Chapter 17: Bastard 2
LYSANDER
The room went very still.
"What are you implying." His voice had dropped low, quiet in a way that was somehow worse than shouting.
"I told you. Ask your mother."
Johann stared at me, and for a moment I watched him actually consider it, watched the wheels turn behind his eyes as he ran the accusation forward to its logical end and tried to decide whether it was possible. Then he laughed. It came out dark and short, no real humor in it anywhere.
"If that is genuinely what my father believed," he said, "if that is what pushed him to gut his own will three weeks before someone put a bullet in his chest, then I will fight it. In front of the full council if I have to. I will not be erased on the basis of some deathbed accusation you claim he whispered to you alone in a room with no witnesses."
"Expose yourself," I said. "And your mother? In front of the full council? That’s your plan?"
"I am not a fucking bastard." The words came out sharp enough to draw blood on their own. "I have his blood in me. Royal blood. Same as you, cousin, whether you care to admit it or not."
I looked at him for a long moment, at the true fury sitting raw and unguarded on his face for the first time since he’d walked into this library this morning, and something in me decided to press harder instead of easing off.
"You’ve been acting like a cold bastard since the moment you arrived here," I said. "No grief for your father’s body. No hesitation putting your hand around an innocent girl’s throat within an hour of his death."
"I’m supposed to smile and shit with the girl who killed my—"
"She is an Omega! In what world would that be possible? You have been Nothing but calculating about the will and the chair." I let that sit before I finished it. "Is that how badly you wanted the throne, Johann? Badly enough that when he implied he was changing his mind or maybe you even found out, you decided to make sure he never got the chance to follow through?"
"What the fuck."
He shoved me. Hard, both hands flat against my chest, hard enough that I stumbled back a full step before catching myself against the edge of the desk.
"Are you asking if I killed my own father?" His voice cracked on the word father, the first genuine break I’d heard from him all morning. "Is that what you’re standing there implying, in the room where his body was lying an hour ago?"
"I’m sure everyone with half a brain is already thinking it," I said, and I kept my voice level even as his hands curled into fists at his sides. "Your father changes his mind. Cuts you and your mother out entirely. You find out, and you’re furious, and before he can actually follow through and announce it to the world, you make sure he never gets the chance. Must suck that you weren’t fast enough."
"Not everyone is as heartless as you." His eyes were bright with something dangerous, something that wanted very badly to hit me and was doing the arithmetic on whether it could win that exchange. "We both know that, don’t we, cousin."
I let that pass without comment. Whatever he thought he knew, whatever ugly little theory he was nursing about what I might have done, it wasn’t worth engaging right now. I had a different target, and I could feel him getting closer to it with every exchange.
"In your case," I said instead, "it wouldn’t even be heartless. He isn’t your father. Not by blood. So killing him would just be removing an obstacle. Nothing more sentimental than that." I tilted my head slightly. "Is that why you weren’t at the party last night? Convenient timing, don’t you think? The one night everything fell apart, and you happened to be somewhere else entirely."
"My mother was sick." His jaw worked. "My father asked me to check on her. That is the whole of it."
"Sick." I let the word sit there, unconvinced. "Your family owns the De’Lune estate’s medical wing. Top-grade healers on retainer around the clock, an infirmary large enough to treat half this great pack at once, and yet the Queen needed her son at her bedside instead of a healer."
"My father didn’t want the news spreading." Something flickered across his face, uncertainty creeping in where the anger had been. "He said it was delicate. Said it needed to stay quiet. I believed him. I thought I was doing something for my family." He stopped, and I watched the realization land on him in real time, slow and sickening, the way understanding arrived when it was the last thing you wanted to understand. "Or so I thought. It seems like it was all a plan. Get me and my mother out of the way, off in some quiet corner off the estate, so he could rewrite everything without either of us close enough to stop it."
"That would be a reasonable read of it."
"I am still his son." His voice had gone rough. "Whatever he believed, whatever lies he fed you in his last hours, I have his blood, and I will fight you for that throne, cousin. In front of the full council. In front of every pack in this territory if that’s what it takes."
I studied him for a moment. There was something almost pitiable in him now, standing in the wreckage of everything he’d been promised since birth, and some smaller, quieter part of me almost regretted how thoroughly I’d just taken him apart.
Almost.
"I believe you," I said. "And I believe you’ll lose." I let the silence stretch before I finished it. "Because we both know. We both know what’s true here, whatever you tell yourself in the meantime. I trust what uncle told me. He had no reason to lie to me in his final hours, and every reason to lie to you for as long as he possibly could."
Johann stared at me. Something in his face finally cracked all the way through, the last of the composure sliding off entirely, and for one moment he looked less like a prince fighting for his inheritance and more like a boy who’d just watched the floor disappear beneath him.
Then he turned and walked out, boots striking hard against the stone, and he didn’t look back once.
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