Chapter 21: The gift of the bite
JOHANN
I turned the key in my chamber door before dialing her, because some conversations demanded secrecy, even from the sentinels outside who feigned deafness but could hear through solid oak if they wished.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Johann." Her voice came through thin and tired, the way it had sounded every time I’d spoken to her since the infirmary, since the tubes, since the truth she’d handed me like a stone I hadn’t asked to carry. "Is everything—"
"Did you do anything?" I kept my voice flat, stripped of whatever emotion might give her room to maneuver around the question. "Mother. I need you to answer me plainly, for once in your life."
A pause lingered on the other end, stretching just long enough to betray the weight of secrets she carried.
"Do anything about what?" she said finally.
"Don’t." The word came out sharper than I meant it to. "Father is dead. Someone put a bullet in his chest last night, in his own library, in our own estate, hours after he stripped me and you out of his will like we were strangers he’d never met." I pressed my palm flat against the cool wall beside me, needing something solid under my hand. "So I am going to ask you one more time, and I need the truth. Did you have anything to do with it?"
The silence grew until I caught the subtle shift in her breathing, the telltale catch that meant she was weighing how much truth I could bear.
"I didn’t tell you," she said quietly, "because I knew you wouldn’t agree with me."
Something cold settled into my stomach, heavier than anything I’d felt since the hospital room, since her eyes had gone black and then human again like something out of a nightmare I couldn’t wake from.
"Mother."
"But it all worked out," she continued, and there was something almost pleading in her tone now, like she genuinely believed the words could still land as comfort. "In the end. Didn’t it? Your father is dead. There will also be dead men walking to answer for it, men who would take the blame and disappear quietly into whatever fresh hell the sentinels decided was worthy for them, and you would take the throne. We would win, Johann. Finally, after everything. I would ask the goddess for forgiveness for the method. I would carry that. But it would pass. All of it would pass, and you would be sitting exactly where you were always meant to sit."
I laughed.
It came out of me broken and disbelieving, nothing like real humor in it anywhere, and I heard her go quiet on the other end of the line, waiting for whatever came next.
"No," I said. "Your fantasy didn’t come true, Mother. Not even close." I pushed off the wall and started pacing, because standing still while I said this felt impossible. "Father is dead, yes. You got that part right. But there are no dead men to take the blame. There’s a girl though. A retainer who saw your mercenaries with her own eyes, who is very much alive right now, sitting somewhere in this estate breathing and talking and telling anyone who will listen that two masked men shot the King and put the gun in her hand."
"What?" Her voice had lost its careful, pleading softness entirely.
"I suspected this had your hand all over it the second I heard her account," I said. "So I tried to end her myself, quietly, before she could become a problem for either of us. Except my cousin is obsessed with keeping her alive for some reason." I stopped pacing near the window, staring out at the estate grounds without really seeing any of it. "And to be frank, I have a theory about why, Mother. I think he suspects us."
"Cousin," she repeated, and something in her voice had gone very still, very careful. "Who?"
"Lysander." I let the name sit there, heavy, because I wanted her to feel exactly how much weight it carried now. "The very man Father named his heir."
The silence on the other end of the line went on long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
"What," she said finally, and it wasn’t a question so much as a demand for the sentence to be untrue.
"It’s real," I said. "It’s in the will. Read aloud by High Gamma Cormac himself, in front of the full Elder Circle, notarized and dated three weeks ago." I felt my jaw tighten around the words. "Which means Father decided this the same week he found out what you actually are. The same week he shipped you off to some quiet corner out of the Kingdom so no one would ask questions." I turned back into the room. "It is written in front of witnesses. In front of anyone with political weight in this territory. There is no undoing it through denial."
"Three weeks," she said, and I heard something crack in her voice, some last piece of composure finally giving way. "He didn’t say a word to me. Not one word."
"He wouldn’t have," I said. "Not once he found out you’d deceived him for so many years."
"And Lysander," she said slowly, working through it even as she spoke, "why would your father choose him? Of every option, every relation, why him specifically?"
I hesitated for a moment, because saying it out loud made it feel more permanent, more real, and some small stubborn part of me had been avoiding that permanence since the moment Lysander had said it to my face in the library.
"For some reason," I said, "Father peddled the idea to Lysander that I was a bastard. That you’d deceived Father about my parentage entirely, and that was reason enough to strip us both of any claim to the throne." I heard her breath catch through the phone. "I think it was probably to make sure Lysander would actually want the seat once it was offered to him. Give him a reason to believe he deserved it more than I did."
"That is not true," she said, quiet and furious at once. "You are his son. Every drop of blood in you came from him and from me."
"I know that," I said. "But knowing it doesn’t undo what’s already been read aloud in a room full of elders who will now most likely believe otherwise or worse."
I heard her moving on the other end, footsteps uneven as she paced as I had, then a deep, wet cough that twisted something old and helpless in my chest, a fear I had never truly outgrown.
"Mother—"
"We were so close," she said, once the coughing settled, her voice thinner now, worn down at the edges. "So close, Johann. I thought, once you took that throne, once you sat where your father sat and held both bloodlines under one crown, that this curse we’ve carried for nearly a thousand years would finally break. That I would be part of the last of us to suffer through it. That you would never have to watch your own body turn against you the way mine has, the way every one of our line has since the goddess first cursed us for a crime we didn’t commit."
"Mother, please—"
"But no." Her voice cracked entirely on that single word, raw and furious and grieving all at once. "Now the throne sits with your cousin, a man who has no idea what he actually holds in his hands, who probably thinks this is simply about politics and succession and nothing more, while the actual weight of what’s at stake slips further and further away from us."
"I know," I said quietly, because there was nothing else to offer her in that moment, no comfort that wouldn’t have been a lie.
"I don’t want to die like my predecessors," she said, and the fear in her voice was old, deep, something she’d clearly been carrying silently for far longer than the three weeks since Father’s healers had found her out. "I don’t want that for you either, Johann. I have watched women in our bloodline waste away by their thirties. I have watched men in our line die before they ever got the chance to understand what they were losing or enjoy life. I have spent my entire life terrified of the moment my body would finally collect what it’s owed, and I thought, I truly believed, that you were going to be the one who ended it. For all of us. For everyone who comes after us."
"I know," I said again, because it was the only true thing I had left to give her.
"We have to salvage this," she said, and I heard something harden in her voice now, the grief folding itself back into resolve, into the particular steel she’d always carried beneath the surface no matter how sick she got. "Whatever it takes. You have to get that throne back, Johann. It isn’t simply ambition anymore. It isn’t simply pride, or inheritance, or proving something to a dead man who never deserved either of our loyalty in the first place." Her voice dropped lower, more urgent. "It is what the prophecy demands. It is the only chance the Lycan race will ever have."
I stood at the window, watching sentinels patrol the grounds in slow, careful arcs. By evening, more Alphas and Lunas would arrive, bearing both condolences and scrutiny. I did not have time for this shit. Since Mother had mentioned how we would end up, I was doing everything in my power to avoid that fate.
"I know," I said, for the third time, and this time I meant it as a vow rather than an acknowledgment. "I know what has to happen, Mother. Give me time."
"Time is the one thing neither of us actually has."
"Then I’ll move quickly," I said, and I felt something settle into place behind my ribs, cold and clear and entirely without mercy. "But you have to help me too."
"In what way?" She asked.
"Your fall guys... Killing an Alpha King is insane and foolish. What did you convince them with?"
"The gift of the bite." She replied.
"What does that mean?"
"Lycans can share the curse, and they wanted it badly because they are disgruntled rogues after all."
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