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The embers had sunk low, a delicate, breathing red.

Francesco didn’t seem to notice the chill that crept across the floor; the past had its own weather, and it had closed around him like winter.

I pulled the nket higher over our knees and threaded my fingers through his. His hand tightened, grateful and grave, and he stared into a ce that wasn’t this room.

“War didn’t arrive with trumpets,” he said atst. “It arrived with a smile.”

He meant Franco’s smile.

The one the courts adored, the one that bent Alphas into believing they were choosing liberty while they were led by the throat.

By then, Franco had learned that des frighten, but masks convince; he wore mine often enough that even loyal men began to doubt the face they served.

“And then,” Francesco said, voice roughening, “he found the one thread that could unravel me.”

“Isolde,” I whispered.

He inclined his head, jaw locking once.

The name rang in the room like a bell struck with ice.

“She didn’te as an assassin,” he went on. “Not as a messenger, or a spy. She came as a girl who had learned to make hunger look like innocence.”

He told me how she’d been brought to court as the niece of a southern ally, with a letter of introduction inked by a hand the scribes would swear was genuine.

She had been careful in those first days–quiet, clever, devastating when sheughed. The servants adored her. The old men on the council melted like wax around a me.

She did not chase; she let herself be chased, the surest way to tempt the most guarded heart.

“And you?” I asked, keeping my voice steady, not to wound him with the memory.

“She didn’t chase me either,” he said simply. “She didn’t have to. I was… tired.” His gaze flicked to me, then away, as if embarrassed on behalf of the man he had been.

He had been the Executioner too long, the silent de that never slept.

The court had given him their fear and their obedience; no one had offered him tenderness without a ledger. Isolde served it without an invoice. Or so he believed.

“She watched me train,” he said. “Not the way courtiers did, like a spectacle, but the way a thirsty man watches

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a well. She brought water. She asked where the bruises lived after a battle and didn’t flinch at the answer.”

He paused, and I felt the ache that followed the admission.

I pressed my knuckles to his mouth; he kissed them without thought and kept going.

“She listened when I spoke about maps. I never spoke about maps.” The barest curve touched his mouth. “And one night, when my father had sent me to end a rebellion and I came home wearing more blood than pride, she sat on the library floor and read aloud to me. A book of myths. The first story was about a king who disguised himself as a farmer to learn what hisnd truly needed.”

“Did he learn?” I asked.

“He learned humility,” Francesco said. “He learned that the ground feeds those who bow to it. Isolde said it was romantic.”

And in that tender frame–her voice over old words, his exhaustion turned soft–Franco slipped the knife. Not a de. A n.

“He fed her the details,” Francesco murmured. “My days. The councils. What made me soften and what made me iron. He knew the sound of the key to my doors because he’d spent his life rattling them from the other side. He dressed her in virtue and sent her into my keeping.”

I breathed once, sharply, at the cruelty of it–of using love as a weapon, of suiting betrayal in kindness and calling it destiny.

“She never loved you” I said.

He took the words and looked into it as if it were a de he might pick up. “She loved something,” he said atst. “Maybe not me. Maybe not power. Maybe the way my name unlocked doors she was too hungry to open alone. She loved being seen by the man everyone feared. She mistook that for meaning.”

“Franco’s handwriting,” I said, bitterness rising. “He writes in other people’s hands.”

Francesco nodded. “He wrote in hers.”

The court began to soften to the Executioner because Isolde softened to him–or seemed to.

She thanked the cooks for extra bread when Francesco returned from patrol, knowing he would pretend to be full and then steal crusts like a boy when no one watched. She slipped gloves into his pocket when winter made the de bite. She made herself useful to the healers and kind to the stableboys.

“If you were writing a siege,” I said quietly, “you would write that.”

“It was a siege,” he agreed. “But even sieges sometimes find the gate unbarred from within.”

He had not been loved before in a way that asked for nothing. He had not been offered ap and a story and a night without armor. The fault was not that he epted; it was that he lived in a world where men with crowns are taught to fear every gift. Franco had counted on it. He’d built the trap to spring exactly when tenderness made vignce into a sin.

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The fracture widened into chasms. Oath–swearing Alphas began to waver in the same breath they praised Isolde’s grace. Witches were seen at the edges of the forests, their smoke thin and secret as the lines that tether a puppet. And still Francesco did the work of his father’s hand: he brought sentence to those who broke their word and mercy to those who stumbled toward repair. But each judgment he passed arrived in the court as Franco’s rumor first: “The Executioner delights in the axe. See how he’s quick to the de.” No one noticed the days he argued men out of death; Franco did not write those lines.

“Did your father-”

“See?” Francesco finished for me. “He saw enough to try. He called Franco into the hall and demanded he stop. Franco wept.” Francesco’s voice did not bend on the word; it was iron hammered t. “He told my father he was jealous but loyal. He kissed his hand. He called me brother. And then that night he sent couriers into the mountains with promises written in my name.”

My eyes widened in shock “What promises?”

“That the Lycaon heir would stand down. That he would cede the eastern border. That we would make werewolf packs sovereign under a treaty signed in blood. He used my seal. He sent them into ambush. He wanted my father to call me a traitor or a fool.”

But, Totti did neither.

He summoned Francesco and sent him to that border with fifty men. And when the Lycaon banner rose over the pass at dawn, Franco’s allies found not a weak heir with an open hand, but the silent one with a de.

“You won,” I said, because he was here.

“We lost,” he said. “Not the fight. The story. They returned to their dens with tales of the butcher who smiled while he cleaved. I never smiled. But the smile was useful to them.”

I swallowed.

The fire sighed.

The shadows moved, as if the past was changing chairs.

“And then,” he said, and I felt the hinge of his life creak, “my father died.”

The world stilled around that sentence, as if the room had curtsied. fnd9a3 Newest update provided by find(?)ovel/fnd9a3

“How?” I asked, though I already knew it would not be time or winter.

“A de,” he answered, “and a mouth.”

Oh God… Franco’s mouth.

A witch’s de.

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