Chapter 23
Flashback
The negotiation hall gleamed—walls of crystalline glass that reflected nothing but revealed everything.
Glass floors, glass ceilings, glass chairs that seemed designed to make their occupants feel exposed, vulnerable, breakable.
Everything transparent in structure, nothing sincere in purpose.
General Velis Drayke lounged with deliberate insolence, one powerful thigh draped over the armrest of his obsidian throne.
His crimson military cloak spilled down like arterial blood against crystal, each fold arranged with the casual precision of a man who turned violence into art.
He hadn't spoken since the session began—didn't need to. His presence pressed against the room like the kiss of a blade held just shy of flesh.
Prince Caelum stood at the chamber's heart, flanked by advisors whose trembling barely stayed within diplomatic bounds.
He was dressed in ceremonial ash-grey silk, every line of the fabric screaming military discipline and royal authority.
When his voice finally cut through the suffocating tension, it sliced clean as piano wire through bone:
"Ashan will not provide additional offerings beyond what the Shadowvale Accord demands. The blood moon ceremony was fulfilled to the letter. This request transcends diplomacy—it is naked greed, dressed in ritual's borrowed robes."
A sharp intake of breath rippled through his own delegation. One advisor's hand moved instinctively toward his ceremonial blade before catching himself.
Across the crystalline divide, Senator Orelle Vaine released a sound like champagne bubbles breaking against cut glass.
Her fingers traced the rim of her goblet with obscene delicacy, as if savoring memories of whose veins had filled it.
"My dear prince," she purred, voice thick as honey over poison, "there are whispers throughout the Crimson Court that our appetites grow... restless. The recent offerings have proven so terribly predictable. There exists, shall we say, a craving for something with more... fire."
She didn't need to glance at Velis to make clear whose particular hunger had inspired this diplomatic overreach.
Caelum's jaw tightened like a steel trap. "Then let them starve on their own gluttony."
That's when Velis moved.
A slow, deliberate unfurling of predatory limbs—like a great cat stretching before the hunt. He rose to his full, commanding height, built like a cathedral of punishment made flesh. When he spoke, his voice was velvet wrapped around a blade's edge:
"Spoken like a prince who's never bled on a real battlefield."
"I have bled," Caelum replied without a tremor, winter-pale eyes never wavering. "Just not on yours."
Velis's lips curved in something that might charitably be called a smile—if smiles could promise such exquisite ruin.
His gaze traveled down Caelum's form with shameless appreciation, cataloguing every vulnerability.
"No. Not mine. Not yet."
The room crystallized into perfect, breathless silence.
An Ashan advisor leaned close to Caelum's ear, his whisper harsh with barely controlled terror: "Your Highness, this is the Butcher of Westmarch. He broke the Iron Alliance with his bare hands. Flayed the Erenthal heir alive before his father's gates. We cannot afford to provoke him."
But Caelum's spine remained unbroken, shoulders squared against the weight of fear.
"Not all his bloodline," he said, his voice carrying across the glass chamber with crystalline clarity. "He left one child breathing. A newborn boy who vanished like smoke before dawn. Me. Perhaps your soldiers weren't as thorough as your reputation suggests, General."
The information had come from his mother's lips during one of their private strategy sessions—whispered like a bedtime story over wine and candlelight. "There are always survivors, darling. Always someone who slips through the cracks. Remember that.”
Velis stepped closer—not a threat, but something far more dangerous. An invitation wrapped in silk and shadow.
The air between them tightened like a rope stretched to breaking.
"Careful, little prince," he murmured, beginning a slow, predatory circle around Caelum's position. "Suggesting I've left work unfinished might make me... curious. I have such an inconvenient obsession with loose ends."
Caelum turned to track his movement, bringing them chest-to-chest in a moment charged with electricity. "Then perhaps you should learn to tie better knots."
Velis paused mid-step. Blinked once, slowly, like a cat savoring cream. A grin unfurled across his mouth like a wound opening to reveal sharp teeth. His voice dropped to a register meant only for Caelum's ears:
"I wonder, my beautiful prince... just how well you hold under pressure?"
