Chapter 10: The Cousin 1
LYSANDER
I knew the voice before I finished turning around.
Johann lingered in the library doorway, hands buried in his pockets, collar askew, the embodiment of someone who could rush and still command a room. Ownership radiated from him, as if every inch of space had been crafted for his entrance. His gaze swept the room, cataloguing its contents, before settling on me with a mask of deliberate emptiness.
"Cousin," he said. Not warmly.
"Johann."
He walked in.
The sentinels stepped aside for Johann as they had for me, and I watched him glide across the library with the unhurried assurance of someone raised to believe rooms anticipated his arrival. He seemed taller than I recalled, though perhaps grief distorts memory. His father lay just feet away, shrouded, and Johann passed by without a pause, without a glance, betraying nothing of the history beneath that sheet—the lessons, the hand-holding, the legacy.
He stopped in front of her.
She remained kneeling, wolfsbane rope biting her wrists, platinum hair spilling in the harsh light like a silent accusation. She looked up at Johann with a familiar expression—a person bracing to be made an example, scanning the room for one face that might disrupt the inevitable.
Johann looked down at her the way you looked at something you had already decided the value of.
Then his hand shot out and closed around her throat.
A brief, involuntary sound escaped her as her bound hands strained against the rope. Johann crouched, meeting her eyes, his grip tightening with calculated precision.
"Criminals," he said, his voice pleasant and conversational, "do not deserve the air we breathe." He tilted his head slightly. "But you will confess. One way or another, you will tell this room exactly what you did and why, and then we will discuss what comes next."
Every muscle in my body pulled tight at once.
My wolf surged forward before I could name the impulse—a rush toward the door, toward Johann, toward his hand on her throat. I caught it by reflex, barely. I anchored myself, gripping the nearest chair, steadying my breath, refusing to cross the room. Moving now would answer every silent question Johann’s eyes hurled at me when they found mine above her head.
He saw me holding still. Something in his expression settled, satisfied.
I let go of the chair.
Her face deepened in color as she fought to control her response, denying him the satisfaction of futile struggle, refusing to collapse. She held herself upright with the fierce resolve of someone determined not to give the room the spectacle it craved.
"I didn’t do it," she said. The words came out compressed and rough, but they came out. She found my face across the room and held it. "I didn’t kill him. You have to believe me." Her eyes stayed on mine, not Johann’s, not the captain’s. Mine. "It was two of them. Assassins. Both masked. One of them had a scar, here," she pulled at the rope trying to bring her hand up and failing, "from the corner of the mouth to the ear. A long one. Deliberate. They shot the King, and they put the gun in my hand before they ran."
Johann released her throat and straightened up.
He faced the room, wearing a mask of exaggerated, almost performative fatigue.
"I heard all I needed to hear about this girl on my way here," he said. "She lied about her name. She lied about her identity. She lied about her gender and walked into my father’s home under false documentation and false pretenses." He spread his hands. "And now she would like us to believe her account of two mysterious masked assassins." He looked at the captain. "Take her to holding."
"She’s telling the truth." The words were out of my mouth before I had fully decided to say them.
The room went quiet.
Johann turned back to me slowly. "I am sorry, cousin. But why should I give a damn about what you think?"
"I do not know, cousin. I... I just... well... it is just that I find it odd," I said, "that you’re here."
"My father is dead, Lysander. Why would it be odd?"
"Your father died hours ago. The bells rang twenty minutes ago. You are dressed, you are present, and you walked into this room without looking at his body." I held his gaze and kept my voice level. "I find that odd."
Something moved through Johann’s expression. Fast, and then gone.
"Grief takes people differently," he said.
"It does."
We looked at each other.
The captain cleared her throat. "The prisoner—"
"Take her," Johann said, without looking away from me.
They hauled her up. I listened to the struggle, the resistance, the ragged breath, and kept my eyes averted—watching would have been its own confession, and I was not ready for that. The bond stretched as she left, not painful but insistent, a steady tug in my chest that no one here could understand.
The sentinels departed. The body followed. The library drained slowly, leaving only Johann, me, and the aftermath—the scattered furniture, the stained rug, the overhead lights casting their cold judgment on it all.
Johann sat down behind the desk.
His father’s desk.
He sat in his father’s chair with the ease of a man settling into something that had always belonged to him, and he looked at me across the surface of it, and I looked back.
It made me think about what his father had said before this tragedy.
"Do you actually believe," I said, "that a girl trapped in wolfsbane rope killed your father?"
"I believe the evidence."
"You believe what is convenient."
"Lysander." He said my name in the patient tone of someone explaining something to someone who was being deliberately slow. "She was found with the weapon. She was found in the room. She had no legitimate reason to be in this estate. She is a rogue, unregistered, operating under a stolen identity. The evidence does not require my belief. It exists independently of it."
"She described a scar."
"Criminals invent details. It makes the fiction more convincing."
I drew out the chair opposite him and sat, knowing that looming over Johann would send the wrong message. We regarded each other. Our childhoods had run parallel—close enough for familiarity, distant enough for formality, like neighboring nations negotiating. I had never hated Johann, but trust had always been elusive, and now I wondered if those feelings could ever truly coexist.
Given all that had happened, all that uncle said, and how he was acting now.
Comments