"Cigarettes?"

Gustav furrowed his brows as he read a message from Lukas. It was short, but clear.

Lucian wasn’t terminally ill. He had been poisoned — and the poison was possibly in his cigarettes. Cigarettes Lucian had quit a long time ago.

"Hah," Gustav scoffed and pushed himself out of his chair.

He marched straight from his office to Lukas’s department. The moment he opened the door, everyone was busy. Lukas was leaning against one of the cubicle partitions, eyes fixed on an employee’s screen.

"Pull that person in, no matter what," Lukas ordered, then looked up and caught Gustav in the doorway.

A sharp exhale left him. He glanced around the room. "Find out everything about the brand of cigarettes — who handled it and where it passed through before it reached the Master’s hands."

"Yes, sir!" the room answered in unison.

Gustav tilted his head, watching Lukas move toward him.

"That was quick," he noted.

"Is that surprising?" Lukas arched a brow.

In a way, it was. Lukas hadn’t been himself lately — throwing his attitude around, doing little else. But this was the Lukas Gustav knew: sharp and efficient.

Lukas clicked his tongue and walked off. Gustav smacked his lips, cast one last look over the humming department, and followed him into his office.

"I’ve already started a full-scale investigation," Lukas said, breaking the silence as he stepped up onto the small platform in the corner to put on some tea. "We have a few leads. Our supplier overlaps with the brand in question. They haven’t been cleared yet, but we’re focusing on everyone who handled the packaging."

"That’s going to be a lot of ground to cover," Gustav said, knowing the brand Lucian had smoked was a large corporation.

It would be complicated. Lucian had been a chain smoker. They would have to trace manufacturing dates, who worked those dates, who touched the deliveries, and whether the tampering happened during transport or after the product was already inside Dominion.

Lukas didn’t respond, and Gustav studied him from the couch.

"I suppose it won’t feel like that much work to you," Gustav said. "Given your current state of mind."

Lukas snorted, cutting him a sideways glance. "I’ll send you the report. Forward it to her."

"Don’t bother." Gustav rose. "Send it to her yourself."

Lukas frowned. "Gustav."

"Lukas, I don’t know what your hesitation is — you’re alive right now because of her," Gustav said evenly. "She had no obligation to you or me. If anything, she had every reason to side with the High Chamber. And yet she came."

He held Lukas’s gaze. "Report to her directly. The Master won’t be handling anything until he’s fully recovered."

With that, Gustav walked out, confident everything was in capable hands.

Left alone, Lukas could only stare at the closed door. His jaw tightened. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Damn it," he breathed, then dropped onto the couch and tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling.

"It’s not that I don’t understand," he muttered. "She came for us even when she had every reason not to. I know that." He paused. "And yet..."

He swallowed and draped his arm over his eyes, exhaling slowly.

He was grateful to be alive. Genuinely. But a part of him couldn’t silence the thought that it might have been simpler to die — because living meant facing the fact that a person as proud as himself had let love and duty blur together until he couldn’t tell them apart. And that it had cost him.

Now he had to sit with a kind of pain he had never thought himself capable of feeling.

*****

Lucian was quiet, staring blankly at the road ahead. When Ashley suggested the poison might have been in the cigarettes he used to smoke, a great many things moved through his mind at once.

Being poisoned was not a surprise to him.

It was, after all, the same method he had used on the late Madam of Dominion. Small doses, worked into her favorite flowers and tea. Enough to let her suffer before the end rather than go quickly. To think that what had nearly killed him was almost the same thing — karma, it seemed, had a long memory.

"Lucian."

He came back to himself and realized they had stopped in a parking lot. He turned to Ashley, who was watching him with a small smile.

"I’ve been staring at you for exactly five minutes," she said. "What are you thinking about? The cigarettes?"

He exhaled. "No. Something else."

She tilted her head, waiting. That was far too vague.

"How the late Madam of Dominion died," he said. "I should have known someone would eventually do the same to me."

Ashley blinked, then her brows drew together. "Didn’t she die of an illness? Something natural?"

"No."

"What?" she breathed.

Her whole life — both the first and this one — she had believed the late Madam died of natural causes. Everyone did. This was the first time she was hearing otherwise.

She was still trying to absorb it, already wondering how much more she hadn’t known from her first life, when Lucian continued.

"I poisoned her."

She flinched. Her breath caught. Her eyes widened as she stared at him.

Lucian, expression unchanged, held her gaze. "Please don’t judge."

"I’m not judging."

"Your eyes have their own subtitles."

Ashley cleared her throat and shifted slightly in her seat, her expression caught somewhere between conflict and discomfort.

"Is that a problem for you?" he asked, mildly concerned. He had said it so plainly that her reaction only now registered.

"No?"

"Then why do you look like you didn’t want to hear that?"

Ashley clicked her tongue and sighed. She rested her arm over the steering wheel and looked at him with the same unreadable expression.

"It’s not that I don’t like it or like it," she said. "More like... good for you." Another sigh escaped her. "I’m jealous, is what I’m saying."

She dramatically let her head fall against the window. "I keep wondering when I’ll get to deal with Marshal."

"..." Lucian blinked, studying her profile.

Ashley arched a brow and turned to him. "What? Don’t judge."

"I’m not judging," he said, almost immediately.

"Then why do you look like that?"

Lucian cleared his throat, choosing his words carefully.

"I’m just thinking... we’re..."

"Fucked up?" Ashley finished, watching him look back at her.

They stared at each other... and then the corners of their mouths gave way, and she broke first, dissolving into laughter. He followed.

In the middle of it, something caught their attention.

A figure standing directly in front of their car.

"Hey!"

Ashley’s laughter tapered off as she looked up through the windshield — and went still when the person stopped in his tracks and stared back at them.

"Shit," she breathed.

Because the person standing in front of their car, squinting at them through the glass, looking utterly haggard and out of it, was Julian.