Chapter 532: Preserving Threads
"AHHH!"
Arzhen woke with a violent, full-body spasm. Sweat drenched his sheets, soaked through his nightshirt, plastered his dark hair to his forehead in wet, clinging strands. His chest heaved, breaths came in ragged, gulping gasps that did nothing to satisfy the terrible, suffocating emptiness in his lungs.
The room spun.
The ceiling above him swam in and out of focus like a reflection in troubled water. He pressed his palms flat against the mattress, trying to anchor himself, but the bed seemed to tilt beneath him.
"URP—UHWG—"
Nausea rose in his throat, hot and sour. He gagged, turned his head, but nothing came up.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. But he couldn’t remember what.
The dream? Was it a dream? If it was, it was gone. Erased. Swallowed by the void between sleep and waking, leaving behind a pressure in his skull.
His body remembered, though. His muscles shrieked with the ghost of a trauma they had not endured.
His skin crawled with the phantom sensation of being torn, ripped, shredded by something... like an embodiment of wrath. Of hate.
He could feel it, the sickening sensation of his own flesh parting, of claws raking through muscle and bone, of a jaw closing around his throat and wrenching.
His hands flew to his neck, his shoulders, his ribs. Whole. He was whole.
There were no wounds. No blood. No evidence that anything had happened at all.
But his body didn’t believe it. He shook violently, his nerves still screamed the truth his mind had forgotten. That he was destroyed. He was pulled apart and scattered across the earth like garbage.
That was when his mind halted.
Cecilia.
Ceci... lia...
Why—
Why was that name in his head?
It surfaced from the chaos of his fragmented thoughts inexplicably.
Why was he thinking of her?
He didn’t know what she had to do with the sweat soaking his sheets or the nausea churning in his gut or the phantom claws still raking through his soul.
But the name was there, and it wouldn’t leave.
He grasped his chest.
His fingers dug into the fabric of his nightshirt, clawing at the skin beneath as though he could tear through flesh and bone and rip out whatever was trying to burst free.
His heart.
His heart was the problem.
It pounded against his ribs like a trapped animal, erratic. So, so quick it felt like his blood flowed backwards.
It wanted out. It wanted to... stop beating!
No—that wasn’t right.
He wanted to stop it. He wanted to claw into his own chest and rip it out of his body and offer it to—
"OLEG—IGOR!" His voice tore from his throat, edged with a panic he didn’t understand.
A moment later, the door creaked open.
Igor stepped inside, his face carefully neutral, though his eyes widened at the sight of his master, drenched, trembling, pale as a corpse. "Yes, My Prince...?"
"Get that healer here NOW!"
***
"There’s no way that’s—" Roarke fell to his knees. The impact of bone against marble barely registered. Nothing registered except the words still echoing in his skull, looping over and over like a bell that would never stop tolling. "That’s... no..."
His voice cracked. His hands, which had killed without trembling, which had held a blade steady against the throats of kings, shook like leaves in a storm.
Cecilia had spoken her complete speculations just a moment ago. All of it.
Oathran stood with his arms crossed, his grey eyes dark and unreadable, his jaw set in a frown that looked like it had been carved there and would stay for a long time.
Eastiel’s lion ears were pinned flat against his skull, his golden eyes wide and wet, his tail wrapped around his own leg as though he were trying to hold himself together. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say.
Their brother. Their Arkai. He had gone through that kind of life, a youth haunted by Sienna’s heat, adolescence spent barricading himself behind locked doors and ice baths.
And yet his reputation as the strongest Alpha, the King of the North, the Black Wolf King, had never borne a single stain.
He was the feared. The respected. The unshakeable.
How far had he gone to maintain that towering facade while carrying such a trauma? How many nights had he spent alone, fighting battles no one else could see, while the world looked at him and saw only strength?
And now, on top of all of that, came this truth. So much worse.
Sienna had not only tormented him. She had murdered, killed the mother of the woman he loved, and he had just found out.
"I didn’t—was it... When did she...?" Roarke whispered.
