Chapter 179: A meeting with the past.

"Yes," Stanford said.

For several seconds, no one spoke.

The word did not need to be explained. Original portraits from the era of the first sovereigns were not simple oil and canvas, no matter what auction houses pretended when they wanted to sound respectable and harmless. They were painted with ether-burnt pigments, blood-ground minerals, powdered bone from old beasts, and stabilizing threads taken from the subject’s own channel residue. They were not quite alive, but they remembered the power well enough to respond when summoned.

Felix had kept one in his private suite.

Arik’s hand closed at his side, slowly enough that the room did not break from the pressure of it.

"Stanford," he said.

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Get treated."

Stanford’s posture did not change. "After..."

"Now."

The word landed softly.

Stanford stopped.

For a moment, his eyes flicked to Mezos, as if his superior might offer him an honorable escape from obeying the order, but Mezos only stared back with an expression that said very clearly that if Stanford made him argue with another injured idiot today, he would become less professional about it.

Stanford lowered his head. "Yes, Your Highness."

"And then you return to Liam."

That, more than the command to receive treatment, made Stanford’s eyes widen and breath hitch.

"Your Highness?"

Arik did not look toward the bedroom doors this time. The bond remained there, dim and soft, curled inward around an exhaustion so deep even Liam’s stubbornness could not dig its claws into consciousness and drag itself upright.

"Marin says he will sleep no less than ten hours. Kamal is already monitoring him. You will join them after your throat is treated." Arik’s mouth tightened. "If Liam wakes and I am not there, he will ask what happened. You will tell him I am handling Felix’s suite. You will not tell him I almost killed you unless he asks."

Stanford’s bruised throat moved as he swallowed.

Mezos muttered, "He will ask."

"He will," Arik agreed.

Stanford’s voice came out lower. "I will answer him honestly."

"Do what you want."

It was not forgiveness.

Everyone in the room knew that.

Stanford and every Shadow under his command had gotten off lightly for the simple, brutal reason that Liam was alive. Had Liam not been breathing behind those doors and had the bond not been warm beneath Arik’s skin, there would have been no conversation to have, no report to finish, and no treatment to order. There would have only been a prince with golden eyes and a manor full of people who had failed to place themselves between Felix and his mate.

But Liam was alive.

So Arik could be civilized for another few minutes.

He turned away first.

Mezos followed him out of the sitting room, but only until the far corridor that led toward a safe area to teleport. Shadows stood along the walls in silent formation, their faces pale with the restraint men wore when they understood that survival depended on not breathing too loudly near a storm with golden eyes.

At the entrance, Mezos stopped.

Arik looked at him.

"No one disturbs me unless Liam wakes or Felix is found," Arik said.

Mezos’s brow lifted slightly. "And if the room tries to eat you?"

"Then it will choke."

Mezos looked, for one suspended second, like he was considering whether loyalty required him to be more annoying. Then he stepped aside.

"Try not to destroy the entire manor," he said. "Rex will make it paperwork."

Arik’s mouth moved, almost into a smile, but the expression died before it could become anything human.

—

The ether circle rose before Arik, swallowing the diplomatic palace, Mezos, the corridor, and the faint distant warmth of Liam sleeping behind medical wards.

Then Alexandria folded around him.

Canmore Manor waited in another district like a corpse that had not yet accepted death.

The gates were sealed, the gardens black beneath containment lamps, the old stone façade crawling with pale ward-light where Wrohan royal security and Agaron Shadows had layered their authority over Felix’s.

Arik crossed the courtyard without slowing.

Inside, the air still carried Felix even if the purification wards had eaten through most of the poison residue, and the Shadows had sealed the obvious channels.

Arik followed the eastern corridor alone.

The doors to Felix’s private suite opened before him, obedient to Shadow override.

The room beyond was still under stasis.

Every object had been caged in pale ether-glass. The shelves, the old archive cases, the dead ether-blooms arranged like sentimental trophies, the exposed transport ward burned into the floor beneath the removed rug.

