The wicked sneer upon Ellios’s face had not yet entirely faded when a heavy, gravelly voice abruptly cleaved through the silence of the chamber, arresting his heartbeat for a terrified fraction of a second.

  "Does the princess harbor a taste for murder?"

  The fine hairs on Ellios’s nape stood instantly erect.

  "The stench of blood... carries all the way in here," the voice continued softly, bearing the cadence of an indolent, waking predator's growl.

  Ellios flinched violently. His lips parted slightly, his ragged breath snagging in his throat. The encrypted slate resting in his coat pocket suddenly felt as leaden as a dreadnought's anchor.

  He turned his head slowly toward the four-poster bed. Arka remained prone, his breathing heavy and rhythmic, his eyes still clamped firmly shut. Yet, through some inexplicable, terrifying medium, Ellios could feel with absolute, paralyzing certainty that the Sagara prince’s gaze was locked dead upon him from beneath those closed eyelids. Arka’s predatory instincts were actively shredding Ellios’s meticulously crafted mask without a shred of mercy.

  Swallowing a mouthful of dry air with immense difficulty, Ellios forced a strained, awkward chuckle past his lips. He needed to project absolute, unbothered naturality.

  "Hehe... hardly possible, Your Highness," Ellios countered, his voice trembling marginally, though he aggressively attempted to mask it beneath a veneer of joviality. "I am merely myself. Look upon this physique... how could I possibly butcher a man with a frame such as this? Hahaha."

  Ellios extended one arm, deliberately showcasing his slender limb and shoulders that fell astronomically short of athletic, desperately striving to convince Arka he was entirely devoid of lethal capability.

  However, without so much as parting his eyelids, Arka’s lips moved, delivering a devastating riposte.

  "With your tail."

  Fuck.

  Unbidden and entirely uncontrollable, an agonizingly humiliating reflex seized Ellios’s motor functions. He actually craned his neck, looking back in a blind panic toward his own spine and hips. A millisecond later, his rational cognition slammed back into place, and he realized the profound idiocy of the action he had just executed.

  "Damn it all..." Ellios cursed under his breath, his face instantly flushing a violent, embarrassed crimson. "Obviously I do not possess a tail! I am a mortal man, not some mythical shapeshifter..."

  Hearing Ellios’s frantic, flustered grumbling, a deep, resonant laughter detonated from the mattress.

  Arka finally opened his eyes. A pair of irises as sharp and predatory as a night-hunting hawk locked directly onto Ellios. The youth rose sluggishly, propping himself up against the heavy headboard while aggressively tousling his own hair. His rugged, strikingly handsome face now radiated a profound, entirely sated satisfaction at having successfully baited the "fox" who had infiltrated his den.

  Arka sneered, baring a row of immaculately white teeth. His gaze shifted, shedding its lethal intimidation, replaced instead by an intensely aggravating, ticklish curiosity.

  "Princess, what is your name?" he demanded bluntly.

  That moniker again. Ellios felt the tips of his ears burning. He flushed slightly, a physiological betrayal exceedingly rare for the typically cunning heir of House Randar. He cleared his throat softly, desperately scrambling to reassemble the fragments of his shattered aristocratic dignity.

  "Ellios Randar," he answered with practiced firmness, elevating his chin a fraction.

  One of Arka’s thick eyebrows arched upward, a glint of recognition sparking in his eyes.

  "Ah... Mount Rhagas," Arka murmured, the gravel in his voice softening. His smile mutated into something marginally warmer, yet it stubbornly retained its feral, predatory undercurrent. "Arka. A denizen residing at the very foot of your mountain. Sagara Temple."

  The savage youth leaned forward and extended a massive, calloused hand—marred by fresh, raw lacerations—across the precipice of the mattress toward Ellios.

  Ellios stared at the offered hand for a long, silent heartbeat. A hand reputed to be capable of pulverizing cast iron. Yet, bathed in the dancing amber light of the hearth, that hand was merely offering an introduction.

  With agonizing hesitation, yet undeniable certainty, Ellios closed the distance. He raised his own unblemished, smooth right hand and met Arka’s grasp.

