Caelum had kept a record. Not a written one. He wasn’t careless enough for that. But he kept one in his head the way he kept everything, in neat rows, dated, cross-referenced against what ca before it.
He had a complete picture of Lena, built on small observations.
The tea was the first thing he noticed. Three months into her service, the taste had changed in a way that was difficult to na.
Just different in the way that sothing is different when sothing has been added to it that wasn’t there before.
He had set the cup down and looked at it for a mont and then picked it up and finished it, because he was Curious.
It took him a full year to understand what it was. But he didn’t care, nor did he ever stop taking the dose of poison. The doses were consistent at first, but soon they began to appear even in his food.
Yet he never raised his voice. He simply consud them for reasons unknown, letting her continue whatever she was doing.
He sat at his desk now with a book open in front of him that he wasn’t reading. Outside the window the grounds were dark. Lena had gone to bed an hour ago. The estate was quiet.
He thought about the morning.
She had served his tea at the usual ti, set it within reach, and left without a word. He had looked at the cup after she was gone.
He had picked it up and held it and done what he had been doing every morning which was nothing. He had just held it and eventually set it back down and waited for the feeling to pass.
The tea was clean now. Had been since he ca back from the capital trip. Whatever she had been putting in it was gone and the absence was so complete that it was almost more noticeable than the presence had been.
He hadn’t said anything. He wasn’t going to say anything. But he was thinking about it constantly.
The capital trip had been necessary. Three weeks with a physician who specialized in long-term ingestion cases, a man who asked no questions because Caelum had paid him enough not to.
The treatnt was unpleasant and slow and the physician had told him plainly that another six months of the sa compound would have started doing things that couldn’t be reversed. He had listened to this information and nodded and traveled back to Ashfen.
He hadn’t told anyone. The court knew he had gone for training purposes, which was vague enough to be useless to anyone trying to understand it. Nobody at court thought about him enough to investigate further. That was one of the few advantages of being the prince nobody watched.
He turned a page he hadn’t read.
The poison itself was high grade. That was the part that had taken him the longest to accept, not because it surprised him that soone wanted him dead but because of what high grade ant.
It wasn’t sothing that could be sourced locally. It wasn’t sothing an ordinary person could obtain. So it was clear that Lena couldn’t have gotten her hands on it on her own. That led him to a simple conclusion, soone had planted her.
Whoever had placed Lena in his household had resources, patience, and a specific interest in his death, enough to invest many years in it.
He had spent a long ti thinking about who that was. He had so ideas. He wasn’t certain enough about any of them yet.
What he couldn’t place was the change.
Lena had stopped. Not gradually, not a reduction in frequency or quantity. She had simply stopped, clean and complete, right around the ti he returned from the capital. He had walked back through the gate and she had been standing there with the reins of his horse and her face had been the sa as it always was, composed and attentive, and yet sothing about the quality of her attention was different.
He had noticed it imdiately. He noticed most things imdiately. He just rarely showed that he had.
She was quieter than she used to be. Not in volu, Lena had always been a quiet person, but in a different way, like soone listening to a room they had just walked into for the first ti.
She moved through the estate with the sa efficiency she always had but there was sothing underneath it now that felt different. Like she was asuring distances she already knew.
He closed the book.
The question that kept returning to him was not why she had been trying to kill him. He understood that well enough. People were placed and given instructions and they followed them. That was how these things worked. The question was simpler and stranger than that.
She had stopped.
She had stopped and she hadn’t left and she hadn’t done anything to indicate she was planning to leave, and she was still serving his als and managing his household and standing at his gate in the evening when he ca ho and the tea was just tea now.
He didn’t know what to do with that.
He got up from the desk and went to the window. The hills to the east were black against a slightly less black sky.
Sowhere past them was the Veth estate and the pest problem he had given her as a reason to leave for two days, which he had arranged partly because Lord Harren had genuinely asked and partly because he needed to think without her in the building.
It was easier to think when she wasn’t there.
He saw his reflection in the window. At first glance, he looked almost human, strikingly so. His face was sharply sculpted, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw that gave him an air of quiet authority.
Dark hair fell loosely around his face, framing eyes that seed far too intense for any ordinary man. They glowed faintly, like embers hidden beneath ash, hinting at sothing ancient and dangerous beneath his calm exterior.
His skin was pale but flawless, smooth as polished marble, while a pair of subtle, curved horns rose from his temples, blending into his hair as though they had always belonged there. When he smiled, the faint edge of sharpened canines showed behind his lips.
There was an unnatural elegance to him, every movent graceful, every feature perfectly balanced.
Beautiful, in a way that felt wrong. The kind of beauty that made people stare... and then rember, too late, that he was not human at all, but a demon prince.
He moved away from the window, still thinking about what had made Lena change and how he was going to deal with it.
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