Except the portrait.

It sat opposite the door with the stillness of something waiting, and Arik hated, instantly and violently, that Liam had been brought into this room and made to stand before it alone.

Blond hair swept back from a cold, severe face. Gold eyes turned slightly aside, as if even the painter had not dared ask him to look directly at the world for too long. Dark robes heavy with imperial gold. One hand resting elegantly, ready in the way predators were ready even at rest.

Behind his head, a circle of gold burned like a halo.

Felix had wanted Liam to look at the face of a dead emperor and wonder if Arik was only a younger mask placed over something older, hungrier, and unfinished.

Arik stopped before the portrait.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then his right hand twitched. Two fingers, a slight flex near his side, as if they expected the weight of a cane that had never belonged to this body.

Arik looked down at his hand.

The room grew colder.

"No," he said.

The portrait did not answer, but the thing beneath his ribs did.

It rose like pressure under locked doors, old ether pressing upward through the cracks of him, neither foreign nor familiar. Arik felt it in the back of his throat, in the sudden metallic memory of poison, in the agony of channels burning one by one while the mind remained sharp enough to count each failure.

His jaw tightened.

"I said no."

The pressure paused.

Then something inside him laughed without amusement.

Arik’s eyes flashed gold.

The stasis around the portrait trembled.

He had no clear memory of laughing like that. Most of Goliath existed in him as fragments: instincts without origin, knowledge without explanation, reactions that surfaced too quickly to be learned. Amara, Liam, and Felix had dragged a few memories out of him by force. But the rest remained behind a wall Arik had built himself, one careful refusal after another.

He had called it choosing to be Arik.

The old soul called it cowardice.

The word did not sound aloud, and yet Arik heard it so clearly that his hand curled into a fist.

"You don’t get to speak."

Another pulse.

This time it came with an image.

Felix standing beside a table in soft gold light, younger, graceful, and pouring wine. Violet eyes lowered in perfect humility. A mouth curved with a gentleness that only became monstrous in retrospect.

Trust, the old soul remembered.

Arik’s breath went shallow.

The image snapped away, leaving only the portrait, the stasis, the dead flowers, and the burned escape ward beneath his feet.

"You trusted him," Arik said, his voice low.

The old pressure inside him sharpened.

So did you, it seemed to say.

Arik’s head lifted.

"I never trusted Felix."

No. You trusted ignorance.

The suite lights flickered once.

Arik took a step closer to the portrait. "Careful."

The old soul did not retreat.

It had been contained once by poison, by a ruined body, by Olivier’s theft, by death, by rebirth, by a child’s refusal to remember pain that had no place in a nursery. It had slept because Arik had been young, because Damian and Gabriel had loved him fiercely enough to make the present stronger than the past, and because being Arik had been warm and real and violently his.

But it had not vanished.

And now Felix had touched Liam.

Now Felix had reached for what Arik refused to know and used the missing pieces as a road.

"You think I don’t know that?" Arik asked softly.

The portrait’s painted eyes seemed brighter.

Arik hated that too.

He hated the resemblance, the recognition, the way his own ether bent toward the old pigments as if the frame were not a relic but a wound left open. He hated that some part of him knew the pattern of the lower frame before he looked, knew where Felix would hide something if he wanted to use reverence as a lock. He hated most that the knowledge was useful.

That was the hypocrisy.

He had no trouble using Goliath when Goliath gave him strategy.

He had no trouble letting the old instincts rise when they showed him how a room was trapped, how a monarch lied, and how fear moved through soldiers before orders did. He accepted the authority. The memory of war. The old calculations that made danger feel almost boring under his hand.

But when the old soul wanted pain, voice, continuity, and grief, when it wanted to be more than an archive Arik opened only when convenient, he forced it down.

The laugh came again, quieter this time.

Arik’s mouth curved without warmth. "You find this funny?"

No.

The old answer pressed against his pulse.

I find it familiar.

The portrait’s halo flared once.

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