  Their palms connected, and Arka enveloped his hand in a crushing, unyielding grip. The scorching core temperature of the Sagara Prince bled directly into Ellios’s flesh once more. Amidst the howling hurricane of Dum-Shadd, in the dead center of the political apocalypse he was currently brewing for Louis Ferdinand out in the cold, Ellios Randar had just clasped hands—and perhaps, unknowingly forged an invisible, unbreakable pact—with the feral wolf residing at the base of his mountain.

  Their grip finally broke, leaving a residual, rough heat branded upon Ellios’s typically glacial palm.

  Rather than executing a tactical retreat to reestablish the sanitized, safe distance dictated by aristocratic protocol, Ellios found himself dragging a heavily carved wooden chair closer and taking a seat beside Arka’s bed. The paralyzing tension that had previously knotted his intestines evaporated into the ether, entirely usurped by pure, unadulterated curiosity.

  As it turned out, Arka Sagara was nowhere near as terrifying as the whispered rumors suggested.

  There was no suffocating aura of bloodlust radiating from the youth as he spoke. Their discourse flowed effortlessly, light and entirely unburdened, akin to a gentle spring current. Arka did not employ the byzantine, labyrinthine political metaphors favored by Reine, nor did he attempt to assert the overbearing, arrogant dominance characteristic of Louis Ferdinand.

  When Ellios inquired regarding the fresh lacerations, Arka merely shrugged his broad shoulders, offering a response that was brutally simple, concise, and unapologetically blunt.

  "Merely the scratch of a feral dog out on the frontier. It will scab over by tomorrow," Arka replied casually, plucking a ripe red apple from the nightstand and biting into it with a loud, aggressive crunch. The sweet juice ran down his strong chin, and he wiped it away haphazardly with the back of his bruised hand. Unrefined. Feral. Entirely devoid of palace etiquette.

  Yet bizarrely, therein lay his absolute, undeniable magnetism.

  Ellios studied Arka with a gaze that slowly, imperceptibly softened. Within the walls of Ironseat, every single syllable escaping Ellios’s lips had to be meticulously filtered through a dozen internal sieves. Every smile was a sharpened blade, every compliment a carefully concealed snare, and every drawn breath a calculated maneuver. He was forced to permanently fuse the mask of the "Cunning Randar Fox" to his face merely to survive his own father, his adversaries, and even his supposed allies.

  But within the confines of this chamber... that mask felt agonizingly heavy and utterly useless.

  Arka did not hunt for hidden, double meanings beneath Ellios’s words. If Ellios laughed, Arka genuinely believed he found something amusing. If Ellios scoffed, Arka simply retaliated by mocking him with the 'princess' moniker. There was no invisible chessboard positioned between them. There were no ulterior motives demanding concealment.

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  Unconsciously, Ellios’s perpetually rigid, hyper-vigilant posture began to slacken. He leaned back casually in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and let out a free, unchained laugh in response to a remarkably crass joke Arka had just delivered regarding his grandfather's excessively oversized military regalia.

  The laughter sounded crisp, profoundly authentic, and entirely unmanufactured. Ellios himself was marginally startled to hear it.

  Comfortable, Ellios mused internally, his eyes tracking the dancing reflection of the hearth fire within Arka’s dark irises.

  He felt astronomically comfortable. The bone-cleaving frost of Dum-Shadd, the encroaching, apocalyptic threat of the Shade Walkers, the catastrophic secrets of Sanjaya and Rahessa, even the executive assassination order he had just unleashed upon Louis... all of it faded into a hazy, indistinct background static.

  For the very first time in a life absolutely saturated with manipulation and manufactured falsehoods, Ellios did not feel compelled to strategically draft his next sentence. He did not need to calculate the precise profit margin he could extract from the youth sitting before him.

  He was merely... Ellios.

  A young man engaged in idle conversation with another young man within the sanctuary of a warm room. An emotional luxury infinitely more exorbitant than all the gold stockpiled within Mount Rhagas. And the undeniable fact that he had unearthed this profound peace within the den of the most savage wolf in the kingdom brought a smile to Ellios’s face that he had never once experienced in his entire life.

  BZZT. BZZT. BZZT. BZZT.

  The heavy slate concealed within the inner pocket of Ellios’s coat vibrated four times in rapid, successive staccato. Succinct. Precise. Lethal.

