Chapter 24: Blood Oath
Kya wakes screaming from nightmares of Silks - Seraphina rocks her while Vincent methodically sharpens his knives and Callum paces like a caged wolf. Seraphina wrapped her arms around Kya, her nine year old little warrior who had been sold just like her mother had been. She held her like an anchor, a promise. She was here with them, alive and closer to freedom than she’d ever been. “Have you ever done the math?” Her words came out quiet, almost like she was talking to herself. “Kya is my oldest. She’s nine, I’m twenty-four… and she was my third pregnancy.” She didn’t do the math for them,
The silence after her words wasn’t empty. It was thick, a physical substance filling the cold cavern of the great hall. The math hung there, ugly and undeniable. Twenty-four. Nine. Third pregnancy.
Callum stopped pacing. He turned slowly from the doorway, his eyes finding Seraphina in the gloom. He’d done campaigns, seen the aftermath of sieges on villages. He knew the numbers violence could produce. This was a different calculus. It wasn’t the chaos of battle. It was systematic, cold, and it had started when she was a child herself. A sound, low and guttural, escaped him before he could bite it back.
Vincent didn’t move from his spot against the wall. His head was still tilted back, eyes closed, but the line of his jaw was rigid, a blade under skin. The whetstone had stopped its whisper. His fingers were white-knuckled around the hilt of the dagger in his lap. He was doing the math. Fourteen? Thirteen? The numbers scrolled behind his eyelids, each one a hammer blow. His father’s trade ledgers, his father’s profits, his father’s quiet dinners with Madam Lysandra. They had just become violently, personally specific.
Kya stirred against Seraphina, whimpering in her sleep. The little girl’s face, so like her mother’s, twisted. “No,” she muttered, a tiny, frantic protest. “Not the velvet room. Please.”
Seraphina’s entire body tightened. She pulled Kya closer, her hand smoothing back sweat-damp hair from the girl’s forehead. “Shhh. You’re here. You’re with me. The velvet room is gone.” Her voice was a rock, steady for her daughter, but her green eyes, when they flicked up, were shattered glass.
“The velvet room?” Callum asked, his voice deliberately soft, neutral. A strategist collecting intelligence.
“At Silks.” The words were torn from Seraphina. She pressed her lips to Kya’s hair. “For the… the ones they were priming for exclusive auction. Soundproofed. Everything was dark red velvet. It swallowed sound. You couldn’t even hear yourself scream.”
Vincent’s eyes opened. They were black in the low light. “Lysandra’s innovation. She found clients paid a thirty percent premium for the assurance of absolute discretion.” He said it like he was reciting a market report. The disconnect between the clinical tone and the horror it described was more nauseating than any shout.
Kya’s whimpers escalated into a thin, rising cry. Her small hands came up, clawing at invisible restraints. The nightmare had her. “The scent! Get it off! Get the perfume off me!”
Seraphina sat up, rocking her, but the terror was too deep, a well dug over months of conditioning. “Kya, baby, wake up. You’re safe.”
Callum was across the room in three strides. He crouched before them, not touching, a presence. “Kya,” he said, firm but not loud. “Soldier. Report.”
The strange, military command cut through the dream-fog. Kya’s eyes flew open, wide and unseeing for a second, then focusing on Callum’s face. Her breath hitched in great, shuddering gulps.
“You’re in Whitetower. The mission is rest. Your mum’s here. Leo and Mia are here. Do you see your siblings?” Callum kept going, grounding her in facts.
Kya’s panicked gaze darted to the sleeping forms of Leo and Mia, then to Seraphina’s face. She gave a jerky nod, a tear tracing a clean path through the grime on her cheek.
“The perfume…” she whispered.
“You smell like river mud and old blanket,” Callum said, a hint of a real smile touching his mouth. “Honestly, it’s rank. Nothing floral about it.”
A choked sound, almost a laugh, escaped Kya. She buried her face back into Seraphina’s neck. The tension in her small body eased from a fracture to a tremble.
Vincent watched the scene. Callum’s instinct, the right one, the effective one. He himself was frozen, trapped between the image of a child terrified of a scent and the knowledge that his family’s coffers had likely paid for the perfumer. His usual tools—information, strategy, cold analysis—were useless here. They were just more velvet, swallowing the scream.
He stood, the movement stiff. He walked to one of the high, broken windows, staring out at the grey dawn. He needed air the room couldn’t provide.
“He’s angry,” Kya mumbled into Seraphina’s skin.
“No, sweetheart,” Seraphina murmured. “Not at you.”
“Yes he is. I can feel it.”
Seraphina looked over at Vincent’s rigid back. “He’s angry for you. There’s a difference.”
“Doesn’t feel different.”
Callum pushed back to his feet, his knees cracking. He joined Vincent at the window, leaning a shoulder against the cold stone. Below, the river curled, iron-grey and silent. “We need to move faster,” Callum said, quiet. “Not just for the plan. For them. Every night here is another night that room lives in her head.”
