Chapter 170: The bitter truth is...

BRADLEY

The corridor smelled of disinfectant and copper, the lingering residue of violence that no amount of scrubbing could ever fully erase. I stood near the east wing junction, my back against the wall, my arms crossed over my chest, watching as the last of the sentinels carried Ryker’s body away on a stretcher. The sheet they had thrown over him was too thin, and I could still make out the outline of his face beneath it, the sharp angle of his nose, the slackness of his jaw. He had been twenty-three years old. I knew because I had approved his recruitment personally years ago.

The witch, Madeline, had left an hour earlier, her car disappearing down the drive with a finality that felt like a door slamming shut. The soul kisses she had cast still hummed beneath my sternum, a faint vibration that reminded me of the cost of loyalty and the price of secrets. I pressed my palm against my chest, trying to quiet the sensation and force my attention toward what came next.

Footsteps approached from the infirmary. Soft and hesitant, belonging to someone who seemed to be reconsidering every step before taking it.

I looked up.

It was the healer from earlier, the young woman who had drawn Johann’s blood what felt like weeks ago, though it had only been this morning. She clutched a folder against her chest, her fingers curled so tightly around it that her knuckles had gone white. Her eyes found mine for barely a second before slipping away again, toward the floor, the walls, anywhere that wasn’t my face.

She stopped several feet away.

"High Beta," she whispered.

There was something in her voice that made me straighten from the wall.

It was not fear. No... this felt like something worse.

"You have something to tell me?"

"Yes." She swallowed before forcing the word out.

I straightened, uncrossing my arms. Tension snapped into my shoulders like a rubber band pulled taut.

"Oh." My gaze dropped to the folder in her hands. "The results."

She nodded once, the movement sharp and almost reluctant. "They’re ready."

I held out my hand.

My fingers were steady. They had to be. I had learned long ago that men in my position could not afford to tremble, especially not when the thing they feared was still only a possibility.

She placed the folder in my palm.

It felt heavier than it should have.

I opened it and scanned the first page, my eyes moving over the clinical language, the percentages, the genetic markers and conclusions written with the cold certainty of science. There was no room for interpretation in numbers like these.

Ninety-nine percent.

For a moment, I simply stared.

Then I felt the tremor in my hands.

It began in my fingers, subtle enough that I almost dismissed it, before traveling into my wrists and settling in my forearms. I tightened my grip around the folder, crushing the edges beneath my fingers as though I could force the numbers to change through sheer pressure.

Johann was Cornelius’s son.

Biologically. Genetically. Unequivocally.

The boy was a ninety-nine percent match to the late King, the product of Cornelius’s blood and Edelina’s womb. By every measure that mattered, Johann was his child.

His heir.

I read the result again, hoping I had somehow misunderstood it.

I hadn’t.

Cornelius had lied to me.

The thought landed slowly, almost gently, which somehow made it worse.

Months ago, Cornelius had looked me in the eye and told me the boy was not his. He had been calm when he said it, certain enough to make me question why I had ever doubted him. He had even claimed to have proof.

He was infertile.

That was what he had told me.

And I had believed him.

My jaw tightened.

For years, I had trusted that man’s word more readily than I trusted my own judgment. I had followed him into battles, defended his decisions when half the court thought him reckless, and stood beside him when the crown demanded sacrifices no sane man should have accepted.

Yet he had kept this from me.

I looked down at the report again.

Something shifted inside my chest.

It wasn’t heartbreak. It was something colder, harder. Something forged from years of loyalty and duty, now being forced to withstand the weight of betrayal.

But no.

The thought came almost immediately, instinctive and desperate.

There had to be a reason.

Cornelius was not a liar by nature. He had built his entire life around his word. When he gave an order, he expected it to be obeyed because everyone around him knew that his word was rarely given lightly.

If he had told me Johann was not his son, then he must have believed he had no choice.

A protection.

A strategy.

Perhaps he had been protecting the boy. Perhaps he had been protecting the crown. Perhaps there was something buried beneath that lie that I had never been meant to uncover.

My thumb moved unconsciously over the edge of the report.

Whatever the reason, Cornelius had not lied without purpose.

At least, that was what I needed to believe.

Because the alternative meant that the man I had spent years serving had deceived me for reasons I could not even begin to understand.

And if that were true, then I had never truly known him at all.

Still...

My mind kept circling back to the same impossible question, trying to reconcile the man I had served with the man who had looked me in the eye and lied.

If Johann was truly Cornelius’s son, then why had Cornelius spent years making certain he would never inherit the throne? Why had he altered the succession, favored Lysander, and done everything within his power to push his own blood out of the line of inheritance?

What had he known?

What had he been afraid of?

I had no answers. Only the report in my hand, its edges crumpled beneath the pressure of my grip.

I needed to find Lysander.