing.
Wolves. Blood. Hunt.
His father's favorite metaphors.
He kept walking.
A door guard opened his suite without being asked. Edgar stepped inside and shut it himself.
The lock clicked.
Only then did the breath he had been holding finally escape him.
Not a sigh. Not relief.
A controlled exhale, like a blade being returned to its sheath.
His chambers were immaculate. Fire low in the hearth. Papers on the desk aligned with obsessive precision. A decanter of brandy untouched. The sort of room built to display a man's discipline as much as his privilege.
Edgar crossed to the washstand and stared at his reflection in the mirror above it.
A handsome face, cut sharply enough to belong in coins and portraits. Eyes too clear, too cold, too aware. A future king's face, polished and composed.
He lifted his hand and adjusted his collar, exposing just the barest hint of the reddened line at his throat.
The place where Lucien's knife had kissed him.
The place where the air had smelled of smoke and bergamot.
Edgar's fingers stilled.
He blinked once, slow.
The room did not move. The mirror did not change.
And yet for the briefest, treacherous second, it was not his own chambers he saw reflected back at him.
It was marble under moonlight. Velvet drapes breathing against a window. Candlelight gilding a door that had closed too softly to be a prison and too deliberately to be anything else.
And, anchored to it like a hook through flesh, one single detail surfaced with vivid, humiliating clarity:
A gloved thumb, brushed lightly across his lower lip, not to silence him but to test him. A casual, intimate gesture that implied ownership without ever demanding it.
The phantom pressure of it made Edgar's throat tighten.
His breath caught. Sharp. Involuntary.
His hand rose as if to touch his mouth, as if his body could confirm what his mind refused to name.
The movement lasted less than a heartbeat.
Then Edgar stopped himself.
His fingers curled into a fist at his side so hard his knuckles went white. He forced his lungs to fill, slow and measured. He stared at his reflection as if it were an enemy to be subdued.
His voice, when it came, was quiet.
"Enough."
He did not know who he was ordering. Himself. The memory. The chateau. The man with wine-red eyes who spoke like indulgence and moved like a knife.
It did not matter. The command did.
Edgar turned away from the mirror.
He crossed to his desk, pulled a blank sheet of paper from a drawer, and set it squarely before him. The quill sat waiting, ink black as fresh bruises.
He wrote two words at the top of the page, crisp and clean.
BASTILLE.
CHATEAU.
His hand did not shake.
He forced himself to treat it like strategy. Like logistics. Like the war study map spread under candlelight.
The chateau was a location. A resource. A liability.
Lucien Bastille was a variable.
Edgar pressed the tip of the quill to the paper again and began to list what he knew, not what he felt.
Bastille's network penetrated Swiss corridors.
Bordeaux relied on his mercenary flows, whether they admitted it or not.
His survival would trigger internal accusations, purges, tightening control.
If Edgar moved openly, Bordeaux would frame it as aggression.
If Edgar moved quietly, he could bleed them without ever showing a blade.
He paused, then added another line with clinical precision.
The Kaiser attempted to use Edgar as bait.
His jaw tightened, just enough to hurt.
He wrote one more line, and this time, the ink cut deeper.
The Kaiser will attempt to use Edgar again.
He set the quill down.
The fire crackled softly, like someone laughing at a distance.
Edgar stood and went to the window. He did not pull the curtains aside. He did not need to see the night to know it was there.
Behind the velvet, the glass was cold. The castle was cold. The world beyond was colder.
A war was already moving, whether the Kaiser admitted it or not. Whether Bordeaux admitted it or not. Whether Edgar wanted it or not.
And the problem was that Lucien Bastille was not merely an enemy.
He was leverage.
He was chaos that could be aimed.
He was a hand on the scales.
Edgar closed his eyes and forced himself to think about the arranged marriage, because it was safer than thinking about a gloved thumb on his mouth.
Marriage was a political instrument. A treaty in flesh. A leash disguised as ceremony.
His father would choose someone "suitable." Lorraine. Saxony. A duchess with quiet eyes and sharper relatives. A bride whose dowry came with soldiers and surveillance.
Edgar could already see the wedding like a battlefield: guest lists as alliances, vows as contracts, the kiss as a public claim.
And the infuriating part was that he could survive it. He could perform it. He could even win with it, if he treated it as he treated everything else.
He could do it all and never be free.
His fingers pressed to the glass, just lightly.
A thought came then, cool as steel, almost soothing in its simplicity.
If Father insists on binding me, I will choose the knot.
Edgar opened his eyes.
He turned from the window and returned to the desk. The page waited. The ink dried. The words stared back.
BASTILLE.
CHATEAU.
His gaze snagged on the second word again, and for a moment the air in his chambers tasted wrong, sweet and sharp.
Bergamot.
Edgar's stomach tightened, hard and sudden. Not fear. Not desire. Something stranger: recognition without context. A locked door rattling in its frame.
He forced it down with brute discipline.
Not now.
He would not detonate in his own rooms. He would not give the castle even the echo of weakness.
He picked up the quill again and wrote beneath the list, each word carefully placed, each stroke an act of control.
Find the estate.
Trace the supply lines.
Identify Bordeaux's internal fractures.
Locate Bastille's exit routes.
Learn why the chateau matters.
That last line cost him more than the rest.
He set the quill down and folded the page once, then again, the creases sharp enough to cut.
He slipped it into a drawer and locked it.
The click was decisive.
Edgar straightened his cuffs. Smoothed the front of his coat. Adjusted his collar so the mark at his throat vanished completely.
By the time he stepped back toward the mirror, the prince was already returning to his face. Polished. Proper. Almost warm.
His eyes, however, remained unchanged.
They were still the eyes of a man who had tasted the edge of a blade and found himself alarmingly awake.
He looked at his reflection one last time, and his mouth curved, faint and humorless.
"Tomorrow," he said softly, to no one at all.
Then he extinguished the candle by the desk, plunged the room into shadow, and stood in the dark with perfect stillness.
Outside, the war continued to shift.
Somewhere, Lucien Bastille was riding through snow, bleeding and laughing.
And inside Wolfenstein Castle, Edgar held himself together by force alone, knowing with cold certainty that whatever the chateau meant, it had already begun to claw its way back into him.