Chapter 76: What Game Is He Playing?

Merrick did not clean the blood off his face. He did not straighten the borrowed shirt or rinse the taste of copper from his mouth. He ran the length of the servants’ corridor, took the turn toward the family wing too fast, and pushed straight into Dexter’s rooms without knocking. The door struck the wall hard enough to draw a sharp sound from the frame.

Dexter was already on his feet.

The third prince’s expression started as pure irritation at the intrusion and the state of the omega in his doorway—split lip, missing tooth, swollen cheek, Levi’s clothes hanging open and blood-spotted. Then the irritation shifted. Something had clearly gone wrong. Dexter’s mind sorted possibilities in a single breath. Aaron? No. If Aaron had caught the switch while still coherent enough to understand it, Merrick would not be standing here breathing. Dexter had left the second prince nearly gone, heavy with wine and sliding into sleep. That part of the plan had held, so what exactly had happened to the man before him?

"You better have a good reason for barging into my room like this." Dexter said as he slowly approached the omega.

Merrick’s chest was heaving, he was out of breath, and had barely recovered from getting absolutely wrecked by Levi. "Levi walked in."

Dexter did not answer, he didn’t even react. He just kept walking forward until there was barely any distance between them. Then he took Merrick’s jaw in one hand, and turned his face toward the morning light. His gaze dropped to the side of the servant’s throat, and his body flushed with satisfaction. He had been marked, and that was what mattered to him. Dexter felt a thin, private satisfaction settle under the newer problem. He made sure none of it reached his face. He still had to look like a man who cared about the wreckage in front of him.

"And?" he asked.

"He attacked me." Merrick’s voice shook. "He hit me hard enough to knock a tooth out. He would have kept going. I—I had to use what I heard. I’m sorry....The plan’s ruined. What are we going to do now?"

Dexter released his jaw. Ruined? No, this was just perfect.

"Stop panicking." The order was flat. "And go back to your room. Stay there. Do not speak to anyone. I will think of something to deal with the problem."

Merrick nodded too quickly, relief and fear still tangled in his scent. He turned toward the door, then stopped and looked back. He probably should keep his mouth shut, but since him and Dexter were allies now, there was no need keeping secrets from the Alpha.

"One more thing."

Dexter’s eyes narrowed, the earlier irritation returning slowly. "What."

"Aaron isn’t the one who put the second mark on Levi." Merrick announced casually. He swallowed the lump in his throat, then continued. "It’s Kai’s. I heard Aaron say it while he was still awake enough to talk. He said if he marked me it would risk exposing Kai’s mark. The second claim belongs to the first heir."

The air in the room changed, and for a hot minute neither of them said a word or moved a muscle.

Dexter went very still, then annoyance flared first, the automatic response to a servant speaking carelessly about things above his station.

"Do not step out of line," Dexter said, each word precise. "Do not repeat things you do not understand. If you start spreading stories about my brother’s claims—"

"I’m not lying." Merrick held his ground despite the blood still running from his mouth. "He said it clearly. The second mark isn’t Aaron’s. It’s Kai’s."

Dexter looked at him, stunned by the certainty and bravery in the servant’s voice. There was no cunning performance in the servant’s face, only the desperate firmness of someone who had already been beaten once this morning and had nothing left to gain by inventing a lie this large.

The stomach-drop arrived a second later—cold, complete, and far worse than the news that Levi had walked in. Dexter’s mind tried to reject it and could not find a clean place to stand. How would Merrick even invent that detail? Why would Aaron say it while drunk unless it was true?

He found his voice again with effort.

"Get out. Back to your room. If you speak of this to anyone else before I send for you, I will finish what Levi started."

Merrick fled without being told twice. Aaron might be hot tempered, but everybody within these walls knew very well that the one to be afraid of was Dexter. The third prince was unpredictable, and he always had such a cold and ominous aura around him.

The door closed, and the quiet of the room returned louder than it had been before Merrick’s intrusion.

Dexter stood alone in the center of his room and felt everything he had believed fall apart right in front of him.

He walked back to the bed and sat down hard on the edge of it. Aside from the morning light across the floor that looked the same as it had before Merrick arrived, nothing else did.

Kai had marked Levi. Not Aaron. His eldest brother had put his teeth in the omega in the dark and then let the house believe otherwise.

Dexter’s hands curled against his knees.

It did not make sense. And if it was true—if Merrick had not somehow twisted a drunken sentence into the wrong shape—then why had Levi never used it? A claim from the first heir was leverage of the highest order. It could have broken the engagement with Flora. It could have forced the old Alpha’s hand far beyond a simple expulsion of Elvis and a better set of rooms. Levi had sat on that secret and agreed to keep it buried. He had let Aaron take the claim, and he had let Dexter himself believe the second mark belonged to the middle brother.

What was the omega playing at? What did he want that was larger than the obvious weapons already in his hands?

Dexter stared at the far wall and felt, for the first time in a long while, that he had moved a piece across the board without seeing the rest of the pieces clearly. He still didn’t want to believe what he had just heard, but somehow he couldn’t shake off the feeling that it was true.

He lay back against the pillows without bothering to undress and let the questions turn without answers.

Kai? How? And what, exactly, was Levi waiting for?