"Dr. Silver went missing shortly after I was crowned Saintess. I was eight by then, so it was seventeen years ago." Cecilia said coldly. "Seven years before Rinne was born."
Roarke’s eyes faltered. Seventeen... seventeen fucking years ago!
"I... Is there some proof...?" He looked up at Cecilia, his dark eyes pleading for a lifeline, for some thread of doubt he could cling to.
"Why do you think I called you here?" Cecilia asked coldly. "At the time, you were still your Alpha’s Strongest Beta. You’ll know where to look."
"Luna..." Roarke’s eyes trembled.
"I’m pulling you from the mission. You will go to the north with Borak and find everything Sienna left behind. Investigate her death too. Don’t leave a single detail," Cecilia said with iron in her voice.
"Luna, wait a minute." Roarke’s voice faltered, his dark eyes flickering. "I’ve made a deeper than necessary connection with Arzhen Vas—"
CLICK—Creak!
The door swung open without a knock. Borak strode in, his expression tight. "Luna, Father Rohan is needed back at the temple. Angel’s Bunny’s people just sent a message that Arzhen Vasiliev just sent his aide to fetch the healer."
A cold silence fell over the room.
After the incident between Roarke and Arzhen previously, Cecilia had ordered people to watch over Arzhen’s small townhouse.
They had been monitoring his movements, waiting to see if he made a move. And now he had.
He had sent for Father Rohan the Temple Healer, and thankfully the warning had arrived before the aides reached the temple. But the margin was thin.
Roarke shot to his feet. "If it’s revealed I’m not at my post, they’ll start to question everything about me." He said, voice sharp.
Cecilia fell silent. Her eyes, still red-rimmed from crying, were calculating.
Of course. She had known that the alternate worlds affected the real one, just as the real world bled into the alternate scenarios.
Perhaps Arzhen had woken with the phantom sensation of his body being torn apart by Eastiel’s claws, the memory of his death in that other world lingering in his nerves even as his conscious mind forgot everything.
Seeing how he was faring so far, the erratic behavior, the desperate summoning of the healer, perhaps he had been affected for quite a while.
From the previous scenario, where Oathran had beaten and humiliated him. And now Eastiel, who had ripped him apart with fury.
It might also have been compounded by the fact that Arzhen had met Oathran in the real world, had seen his true dragon form in the ditch where Oathran was supposed to die.
The boundaries between worlds were thinner than anyone understood.
"Luna, this mission... I don’t think I can abandon it," Roarke said.
As much as he wanted to uncover Sienna’s past, her crimes, the truth of what she had done to Arkai and to Cecilia’s mother, and perhaps, even to himself, he was already too deep.
The mission watching over Ruby Vaiva, the Saintess at the temple, was delicate. His entanglement with Arzhen over the only medicine that allowed the tiger prince to function at all was even more so.
If he vanished now, both threads would snap.
Ah. What was he speaking?! He couldn’t believe he just said that!
Meanwhile, Cecilia looked at him and saw a man who had changed.
The first time they had met, he had been a blade without a master, his edge directed by money.
Now he stood before her like this.
He had grown, becoming something more than an assassin. Or was he returning to becoming himself once more...?
"Are you sure you don’t want to take care of your Alpha’s predicament with your own hands?" Cecilia asked.
Roarke gritted his teeth. His hands clenched into fists at his sides.
He wanted to. More than anything, he wanted to find out the truth, every ugly, painful, even disgusting detail. He wanted to untangle the twisted past that had bound him and Arkai and Sienna together for so long.
He wanted to fix everything. He wanted to protect Arkai and Rinne.
He... wanted to return to their side.
And this investigation into Sienna’s crimes was the fastest way to do it. To prove something. To prove that whatever was broken between them could be mended, no matter how painful the process. To prove that it wasn’t... their fault.
But could he leave Bimo alone in that place?
"I still want to investigate everything myself, Luna," Roarke said, his voice steady despite the war raging behind his eyes. "But at the very least, I also want to wrap everything I’ve done so far neatly first. Personally."