  It was the cipher of death. The execution order had been initiated somewhere along the lonely transit routes leading to Ironseat.

  Instantaneously, the profound comfort that had just thawed Ellios’s chest evaporated without leaving a single trace behind. A sharp, glacial dread drove like an ice pick into his scalp. A singular bead of cold sweat birthed itself from the pores of his forehead, tracing a slow, agonizing path down his rapidly paling cheekbone.

  Upon the mattress, the rhythmic motion of Arka’s jaw as he chewed the apple abruptly ceased.

  The barometric pressure within the chamber shifted violently. Arka’s drawn breaths became noticeably longer and infinitely deeper. The hawk-like eyes that had been jovial and welcoming mere seconds ago narrowed into lethal slits, darkening considerably, and drilled a stare straight through Ellios’s hastily erected defenses.

  "Princess..." Arka’s voice butchered the silence. The tone was no longer light; it was an abyssal, vibrating rumble radiating absolute, territorial dominance. "...Have you succeeded in butchering him?"

  Ellios froze solid. His musculature locked rigid as a statue carved from permafrost.

  His mouth fell open slightly, yet no oxygen escaped his lungs. It was an impossibly omniscient inquiry. Arka had not laid eyes on the encrypted slate. Arka had not intercepted any tactical directives. Arka did not even possess the identity of the target or the parameters of the operation.

  Yet, the Sagara youth could read it all with terrifying clarity. He smelled the sudden, violent spike of adrenaline bleeding from Ellios’s pores. He heard the violent shift in the young fox’s cardiac rhythm, hammering wildly fueled by the intoxicating euphoria of orchestrated murder.

  Tonight, Ellios experienced the terror firsthand. He finally, viscerally comprehended down to his very marrow precisely why the elites of Carta harbored such a paralyzing, deathly fear of House Sagara. Before this monster forged of pure instinct, political masks and cunning stratagems were reduced to absolute ash. Arka read Ellios’s soul as effortlessly as reading chalk script upon a black slate.

  "Who?" Arka demanded softly, tilting his head a fraction.

  Those eyes locked Ellios in a vice, permitting not even a microscopic margin for deception. Ellios knew with absolute certainty that attempting to lie to this young Sagara was the equivalent of willingly dragging a blade across his own throat.

  Ellios swallowed heavily, desperately fighting to locate his stolen voice.

  "Louis Ferdinand," Ellios whispered hoarsely. His hands unconsciously clamped down upon his own kneecaps with bruising force. "The son of Marquis Ferdinand... from Porto Royale."

  Upon hearing the name, Arka’s expression did not warp into panic or shock. The youth merely placed the half-eaten apple onto the nightstand, then slowly, methodically leaned his head back against the mountain of pillows.

  Arka let his eyelids flutter shut.

  The chamber descended into a terrifying, suffocating silence. Ellios held his breath, bearing witness to something profoundly illogical occurring right before his eyes. Arka’s nostrils flared slightly, as if he were forcefully drawing air through a tear in the dimensional fabric. He appeared to be violently extending his consciousness, physically cleaving through hundreds of miles of howling storm and pitch-black night, solely to taste the copper tang of the tragedy Ellios had just authored.

  The silence stretched for a dozen seconds that felt like an eternity in purgatory.

  Then, the corner of Arka’s lip slowly, deliberately curled upward. A razor-thin, feral sneer, saturated with a dark, primal fascination, carved itself onto his face.

  "Exceptional blood... hmmm..." Arka murmured, his voice incredibly hoarse, vibrating with a bizarre, unnatural resonance.

  His eyelids parted lazily, his gaze locking dead onto Ellios’s narrowed eyes, which were now dilated with mounting panic.

  "He may not be dead yet, Ell."

  Ellios’s heart seemingly stopped dead in its chamber. His executioners were the absolute apex predators of their trade. That four-pulse vibration was the definitive confirmation that the jaws of the death trap had snapped entirely shut. But if a Sagara declared the target had not yet perished... then Louis Ferdinand was genuinely still drawing breath. And Louis would know with absolute certainty exactly who had unleashed the hounds.