"Tighter than you'd ever expect," Caelum shot back, but the faintest flush blooming across his throat betrayed the effect of that intimate whisper.
Orelle's laughter rang through the tension like silver bells over broken glass. "Oh, how absolutely delightful! You two make warfare sound like foreplay. I'm positively trembling with anticipation."
Velis turned from Caelum with deliberate slowness, his gaze dragging like silk scarves over the prince's exposed neck, lingering at the rapid pulse visible beneath pale skin.
"He'll shatter beautifully when the time comes," he said with casual certainty, as if discussing the weather. "They all do, eventually. But this one... might weep first. Such pretty tears he'd shed."
Caelum's breath caught, but he refused to speak. Couldn't—his rage and something infinitely more dangerous had tangled behind his teeth like barbed wire.
He despised how the General's voice curved like a whip-crack.
How those words felt like phantom fingers at his throat, pressure that was almost gentle, almost caring.
Later, in the shadow of the Tribunal's vaulted halls, one of Caelum's advisors finally dared to break the silence:
"Your Highness... you risked the entire Treaty speaking to him that way. If he reports this as provocation—"
Caelum lifted his gaze to the moon visible through stained-glass windows, its light fracturing into bloody fragments across his face.
"I wasn't speaking to him," he said quietly, voice carrying undertones of something his advisor couldn't quite name. "I was warning him."
But his fingers trembled against his sides, and the ghost of Velis's voice still lingered against his skin like heat from a brand not yet pressed to flesh.
*
Chapter 24
Present
His arms gave out with a sickening finality.
Elbows slammed against cold marble—not with a bang, but a dull, intimate thud that somehow rang louder than screams. The kind of sound flesh makes when surrender wins.
His back arched—not from strength, not from pride, but from something far more primal. A body's last, frantic attempt to flee itself. A spine bowing to something it could no longer fight.
No—don’t—
The thought scraped through his skull like a nail dragged over wet glass. Weightless. Fragile. Useless. It slipped from his mind before it ever had a chance to root—disappearing like breath on winter glass.
And the collar knew.
It throbbed with terrible precision, a low, humming growl that pulsed against the skin of his throat. Not punishing now, but something worse—affirming. It responded not to rebellion, but to collapse. It drank in his defeat like nectar.
The pulse slithered down his spine in steady waves, crawling into hollows and seams he didn’t know his body had.
It coiled around the base of his lungs, poured down into the creases behind his knees, seeped into the skin between his fingers.
Everything touched him. Everything hurt.
The air itself stung—ice-cold against fevered flesh, a thousand invisible needles dancing across slick, trembling skin.
Every breath scraped like glass through his throat. Every gaze cut deeper than blades.
He could feel them—those eyes, dozens of them, devouring him in silence. Their hunger pressed against his bare skin like heat from an open furnace.
His muscles spasmed. His teeth clicked. A noise slipped out—choked and thin.
A whimper.
Small. Broken. Real.
That second sound—barely louder than breath—shattered something sacred.
It rippled through the chamber like a tremor through still water. Not a crash. A revelation.
Chairs creaked. Velvet rustled. Fingernails tapped carved wood. Someone exhaled too fast, another drew in a breath that sounded suspiciously close to a moan.
One vampire dragged a tongue across his bottom lip, slow and instinctive. Another bit into her own wrist to muffle the sound of her rising need.
And through it all—Velis didn’t move.
He watched, motionless, carved from stillness itself.
The amber of his eyes burned with cold fire, tracking every twitch of muscle, every breathless shudder.
Not merely observing—cataloguing. Committing Caelum’s unraveling to memory, stroke by shaking stroke.
Caelum was falling apart.
Sweat ran in rivulets down his spine, caught the torchlight like spilled mercury.
His ribs heaved with shallow gasps, too fast, too shallow. His thighs trembled violently—sagging forward into the chain’s unyielding pull.
And then—his legs gave out.
Completely.
