The Duke of Kineart had not slept a single moment before morning came.
He had deployed every last one of his private soldiers to comb through the estate, and the report that returned was a devastating one — it had not been found.
The Duke of Kineart wrenched his bloodshot eyes wide open. Before him knelt a knight, forehead pressed to the floor, trembling violently. It was the commander who had led the search party.
“I have committed a crime worthy of death, Your Grace. Please — please, punish me!”
“Silence!”
The duke brought his cane down hard against the marble floor, and when even that failed to settle the fury churning inside him, he seized a glass of ice water and drank it in deep, furious gulps.
The sound of him grinding ice between his teeth was enough to make a person’s skin crawl.
How dare someone infiltrate my household without an ounce of fear.
The Duke of Kineart seethed at the sheer impossibility of it. There were precious few families in the empire with the audacity — or the capability — to attempt such a thing.
Yet none of them had any reason to make an enemy of the Kineart ducal house.
For generations, his family had produced empresses and held emperors as sons-in-law. What could anyone possibly gain by crossing the Kinearts at the height of their power?
That someone has discovered its existence…
“Could it be.”
The duke had been pacing the grand foyer when he stopped dead in his tracks. The wrinkled hand gripping his cane tightened until his knuckles whitened.
There was one family that had been exhibiting suspicious movements of late.
Those Arachrene wretches.
With their abilities, they could have slipped past even Kineart’s most seasoned knights without leaving so much as a whisper of their presence. One only had to look at the cellar door — the locking mechanism had been severed with startling precision, its cross-section as smooth and clean as polished glass.
No ordinary swordsman could have cut so flawlessly.
But why would the Arachrene family be after it?
The duke’s eyebrow twitched.
The moment his private army had been dismantled, that blade had swung toward both himself and Karla. There was no physical evidence — but he felt it in his gut.
It was not suspicion. It was certainty.
…Karla, you foolish girl. I told you again and again not to touch the Arachrenes. And now it has come to this.
It was a catastrophe on every front.
If the Arachrene family knew of Isierd’s existence, then the throne — so tantalizingly close — had just slipped through their fingers like water.
The duke resolved that he had to inform Karla at once.
“Prepare the carriage. I am going to the palace immediately.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The Duke of Kineart climbed into the carriage without another word.
⁂
“Father — what brings you here at this hour?”
Karla regarded the Duke of Kineart with puzzled eyes as he arrived at the palace at such an early hour of the morning — so early, in fact, that she had not yet finished breakfast.
And his appearance alarmed her. He looked haggard and exhausted, as though something had gone very wrong at the estate.
Karla’s expression turned guarded.
She had never seen her father look quite so terrible.
“Has something happened?”
When she asked, the duke fixed her with a hard stare. The moment he stepped inside the empress’s chambers, he turned to the ladies-in-waiting gathered around them.
“All of you — out.”
The attendants exchanged uncertain glances until Karla gave a slight nod, and they filed silently from the room.
Left alone with his daughter, the duke lowered himself into a chair. The hand wrapped around his cane trembled with the force of his grip.
Karla was an empress now, untouchable in title, and yet — she flinched.
“…Father, what on earth is the matter? Your color is dreadful.”
“What is the matter? You ask me what is the matter?”
“…”
“Someone broke into the estate before dawn.”
Broke in?
The word had no business being spoken, and yet there it was, falling from the Duke of Kineart’s lips. Karla frowned, baffled.
Who in their right mind would dare break into the Kineart ducal estate?
“Was the intruder apprehended? Whose doing was it?”
Karla kept her voice steady as she asked.
The thought that the intruder might have escaped had not even crossed her mind. The Kineart household employed some of the empire’s most formidable knights as its personal guard. Surely men who outstripped even the imperial knights in skill could handle a single infiltrator.
But the answer that came from the duke’s lips was nothing like what she had expected.
“No. We could not catch them.”
“You couldn’t catch them?”
“Worse than that — the intruder took it and vanished!”
The news that it was gone drained every drop of color from Karla’s face in an instant. Her heart plummeted.
“…Could it be the Arachrenes? Was the intruder from the Arachrene family?”
The moment Karla spoke that name aloud, the Duke of Kineart’s eyes sharpened like the edge of a blade.
He understood immediately — his daughter had not told him everything.
If she had, she would not have leaped to Arachrene the very second she heard that it had gone missing.
“Don’t tell me you actually moved against the Arachrenes.”
“…”
“Did I not warn you? I told you to leave them alone — to avoid them at all costs! And now look at what you’ve done!”
With it in Arachrene hands, there was no getting it back. From this day forward, they would have to live with the suffocating dread of not knowing when those people might appear with it in tow.
Karla stood frozen, unable to speak, and the duke felt something inside him burning alive with frustration.
“It never should have been born in the first place. How could you let something so lowly come into this world?!”
The fact that they had taken it away meant one thing — someday, they intended to bring it before the eyes of the world.
Karla stared at her father as he laid the blame squarely at her feet, and she bit down hard on her lower lip.
After a long, still moment, she lifted her head and spoke, forcing down the roiling emotion in her chest.
“…I had no choice. You know that.”
She had spent weeks drowning in stress, stretched so thin that she felt one small push might shatter her entirely. She clenched her teeth.
The Duke of Kineart’s eyebrows arched sharply upward.
He would not tolerate his daughter showing him anything resembling emotion.
No matter that she now sat upon the throne of the empress — every step, every rung of that ascent had been built and laid by his own hand.
“I handed it all to you on a silver platter, and you still managed to ruin everything. You foolish girl.”
“But His Majesty — His Majesty has never once looked at me the way he—!”
Karla choked on the words and snapped her mouth shut. The humiliation of having to say it at all made her feel wretched to the bone.
The emperor had never once truly seen her.
He had always been drawn to people who seemed exceptional, extraordinary — and before the emperor, Karla Kineart was nothing more than one of countless noble daughters, entirely unremarkable.
The emperor harbored an inferiority he could never quite bury toward the Arachrene family — and along with it, a deep and undisguised fascination with the woman who had been chosen to become that household’s mistress. With Yerena.
With her — the woman who had been Karla’s oldest friend since childhood.
“His Majesty has never once looked my way. Not once has he sought me out of his own accord. You know this — you have always known!”
“Lower your voice this instant! Do you want someone to hear you?!”
The Duke of Kineart shot a sharp look around the room before raising his voice.
“That matter must never pass your lips, no matter what. Do you understand me?”
“…”
“If it ever comes to light that the crown prince’s bloodline is in question, it will be the end of us both — of everything!”
That the emperor had never once sought Karla out was a secret that had to be carried to the grave.
Karla’s tears had just begun to surface when a voice broke through the silence.
“…What exactly is all of this, Mother?”
It was early morning.
Adrian had heard that the Duke of Kineart had arrived at the palace, and he had come to the empress’s chambers to suggest a rare family breakfast together — the first in a long while.
He had just stepped through the door when the words inside reached him, and he stopped where he stood, utterly still.
“A problem with my bloodline…?”
