Archduchess Leone stood amidst the rubble without moving, as though she belonged there more than anywhere else in the world.
For a mont, neither of them spoke. The silence between them felt old, older than the ruins, older than the fire that had devoured the mansion and left only blackened bones behind. It was the kind of silence that did not ask to be broken. It simply waited, heavy with everything that had never been said.
Edric’s gaze moved slowly over the shattered remains around them. The broken stone. The collapsed arches. The scorched fragnts of what had once been a grand hall. Then, eventually, his eyes returned to Leone.
"Of all places," he said quietly, "you chose here."
The Archduchess did not answer at once.
The last light of evening brushed the edge of her hood with a pale silver glow, making her appear almost carved from the sa dusk that lingered over the ruins.
"This is where it began," she said at last.
Her voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that ca only after grief had been carried for so long that it had stopped feeling like an emotion and beco part of the body itself. Edric studied her in silence, and the wind moved between them again, stirring ash that had long since lost its heat.
Leone turned away from him and walked slowly toward the center of the ruin. Her gloved fingers hovered over a burned remnant of a tallic portrait fra before she touched it with sothing close to reverence. For a brief mont, she looked less like an archduchess and more like a woman standing in the ruins of her own mory.
"Do you believe in reincarnation, Spymaster?" Leone asked.
Her hand curled around the fra as though she ant to lift it, though the object resisted her. The tal had warped in the fire, and ti had only made it more stubborn.
Edric’s answer ca without hesitation. He did not believe in souls wandering back to inhabit new lives. He believed that when a soul left this world, it returned to its creator and remained there. The dead did not co back. They were not sent again. That was what he had always believed.
Leone turned then, and when she looked at him, her expression was quiet in a way that unsettled him more than anger ever could. There was sothing almost pitying in her eyes, sothing that made him feel, absurdly, like a child who had not yet learned how cruel the world could be.
"Ah," she said softly, with a faint, resigned exhale that carried the strange affection of soone looking at a naïve and unseasoned soul. "How fortunate you are."
Edric frowned, disturbed despite himself, but he remained where he was.
Leone’s gaze dropped back to the fra in her hands.
"There is one person he loved most," she said, and this ti her voice changed. It grew quieter, rougher at the edges. "His Leveret."
Her fingers trembled as she spoke, and when she brushed the fra with her thumb, it was almost tender. Almost reverent.
"I did my best to conceal it," she continued, her mouth tightening with old pain, "but this ruin... this ruin was the price. The centuries-long history of the Caelvaris family. All of it was destroyed by him."
Edric’s heart gave a hard, sudden beat.
He stepped forward before he quite realized he was moving.
This was the first ti he had ever heard her say it aloud. If this had been hidden even from the Vantaris family, then it was no ordinary secret. It was sothing buried deep enough that the earth itself had chosen to keep it.
"Lucien?" he asked, and the disbelief in his voice was impossible to hide.
The Archduchess gave a faint, almost weary nod.
Edric felt his mouth go dry.
The Archduke had burned his own family’s mansion? He was always eccentric, but what made him go as far as to ruin his own heritage?
The thought seed impossible, and yet the ruin around them offered no contradiction. The shattered stone, the unnatural violence of the destruction, the way even the walls seed to have exploded outward from within. It had not been the work of an outside enemy. It had been sothing much more intimate. Much more terrible.
"All for his Leveret," Leone said, her voice threaded now with a bitterness that had clearly been sharpened over the years. "The day she left him."
Edric’s eyes moved back to the portrait fra.
Up close, amid the dust and ash and the stains left by ti, it looked different. The glass was gone, and the image beneath was obscured by the years, but enough remained for the outline of a face to erge. The shape of hair. The turn of a cheek. The suggestion of features worn soft by fire and distance.
His breath caught.
He stared harder, unwilling to trust what he was seeing.
And then the truth settled over him with a force so sudden it made him stagger back.
"No way," he murmured, his eyes widening.
His gaze snapped back to Leone.
"Is that...?"
Leone let out a long breath, the kind that ca after carrying a burden too long and too silently. His reaction was enough for her to confirm her suspicion.
"So tell , Spymaster," she said, her eyes fixed on him now with deadly seriousness, "what do you know about her?"
Edric’s expression hardened at once.
He looked at Leone, and this ti there was no softness left in him. His hands curled into fists at his sides, the skin over his knuckles tightening as though his body had already braced itself for the answer before his mind had finished forming the question.
Whatever he knew, whatever he suspected, whatever had just begun to align in the dark, he understood at once that this was no ordinary girl they were speaking of.
And sohow, that realization was the most unsettling thing of all.
"You will not touch her, Leone," Edric said. "You’ve already done enough. Your jealousy has already done enough."
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