The leash yanked taut for a heartbeat, then went slack with a terrible kind of finality. Gravity did the rest.
He collapsed.
Not like royalty. Not like someone who’d ever known power. He crumpled like something discarded.
A puppet with every string cut at once. A prince reduced to skin and breath and nerves misfiring in the open.
His cheek struck marble. Skin flushed and glazed with sweat, hair plastered to his temple.
His mouth parted, but no sound came. His eyes fluttered, rolled back. A low tremor still ran through his limbs like aftershocks.
The collar’s glow dulled—but it didn’t release him. It pulsed softly now. A whisper, not a roar. Not to punish. To remind.
This is what you are now.
This is how you begin.
Only then did Velis move.
One step. Then another. Unhurried. Measured. A predator after the kill, not to feed—but to admire.
He knelt, the long line of his coat sweeping over the floor in a hush of fabric. His gloved hand extended—not to comfort. Not even to claim.
To inspect.
Fingers curled beneath Caelum’s chin, lifting his face from stone—wet, flushed, slack.
His other hand moved with unbearable slowness. The sound of leather pulled tight as he removed his glove.
One finger, bare and cold, slid just inside the curve of Caelum’s lower lip.
Not forcing. Not probing. Marking.
Caelum didn’t flinch. He couldn’t. His eyes twitched beneath the lids, a final spasm running through his thighs.
His body was a map of raw nerves and shattered pride. He couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t even close his mouth. He could only lie there and be felt.
Velis leaned in—so close that only Caelum could hear the words that followed.
“Look what your body remembers,” he whispered, his voice more breath than sound. “Even when your mind begs to forget.”
There was no heat in it. No mockery. Only a quiet wonder. The reverence of a collector admiring something rare. Unrepeatable.
Behind him, the handler finally spoke. “Enough.” His voice was rough. Thick with something closer to awe than authority. “He can’t take more. His mind’s beginning to fracture.”
Velis ignored him.
He reached again—this time not to brand, but to touch.
Fingers brushed Caelum’s temple, pushing back damp hair with the tenderness of a lover. Not out of care. But for the sake of clarity. To see him. All of him.
“This was only the prelude,” he murmured, low and final. “And already, you’re trembling like a leaf in winter wind.”
Caelum didn’t speak. Couldn’t. Not a whisper of defiance remained. No strength to even pretend.
The collar pulsed one last time—soft, like a heartbeat slowing. Its glow faded as if sated, for now.
And at last—blessedly—his eyes closed.
Not in surrender. Not in consent. But in the absolute erasure of everything that had made him Caelum.
Unconsciousness claimed him with the cold arms of mercy, dragging him beneath the surface, into blackness.
And in the silence that followed, even the vampires didn’t dare breathe too loud.
Timeline: The night Queen Isabella Salutregui sent her son—no, her weapon—back to the mother who had forgotten him.
The sky above Ashan bled scarlet that night, though not from warfare. The crimson came from ceremony, from ritual, from the kind of sacrifice that stained souls rather than battlefields.
In the royal solar, Queen Isabella stood sentinel by the arched windows, watching the gilded procession disappear beyond the horizon like a funeral march dressed in silk and lies.
The offering carriage—beautiful and grotesque in equal measure—carried Caelum away beneath layers of ceremonial finery, a lamb disguised as a prince, or perhaps a prince disguised as prey.
She did not weep. She had done that once, twenty years ago when she'd first stolen him from his true mother's arms. It had been sufficient then. It would have to be sufficient now.
"It's done," she whispered to the darkness gathering in the window's reflection. "Let them taste what she abandoned."
Her image in the glass remained steady, composed, regal. But deep in those reflected eyes, the ghost of ancient rage flickered like candlelight in a tomb.
The irony was exquisite—sending Ysoria's own blood back to her as tribute, wrapped in ignorance and ceremony.
Isabella had raised him to be the perfect weapon against his birth mother, never knowing he would one day become the perfect offering instead.
The wheel had come full circle, and Isabella Salutregui finally had her revenge.