“I know.” Vincent’s voice was rough. “The Silken Emporium is in the Guilded Quarter. Heavy guard. Private. Lysandra herself is a ghost. She never leaves the top floor.”
“So we make her want to leave. Or we get invited in.”
Vincent finally looked at him. “How?”
“You’re the disgraced duke’s son. I’m the traitor prince. Between us, we have a lot of enemies with deep pockets. What if one of those enemies wanted to make a special purchase? Something to truly humiliate us.” Callum’s mind was racing, gears turning with a grim kind of energy. “We need a buyer with a convincing grudge.”
“My cousin,” Vincent said after a moment. “Alistair. He’s been trying to have me declared incompetent for years to seize the remaining Sterling assets. He’s vain, cruel, and has the money. He’s also bought from Lysandra before. I’ve seen the discreet withdrawals from the family ledgers.”
“Perfect. So Alistair hears a rumor. His fallen cousin has a… particular attachment to a certain rescued commodity. One he’d pay a fortune to acquire, just to prove he can take the last thing Vincent cares about.”
Vincent’s gaze was flinty. “Using her as bait. Again.”
“It’s not bait if she’s the hunter in the trap. We control the narrative. We get the invitation inside. She gets her face-to-face with Lysandra.” Callum’s eyes were sharp. “It’s the only way to get you both through that door without a full-scale assault we can’t win.”
Behind them, Seraphina spoke. They hadn’t heard her approach. She stood a few feet away, Kya now asleep in her arms, a profound exhaustion in every line of her body, but her chin was up. “I’m not bait. I’m the reason.” She looked between them. “You’re talking about walking me back into a place like that.”
“Not back. Into the place. The heart of it,” Vincent corrected, turning fully to face her. “It’s the greatest risk. It’s also the only path to the source.”
“And you think this cousin would believe it? That you’d care enough about me for it to be a true prize for him?” The question was directed at Vincent, stark and honest.
Vincent held her gaze. The air in the ruined hall seemed to thin. Callum watched, a silent witness to the precipice.
“Yes,” Vincent said. The word was simple. Absolute. “He would believe it because it would be true.”
There it was. No silver tongue, no charming deflection. Just a cold, hard fact, laid bare in the morning light. The acknowledgment echoed louder than Kya’s scream had.
Seraphina absorbed it. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t smile. She nodded, once, as if he’d confirmed the weather. “Then we need a way to plant the rumor. One that Lysandra will hear and trust.”
Callum let out a slow breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The triangle had just reconfigured itself. The lines were clear now, even if the ground was no more stable. “Rhys,” he said. “She has contacts in the guilds. The kind of servants who gossip in wealthy kitchens. A word in the right ear about the brooding Duke’s son being inconsolable over the loss of a certain dark-haired woman… it would get to Alistair by supper.”
“And if he takes the bait, he’ll contact Lysandra. She’ll see the opportunity for a monumental sale and a chance to tie up a loose end—me.” Seraphina’s mind was working, the strategist in her rising to the surface, shaped by years of predicting predator behavior. “She’ll want to verify the merchandise. She won’t just take his word. There will be a meeting. An inspection.”
“Which is where we turn the tables,” Vincent finished. His mind was already there, mapping the room, the exits, the guards. “We get you in. We get her isolated. We get the real ledger.”
“And then we burn it all down,” Seraphina said, her voice dropping to a whisper. The promise was for Kya, asleep in her arms.
Leo, who had been quietly watching from the blanket, piped up, his voice too loud in the tense space. “Is Mama going away again?”
Three heads turned to him. The raw fear on his little face was a splash of cold water.
Seraphina moved to him, sinking down to bring herself to his level, Kya a weight in one arm. “No, my love. Not like before. This time, I’m going to get something. And Uncle Callum and Uncle Vincent will be right there with me. We’re getting the last key to the cage. Then we slam the door shut forever.”
She used their words, the ones she’d overhead. Uncle. The spontaneous title hung in the air. Callum felt a strange, sharp pang in his chest. Vincent looked momentarily, utterly thrown.
“Can I have a key?” Leo asked, serious.
“When it’s over,” Callum said, recovering, forcing a grin. “I’ll get you a whole keyring. Now, who’s hungry? I think I saw some ancient, probably cursed barley in Rhys’s sack. Breakfast of champions.”
The practical need for food broke the spell. The plan was set, a dangerous, glittering hook cast into the dark water of the city. As Callum rummaged for the pot, and Vincent began rebuilding the fire for a proper cookfire, Seraphina sat on the cracked marble floor with her children nestled around her.
She watched the two men—the prince with his easy grins and lethal calculations, the duke’s son with his silent intensity and unwavering focus. One had named his care a tactical truth. The other had just been given a title he’d never dared to consider. The path ahead was a knife-edge.
But for the first time, the terror of the velvet room had been spoken aloud in a safe place. The math, once a hidden monster, was now a shared weapon. And the next step, was to burn down the cage.