  Ellios vaulted to his feet, his limbs stiff and jerky. The chamber, which moments ago had felt like an impenetrable, warm sanctuary, abruptly transmuted into a suffocating coffin. The ambient oxygen felt as though it had been entirely vacuumed away by Arka’s singular, devastating sentence.

  He needed air.

  Entirely disregarding Arka’s hawk-like stare still tracking him from the mattress, Ellios spun on his heel and marched aggressively toward the heavy double glass doors at the far end of the room.

  He wrenched the brass handle downward with raw, uncalculated force.

  Crash!

  The instant the seal was broken, the hurricane of the Southern Sea ambushed him with a brutal, physical slap. The savage night gale surged inward, carrying glacial, freezing air and abrasive particles of sea salt that immediately battered Ellios’s face. His meticulously styled hair was whipped into a chaotic frenzy, lashing punishingly against his cheeks and eyes.

  Ellios stepped out onto the freezing stone balcony, violently hauling the glass doors shut behind him to entirely isolate himself. He gripped the stone parapet with white-knuckled force, surrendering his overheating skull to the violent, raging wind that felt as though it were actively trying to tear his head from his shoulders.

  His hands, trembling with violent, uncontrollable tremors, plunged into his coat pocket. He extracted a single cigarette and a battered, heavy metal lighter.

  He clamped the filter between his pale, bone-dry lips. His thumb struck the flint wheel with frantic, desperate aggression.

  Snick. Snick.

  The flame vehemently refused to catch. The oceanic gale demanded absolute submission, ruthlessly murdering every spark the second it attempted to draw breath. Ellios spat a muffled, venomous curse. His frustration crested into a blinding rage. He spun his body around, presenting his back to the raging sea, hunching his shoulders deeply, and utilized both his cupped palms and the heavy lapels of his greatcoat to forge a desperate, microscopic vacuum shielded from the hurricane.

  Snick.

  This time, a pathetic, flickering blue-orange flame managed to survive a microsecond longer. Just long enough to incinerate the tip of the tobacco.

  Ellios inhaled. An impossibly long, desperately deep drag.

  The young man’s chest expanded to its absolute maximum capacity as the harsh, dense smoke flooded his lungs, violently marrying with the abrasive taste of salt encrusting his lips. He trapped the toxic vapor within his chest for several long seconds, forcefully commanding the nicotine to bleed into his circulatory system, aggressively seducing his nervous system into halting the mass production of sheer, unadulterated panic.

  Slowly, his eyelids fluttered shut. He released the breath.

  Fuuusss...

  Yet, there was no cinematic, lingering plume of smoke released into the ether. The very millisecond the white vapor breached his lips, the ravenous hurricane of Dum-Shadd violently snatched it away. The smoke was instantaneously eradicated. Torn asunder, shredded into atoms, and entirely devoured by the abyssal black of the night without leaving so much as a phantom trace behind.

  Precisely like his meticulously crafted assassination plot.

  Ellios snapped his eyes open, staring blankly downward at the explosive, mountainous waves mercilessly pulverizing the coral reefs in the abyss below.

  He is not dead yet.

  The Sagara’s chilling verdict echoed endlessly within his skull, completely drowning out the deafening roar of the ocean. If the encrypted vibration on his slate confirmed the steel jaws of the trap had slammed shut, yet Louis Ferdinand continued to draw breath... it meant the Prince of the North was a monster infinitely more terrifying than any variable Ellios had accounted for in his calculations.

  Louis had successfully crawled out of hell.

  And Louis was no fool. When the Prince of the North stood amidst the burning wreckage of the highway, surrounded by the butchered corpses of the elite mercenaries Ellios had contracted, Louis would know with absolute, crystalline precision exactly which fox had engineered the slaughter. The phantom memory of Louis’s cynical, condescending sneer in room 402 of the Palace Hotel violently slashed across Ellios’s mind's eye once more.

  Ellios took another drag of the cigarette, this time pulling so violently the cherry flared a blinding, incandescent red, burning like a localized star amidst the suffocating darkness of the balcony.

  Tonight, he had sat comfortably alongside a savage wolf within the sanctuary of a chamber, only to realize he had just catastrophically failed to execute another monstrous beast roaming out in the wild. And now, the apocalyptic countdown to Louis Ferdinand’s inevitable, blood-soaked vengeance had officially commenced.