Chapter 285: Different Dynamic
"Bro."
Roarke truly wanted nothing to do with this. Not because he had anything better to do, he didn’t, but well... because he felt unbelong. This was the Dawnoro Family’s trip. Though just the father and son.
Roarke had no place here.
He caught Arkai’s eye. His voice dropped to a whisper, his mouth barely moving, his expression helpless, running out of excuses.
"Add bonus to my salary."
Arkai’s face didn’t change. His hand moved between their seats, his fingers forming the ok sign as if signing a treaty.
Roarke sat back. Crossed his arms. Accepted his fate.
The carriage lurched forward. The wheels began to turn. The Dawnoro estate receded behind them, and Roarke Raul, right-hand man to the heir, unwilling participant in a family trip he had no stake in, watched the walls disappear and wondered what, exactly, he had just signed up for.
Across from him, August finally opened his eyes.
"Good," August said. "You’re both awake."
Roarke straightened imdiately. His spine went rigid. His hands dropped to his knees. After all, he had spent years learning exactly how to sit in the presence of his lord.
Arkai, beside him, did not react at all.
His face was calm. His posture was relaxed, almost lazy, one arm draped along the window ledge, his legs stretched out before him.
His eyes were fixed on his father like he had been waiting for this conversation for a very long ti. He knew exactly what was coming. And he was not, by any asure, going to make it easy.
August’s gaze moved between them. It lingered on Roarke for a mont, long enough for Roarke to feel the weight of it. Perhaps August needed him to rember that he had been his lord for as long as he could rember, and to feel the old instinct to bow rise in his chest.
"Father." Arkai interrupted, cutting through the carriage’s silence. "Stop intimidating my people."
August’s eyes snapped to him. "Your people?" He scoffed incredulously. "Who are paid with my money?"
Arkai didn’t stutter when he answered. "If we are given salary equivalent to what we actually do for this family," he said, "mine will be more than yours."
The carriage went silent.
Roarke’s mouth dropped open. August’s face went through several shades. Red, white, the particular purple of a man who had just been told, very politely, that his son was worth more than him. By his own son.
"You—!" August’s hand shot out, pointing, his voice rising—
"Who’s the handso boy who attracted Cecilia Araceli to side with us again?" Arkai’s voice didn’t change. His thumb and forefinger frad his chin.
August’s hand dropped.
"This shaless—" He pressed his fingers to his temples. Breathed in. Breathed out. He needed to rember that he was the adult here. The parent. The one who had raised this insufferable, impossible, correct child.
"I have questions," he said finally, holding himself back by the thinnest of threads. "About your fiancée."
Arkai shrugged. "I assud."
Roarke sat between them, inside a carriage that was suddenly too small. He wondered if the bonus he had negotiated was going to be enough.
It was not going to be enough.
Roarke had known sothing was wrong when Sienna left.
Not left like a student transferring. Left, like being removed. One day her na was on the dormitory roster. The next, it was gone. Erased. Like it had never been written.
He hadn’t asked. That was the rule, in houses like the Dawnoros. You didn’t ask about the things that disappeared, or the silences that fell over dinner tables. You didn’t ask about the rooms that were suddenly empty, the servants who were suddenly gone, the nas that were suddenly not spoken.
Even one as loved as Miss Sienna, the Snowflower was.
So he hadn’t asked. He had watched the household close ranks around the absence, watched August’s face grow harder and Ines’s eyes grow redder, watched the servants move quieter, faster, careful.
He had watched Arkai, especially, and Arkai had been... calm. Too calm.
He figured it might be the kind of calm that ca from decisions already made and weights already carried. You know, from a world that had already shifted and settled into sothing new.
But he knew he was wrong now. Sothing else had changed. He still didn’t know what, but he just knew that he was wrong.
Because on a night when the estate was quiet and the stars were out, when Arkai got his very first suspension in the history of Arkai Dawnoro, and Roarke had been sitting in Arkai’s study, pretending to organize papers...
Arkai told him everything.
The drugs and the locked room. Everything Sienna had done.
He sat in Arkai’s study, and he listened, and he felt the world rearrange itself around him.
The Young Miss. Sienna.
The girl who had been quiet, sweet and careful. The girl who had smiled at him in hallways, who had asked about his days and made him feel like maybe he was sothing more than the boy who followed the heir around.
He only had good impression on her. She made him feel... appreciated.
But this was what Arkai told him.
Shocked was an understatent. Roarke was appalled. To hear that his best firend had been through such horrible things.
But more shocking was the way Arkai had trusted him with this information. With the kind of truth that could destroy a house, a na and a legacy. Had sat across from him in the lamplight and laid the ugliest parts of his life at Roarke’s feet and said, I need you to know.
Because you’re my Brother.
Roarke had not known what to do with that.
Now, watching Arkai in the carriage, Roarke confird his suspicion. He was wrong to think that Arkai had changed because of the incident. Sothing more fundantal had changed.
This deffinitely not the slow, creeping change of years and the hardening that ca from carrying weight after weight after weight before it all collapsed. This was sothing else.
Roarke watched his friend, answering his father’s question about that girl, one by one, patiently, without a shred of nervousness or sense of guilt.
Then, Arkai caught him looking. One eyebrow rose. "What?"
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