Chapter 232

Chapter 232: Chapter 232

Lysander’s pov

Calix walked out of the parlor before I could answer, his polished shoes unhurried on the stone, and he didn’t glance back once. I stood beside the sofa with one hand spread over the swell of my waist and listened to his steps fade down the corridor toward the east wing. He moved like a man who’d stopped by to wish me a good evening, not one who’d just told me I was the next thing he planned to remove.

The parlor still smelled like his clove. A thin gray thread of smoke curled up from the tray where he’d crushed the cigarette out, right beside the teapot and the single porcelain cup he’d poured for me, and a black scorch mark marred the pale wood. The tea had stopped steaming. I stared at it for a long time before I picked up the cup and poured every drop into the hearth, where it hissed against the coals and sent up a puff of chamomile-scented steam.

I didn’t know if he’d put anything in it. Ten minutes earlier, I would’ve drunk the whole pot and thanked him for it.

His words kept circling my head, and I couldn’t pin down what they meant. Julian had been locked in the dungeon since the gala, stripped of his rank and waiting for the council to decide what to do with him. If that was what Calix meant by removing an obstacle, he could’ve meant a cell for me too. He’d talked about my status, my influence, and the seat beside the throne, as if he planned to peel them off me one at a time. But a man who wanted my seat didn’t need me alive to take it. He could’ve meant a grave.

I sank onto the sofa and stared at the fire. Calix never raised his voice. He didn’t grab me or bare his fangs or do anything a guard would’ve noticed if one had walked by. He smoked his clove and told me he’d take everything from me the way someone reads out the week’s schedule, and he even paused at the door to make sure I’d heard the last part. That was what I couldn’t get past. Angry men make mistakes, but Calix wasn’t angry. He sounded patient, and patient men plan.

I made myself think it through, because panic wasn’t going to keep me alive. I wasn’t helpless. But Calix wasn’t ordinary, and I’d never once seen him fight. In all the months I’d known him, he’d never so much as raised a hand to a servant, and that frightened me more now than any show of strength could have. He was a vampire noble who’d taken Julian apart without lifting a finger. I had no idea what he could do when he finally decided to use his hands.

My palm drifted back to the rounded curve of my waist. Beneath it, our son gave a faint thrum, weaker than the one he’d given Drake earlier, as if he already missed the warmth of his father’s aura. Every time I pictured myself fighting Calix, I pictured his fist landing right there, and my whole body went cold. I could take a hit, and I’d taken plenty in my life, but the baby couldn’t.

"Okay," I whispered, and the word sounded thin in the quiet room. "Okay, think."

The obvious answer was Drake. He was only down the hall in the main study with Commander Valen, signing off on border rotations before the council assembly. He was my mate and the father of this child, and he was the most powerful man in this territory. If anyone could stop Calix, he could. I got up and made it all the way to the archway before I could talk myself out of it, and I had one hand on the carved frame when I remembered the look on Drake’s face the night Calix handed him the proof against Julian.

Drake had gripped Calix’s shoulder with both hands. He’d bowed his head toward him like a man thanking someone who’d pulled him out of a burning house, and his voice had cracked when he said Calix’s name. In Drake’s eyes, Calix was the noble who’d cleared my name, the friend who’d exposed the traitor, and the man who’d saved his heir from a fake life-bond. Drake trusted him without thinking about it, the way he trusted the floor to hold him up, and that kind of gratitude doesn’t crack because his pregnant mate comes running down the hall with a story.

I let my hand fall from the archway. What would I even say? Calix threatened me. Calix said I was next. Drake would ask when, and I’d tell him it happened in the parlor the second he left. He’d ask who else was there, and I’d have to admit there wasn’t anyone. There wasn’t a guard in the corridor or a maid with an armful of linens or anyone at all. There was only my word against Calix’s word, and Calix had already told me how that would sound.

I could see exactly how it would go. Drake’s brows would draw together, and he’d use the careful voice he’d used with me since the truth came out, the one that treated me like cracked glass. He’d look at my stomach before he looked at my face. Then Calix would appear in the doorway with fresh tea and concern all over his face, asking if everything was all right, and by morning I’d be the mate whose months in the dark had finally broken his mind.

Worse, Calix would know I tried, and he wouldn’t bother being patient with me after that.

I didn’t wait for Drake to come back. I took the back corridor to my room, shut the door, and sat down on the edge of the bed, hard enough that the frame creaked under me. The room felt too big and too quiet. On the dresser across from me, a small framed sketch of the mountain pass hung a fraction off true, and I stared at it until my eyes burned.

Then, before I could stop myself, I started to laugh. Calix couldn’t leave a single crease in his jacket alone, and here I was, staring down a crooked frame he’d never get to fix.

"Okay, listen," I told my stomach, keeping my voice low. "If Calix kills us, I want you to know I’ve got a plan. We’re going to haunt your father’s bedroom. We’re going to tilt every single frame in there, every night, forever. He’ll straighten them in the morning, and by dinner they’ll be crooked again, and he’ll never figure out why."