Arik showered because there were rituals that made men feel less like disasters pretending to wear skin.

The water was cold.

It did not help.

He stood beneath it for several minutes, one hand braced against the stone wall, dark hair falling wet over his forehead as his body cooled and his mind very much did not. Liam’s scent was still on him, in him, under the skin in places water could not touch. Saint’s breath, pale and clean and impossible to mistake, clung to his wrists, his neck, his chest.

The bond did not care for water either.

It hummed low inside him, smug and warm and terribly awake.

By the time Arik stepped out, the first grey light of morning had begun to press against the curtains, thin and quiet, not yet strong enough to be called day. He dried his hair enough that it would not drip over his collar, then dressed with the careful mechanical effort of someone who had learned young that looking composed was often more important than being composed.

Dark blue shirt. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Cream trousers.

Brown belt.

Watch on his wrist.

A very acceptable image of a crown prince who had not recently considered ignoring the empire because his mate looked too soft asleep in his bed.

Arik rolled his sleeves to his elbows without thinking.

Then he saw the mark

Liam’s mark.

Arik stared at it for a long second.

His mouth twitched.

Then, just as quickly, the feeling sank into something heavier.

Because beyond the door, beyond the room, beyond Liam’s sleeping warmth and the lingering scent of sex and saint’s breath and warm stone, Kamal was waiting with the sort of news Arik had been refusing to hear even before it existed.

Amara was awake.

Not flickering in and out of consciousness. Not half-dreaming through fever. Awake.

For the first time in weeks, she had remained awake for more than an hour and seemed capable of speaking.

Kamal had said it calmly, with that careful expression of his, the one that had served emperors, ghosts, and ruins.

Arik had almost said no.

The refusal rose so fast inside him that it felt like instinct.

’No.’

He did not want to see her.

He did not want to stand in front of the girl who had been Goliath’s daughter without being his blood. He did not want to look at her and wait for some buried part of him to know what to do. He did not want to feel nothing. He did not want to feel too much.

That was the ugliest part.

He was not cruel. He knew that. He was not a man who could look at a wounded woman and resent her for surviving. Amara had done nothing wrong. Amara had been dragged through the wreckage of a dead emperor’s life simply because that emperor had loved her enough for the wrong person to remember.

And Goliath had loved her.

Goliath had loved Amara like a daughter. Fiercely. Quietly. Perhaps badly, because Goliath had not been a man left with many soft things by the end, but the love had been there. Arik knew, like he knew the shape of a blade before he touched it.

That was what made it unbearable.

Arik crossed the room and opened one of the windows carefully, only a narrow crack, enough to let the cold morning breathe in but not enough for the sudden grey light to fall over Liam’s face.

Liam did not wake.

He was still asleep beneath the sheets, long, brown hair a mess, one bare shoulder visible, his scent still spilling through the room with the shameless intimacy of someone who had no idea how violently he had rearranged Arik’s life.

Arik looked back at him.

For one absurd moment, the answer to everything seemed simple.

’Close the window. Return to bed and fuck everything else.’

Arik exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh, except there was no amusement in it.

The thought was not noble, but it was honest, and perhaps that made it worse. He wanted to return to the heat of the bed, to the stubborn man sleeping in it, to the bond that had not yet learned the difference between comfort and possession. He wanted to put his mouth against Liam’s shoulder and let the world narrow until there was nothing left but skin, breath, scent, and the steady evidence that at least one thing in his life had chosen him without needing the dead to explain why.

That was the problem, wasn’t it?

Liam had chosen Arik.

Not Goliath.

Not the emperor buried under ruins and old ether. Not the man whose hatred had apparently been powerful enough to claw through the rules of rebirth like they were suggestions written by someone he disliked. Not the ghost-shaped truth sitting somewhere beneath Arik’s skin, waiting with all its grief intact.

Arik looked down at his wrist again.

The mark was still there, clean and deliberate, a little too visible with his sleeve rolled up.

Liam had put it there first.

Not by accident. Not because of court pressure, imperial politics, or some ancient alignment of the Ether Core that made everything sound like destiny when in truth it was just disaster wearing ceremonial robes.

Liam had marked him because Liam, in all his sharp, impossible, infuriating clarity, had wanted him.

Arik should have found peace in that.

Instead, it made the fear worse.

’What if Liam had chosen a lie?’

’No, not a lie.’

Arik’s jaw tightened at the thought. He was not false. His childhood had been his. His father’s hand on his shoulder had been real. Gabriel’s dry, amused voice teaching him to read a room before speaking had been real. His siblings, his training, his first bloodied knuckles, his first formal command, the terrible weight of realizing that one day the Empire would not ask whether he was ready before placing itself in his hands—all of it had been real.

Arik Lyon was not a mask.

But Goliath had not been a dream either.

That was where the ugliness lived.

He was not some victim of possession.

He was not carrying a dead emperor the way a man might carry a curse, a second shadow, an unwanted parasite with old memories and inconvenient grief. If that had been the case, it would have been easier. He could have hated Goliath cleanly. He could have separated himself from the man, put him in a sealed room inside his mind, and visited only when strategy demanded it.

But there was no room.

There was only him.

Arik, who loved Liam.

Goliath, who had loved Amara.

Arik, who had Damian’s blood, Gabriel’s lessons, and an empire waiting for his eventual ascension.

Goliath, who had once held another empire together with spite, duty, and hands that had probably forgotten how to be gentle long before the end.

He wondered if Goliath had known what he was doing when he forced himself back into the cycle. Wondered if there had been thought in that hatred or only instinct, only the refusal to let Felix, Olivier, and every coward who had eaten Nuria from within have the final word. The Ether Core was not supposed to be manipulated by a soul in pieces. Rebirth had order. Distance. Time. A natural dulling of old pain before a soul returned clean enough to survive itself.

Goliath had apparently looked at that order and decided it did not apply to him.

There was something almost admirable in that.

There was something monstrous too.

Arik’s hand tightened on the window frame until the old wood gave the smallest complaint.

He did not know which part frightened him more: that Goliath had hated so much, or that Arik understood why.

Because when he thought of Felix’s poison, of Amara’s suffering, of Kamal’s patient loyalty twisted into decades of survival, of the erased names and broken histories and the dead whose only crime had been standing too close to an emperor someone wanted hollowed out, the rage that answered inside him was not foreign.

It rose too easily.

It knew the path.

Arik closed his eyes.

’Was that memory?’

’Or character?’

Liam breathed in his sleep behind him, soft and utterly unaware of Arik standing by the window, quietly dismantling himself before breakfast.

The sound steadied him more than it should have.