Chapter 472. A Routine Review of the Trade Annex

Chapter 472: 472. A Routine Review of the Trade Annex

As William walked beside the three women who had become his makeshift phalanx, his mind drifted through the corridors of memory. In his first life, the one that had ended in blood, betrayal, and a blade between his ribs, he had believed that strength was a solitary virtue.

He had believed that to trust was to invite weakness, and to rely on another was to hand them the dagger they would eventually use to kill you.

It had taken an impossible system, a summoning that defied every law of nature, and more heartbreak than any one soul should be forced to endure twice to teach him the truth. Strength wasn’t the ability to stand alone; it was the capacity to hold the line alongside others.

’Alden Delmore thinks he’s playing chess,’ William thought, his jaw tightening as he watched Kaela’s profile in the fading light. ’He thinks he’s cornered a lone princess in a gilded cage, waiting for her to break so he can claim the prize. ’

The arrogance of it made his blood simmer. Delmore had built his entire conspiracy around the assumption that Lia would face the coming storm in isolation, her hands empty and her allies nonexistent.

He had never once accounted for the monster he had inadvertently helped create.

He was about to learn, with devastating consequences, exactly how catastrophically wrong that assumption was. A princess with a fist capable of pulverizing stone was already a problem.

But a princess backed by a vice headmaster who had buried a monster with her own two hands, a woman who understood the true cost of power, was a nightmare.

Add to that a swordswoman being forged into a weapon by one of the kingdom’s greatest greatswordmasters and a man who had already crossed the threshold of death once and had absolutely no intention of doing it again.

Delmore was walking into a trap he couldn’t even conceive of. He believed he was negotiating with a frightened girl, unaware that the very people sitting across from him at his dinner tables, smiling at his rehearsed courtesies and accepting his hollow flattery, were already measuring him for his grave.

The week that followed was a deceptive calm, the kind of stillness that precedes a hurricane.

It took seven full days before the residual tremors in William’s arm finally subsided, the last lingering echo of the Harem Boost’s violent expenditure.

During that week, the machinery of war and politics began to grind into motion beneath the surface of courtly decorum. King Theron moved with the cold, calculated patience of a predator who had already scented blood, each move designed to build an unassailable case.

Roan, operating in the shadows of the palace’s security apparatus, quietly rotated three more of his most trusted, battle-hardened men into the palace guard, turning the royal residence into a fortress within a fortress.

In the archives, Albert’s fingers became stained with ink as he combed through every ancient clause and forgotten addendum of the old treaty, searching for a legal loophole, any crack that might allow Celestial to walk away from the Delmore conspiracy without triggering a war that would leave both kingdoms in ashes.

Meanwhile, Olivia had commandeered a borrowed desk in the scholars’ wing, her eyes growing bloodshot as she dug through Delmore’s financial records, hunting for the paper trail of corruption that would serve as their smoking gun.

And William? William never stopped moving.

Every afternoon, the sealed training yard echoed with the sounds of steel on steel and the controlled shouts of exertion as he pushed Kaela to her absolute limits.

He wasn’t just teaching her to swing a blade; he was teaching her to read the wind, to sense the shift in pressure before the storm hit, teaching her to read a battlefield the way he had once taught recruits to read a room before an ambush.

The tension in the palace became a physical weight, something that made the air feel thick and difficult to swallow.

Finally, Theron decided that the period of observation had reached its lethal conclusion. On a gray, oppressive evening where the rain lashed against the windows like desperate fingernails clawing at the glass, the king summoned William to his private study.

When William pushed open the heavy oak doors, the room felt smaller than usual, charged with an electricity that made the hair on his arms stand up. The king was not seated.

He was standing over a desk littered with intelligence reports, his back to the door, staring down at a single, folded piece of parchment.

His shoulders were rigid, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line that William had never seen before, a look that signaled the time for diplomacy had passed and the time for reckoning had begun.

"I’ve requested a formal session with the Delmore delegation," Theron said without preamble.

The words fell like stones into a still pool. He didn’t turn around; he simply stared at the parchment as if he could incinerate the treason written upon it with sheer willpower alone.

"Tomorrow... At midday."

"Officially, it will be a routine review of the trade annex before the ceremony proceeds."

"Alden won’t suspect a thing, not if I maintain the same measured tone, the same rehearsed deference we’ve employed in every meeting since the treaty was signed."

He finally turned, and the firelight from the hearth caught the hard angles of his face.

"We will attempt the diplomatic path first," he said, his voice carrying the weary weight of a man who had spent his life trying to prevent bloodshed, only to realize he was now the only thing standing between his people and a massacre. "I still hope, despite everything, that this can be settled without open war."

William met the king’s gaze. There was no hesitation in his eyes, no false comfort to offer.

"I hope for the same thing, Your Majesty."

"But hope is a dangerous currency in this court."

"Be ready for the possibility that when they realize the trap is closing, they won’t take it quietly... They’ll bite."

Theron nodded slowly, a grim acknowledgment. Something in the set of his shoulders suggested he had already made his peace with that possibility days ago, that he had already imagined the taste of iron and the sound of screaming on the wind.

"Roan will have men positioned throughout the hall... quietly."

"I want them invisible ghosts in the alcoves and shadows behind the tapestries."

"Nobody outside this room and his own most trusted officers will know why."

"I won’t have Alden’s spies reading anything into a change in guard rotation before we’ve even taken our seats at the table."

"Good," William said, his own pulse quickening with a cold, anticipatory adrenaline. "Let them believe right up until the last possible second that nothing has changed."

"Let them walk into this room thinking they’re the predators."

...

That night, the quarters were silent, save for the rhythmic, metallic shingling of steel against stone. Catherine found him there, bathed in the amber glow of a single lamp, going through his gear with the methodical, almost ritualistic calm of a man checking a parachute he intended to trust with his life.

Aetherion lay across a soft cloth on the table, its blade gleaming like liquid moonlight. William ran a whetstone along its edge with slow, deliberate strokes.

The blade was already flawless, capable of severing a falling hair midair, but he continued. It wasn’t about the steel; it was about the control.

Each stroke was a tether, keeping his hands from shaking as the implications of tomorrow began to claw at his mind.

"You look far too calm," Catherine said softly, appearing in the doorway like a specter.

She watched him for a moment, her arms crossed, her sharp eyes reading the tension in his shoulders that his face refused to show. "For someone who might be staring down an entire royal delegation tomorrow."

"I’ve been waiting for this moment longer than I realized," William said, his voice low and steady.

He didn’t look up from the blade. "Since the night I overheard Vane use the word ’asset’ through that half-open door."

"Maybe since before that... The inevitability of it has been a constant pressure in my chest."

Catherine crossed the room, her footsteps silent on the rug. She sat down directly across from him, the lamplight catching the silver threads in her expression.

Without asking, she reached out, her cool fingers covering his hand to still the motion of the whetstone. "You don’t need to sharpen it further, William."

"That blade is already sharp enough to end a war on its own if it has to."

William let out a long, controlled breath and finally set the stone aside.

"Habit," he admitted, his fingers curling slightly against hers. "It settles me."

"Doing something physical with my hands while my head tries to sort through the wreckage of everything it’s about to have to handle."

"And what has your head sorted out so far?" she asked, her gaze piercing, searching for the man beneath the warrior’s armor. "What do you see when you close your eyes?"