Chapter 72: Hidden Forces

Basil released a slow, shaky breath he hadn’t even realized he had been holding.

"As for the royal guards, Your Highness," the doctor continued, adjusting his glasses, "they’ll be all right. They were exposed to a relatively small amount of the paralyzing gas, just enough to render them unconscious. Nothing life-threatening. They should recover without any complications." Basil nodded with a grunt.

The doctor hesitated before bowing his head deeply. "Once again, Your Highness, we’re deeply sorry for this security breach. We should have been more vigilant. We should have ensured there was tighter security around this room and recognized that something was wrong much sooner. This should never have happened."

"It’s all right," Basil said, his voice flat with exhaustion. "None of you could have known someone would infiltrate the hospital disguised as medical staff. What’s important is that no one was seriously hurt and that Prince Darius wasn’t actually harmed."

"Thank you, Your Highness. We’ll continue monitoring the Prince closely."

The doctor bowed once more before signaling for the nurses to gather their equipment. Moments later, the medical team excused themselves and quietly left the room. Marcus pulled the heavy doors shut behind them, locking them from the inside before crossing the room and dropping onto the sofa beside Leo.

The room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.

Basil slowly turned his head toward them, fixing them with a cold, uncompromising stare as he remained seated beside Darius’s bed, still holding his hand. "Now," he began, his tone leaving absolutely no room for evasion, "I want to know everything. Every single detail. Don’t leave anything out." His gaze moved from Leo to Marcus. "Who are you ? What is happening? Why does someone want Darius dead? And what the hell is happening around my family?"

Basil’s eyes hardened as he leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping into a dangerous whisper. "I want the truth. All of it."

Leo had already decided that he wanted to tell Prince Basil the whole truth. He reasoned that hiding it was pointless, especially when Basil would inevitably learn everything anyway. It wasn’t as though Prince Basil was the kind of person who would simply accept being kept in the dark, especially when the Reaper was clearly doing everything because he wanted to protect him. Leo hadn’t known Prince Darius for very long, but from what he had gathered about him through the Reaper’s Force and the few hours he had spent talking with him, Leo had already come to understand that the man wasn’t someone who would allow Prince Basil to remain ignorant of everything.

The Reaper had always planned to eventually tell Prince Basil everything about himself.

However, while the doctors were checking on Darius and verifying that no harmful substance had entered the IV line, Leo changed his mind. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that perhaps telling Prince Basil the whole truth wasn’t his decision to make. He shouldn’t have even considered telling Prince Basil the whole truth in the first place because it was never his to tell. That was something only the Reaper had the right to reveal himself, not him. The only thing he had the right to reveal was their immediate purpose in being there and whatever information Basil needed to understand the immediate danger.

He didn’t have to tell him everything, especially when some of those secrets belonged to the Reaper alone. Until Prince Darius awakened and was ready to reveal the truth himself, Leo had no intention of taking that choice away from him. In fact, he didn’t want to find out what would happen if he took matters into his own hands and revealed something Darius had specifically chosen to keep hidden. He still had a lot of sex positions he hadn’t tried with Marcus, so he wasn’t about to risk his life by sticking his nose into matters that didn’t concern him, especially when the person whose secret he was considering revealing was the Reaper himself.

Gathering himself under Basil’s cold, unyielding gaze, Leo took a slow breath. "Your Highness," he began, his tone steady and calm. "Like I said earlier, we are the good guys. And I want you to know that everything we’re doing, and everything we’ve done, is for the sake of Prince Darius. In fact, we’re doing all of it under his orders."

Basil’s brow furrowed immediately, his fingers clenching on his lap as his eyes narrowed on Leo, his expression hardening with suspicion.

"You’re working under his orders?" he repeated, his voice low and disbelieving. "What the hell does that even mean? What exactly do you mean by you’re doing all of this under his orders? How can someone who is in a coma have given you orders? He’s been unconscious , so when exactly was he supposed to give any orders?"

Leo remained composed beneath the intensity of his stare. He had expected Basil to react like this. After all, who could believe that a young man like Prince Darius could command an operation of this scale, let alone someone who had been raised in an orphanage and was publicly known to work as a waiter? Prince Basil must be thinking that they were taking him for a fool and deliberately withholding something from him, so his disbelief and reaction were hardly surprising. Still, there was only so much Leo could tell him.

"Calm down, Your Highness. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s the absolute truth," Leo replied carefully. "I wish I could go into detail, but I’m not at liberty to disclose everything. But you need to understand one thing. We’re working under Prince Darius, and it isn’t just the two of us. There are entire private forces operating under his direct command, working behind the scenes."

Basil’s eyes sharpened.

"They’re the ones who discovered that an assassination attempt was being planned tonight and alerted us before it happened," Leo continued, his expression turning serious. "They also know for a fact that the hit-and-run was deliberate. It wasn’t an accident at all. Someone tried to kill him, and whoever is behind it won’t give up until they make sure he is gone."

A tense silence settled over the room. Basil’s jaw tightened as the weight of Leo’s words sank in. His fingers curled tighter against his lap, and his eyes remained fixed on Leo with a mixture of disbelief and growing concern. The possibility that someone had deliberately tried to kill Darius was difficult enough to accept, but the thought that the person behind it might keep coming until they succeeded sent a cold unease through him.

Leo held his gaze. "I know you might want to know who the person behind it is, but I can’t tell you that yet. And I can’t tell you everything about it or about Prince Darius’s operations. That’s not my secret to reveal. But you need to understand that there are people working to keep him alive, and we’re going to stop at nothing to make sure they don’t get another chance to kill him."

When Leo finally finished speaking, Basil remained silent for several moments, his mind struggling to process everything he had just heard. Slowly, he turned his head, his gaze settling on Darius’s still, pale face as the weight of Leo’s words sank in. They were telling him that Darius had people operating behind the scenes, entire private forces working under his command, and that those forces had known about the assassination attempt before it happened. Why did he find that so difficult to believe? Perhaps because the Darius he thought he knew was nothing like the man Leo was describing. It made him realize just how little he actually knew about his new brother.

As for the hit-and-run being a simple accident, Basil had already begun to suspect otherwise, but tonight’s assassination attempt had erased any remaining doubt. Worse still, the sudden poisoning of Linda in her cell suggested that whoever was orchestrating all of this was systematically cutting off every loose end. But Basil couldn’t comprehend why anyone would go to such terrifying lengths to kill Darius. He had even considered whether all of this was somehow connected to Darius’s past life while Leo was explaining everything, but he had brushed the thought off almost immediately.

If this was tied to some remnant of Darius’s past, it still didn’t explain why the attacks had begun the moment he became a prince, nor did it explain why Linda had to be poisoned on the very same night an assassin tried to kill Darius. He had a very strong feeling that the two incidents were connected. But what did the perpetrator stand to gain? If Darius died, public and political suspicion would naturally fall on Basil, framing him as the ambitious prince who eliminated the true prince for power. Whoever was pulling the strings wasn’t just trying to kill Darius.

They were backing Basil into a corner, using his brother’s blood to destroy him too.