Blood pooled along the tapestry’s edge, a stain the room could not ignore. The hall had gone silent; even the noble murmurs had been choked off. Theodore Chambers moved through the stunned crowd with the casual certainty of a man who believed the world owed him. He did not shout. He did not need to. The deed had been done—your father was no longer breathing—and the ledger had been balanced.

When he halted before you, he inclined his head in formality and spoke as if reciting a fact. “It is settled,” he said, voice flat. “The debt has been collected.”

Guards seized your mother as she stumbled to her feet, her cries cutting through the space. Theodore watched with detached precision as they bound her and pushed her toward the dungeon stairs. He had arranged the punishment as policy.

He stepped to you then, close enough that the air between you felt charged, his gloved fingers tilting your chin until your eyes met his. He spoke softer now, words low and private. “You will learn to obey,” he murmured. “Not for sport. For survival.” His thumb brushed your lip, a motion that blurred tenderness and ownership.

“You will be kept,” he added, and the sentence landed like a verdict. “You will present yourself when instructed. You will answer only as I allow. Your mother will live if she is quiet.” The brutal calculus of his mercy was clear.

He had said before, in other times, that he would “make use” of you. The phrase echoed now with more terrible meaning: not merely ornament, but leverage and advantage. He was pragmatic to the core; cruel when necessary.

As guards dragged your mother away, Theodore guided you through a corridor that smelled of stone and wick. At a private turn, away from witnesses, he paused and regarded you more directly. For a breath you saw not the prince, but the man beneath the polish—calculation braided with a thin, strange tenderness.

“You could make this easier.” His voice was intimate, a whisper that might have been kind in another life. “Learn to please me. Learn what I favor. Be useful, and comforts will follow.”

The words held both offer and command. His gloved hand cupped your jaw; the touch was gentle, but his grip was sure. “Do not mistake civility for mercy,” he said, voice low as a blade. “It is strategy. Learn your place, and you will be granted comforts. Fail, and you will learn consequence.”

He pressed a brief kiss to your brow—soft, almost reverent—and stepped back as if the intimacy had been an experiment. Later, in the small chamber allotted to you, there would be a tray of food and a lamp left burning at the bedside. A note, written in his precise hand, would instruct: Present yourself at dawn. Comport as directed. Survival is negotiation.

That night the dungeon’s muffled sobs haunted the walls. Theodore’s shadow fell across your door at odd hours; sometimes he would pause there, watching with an air of study. He noted which comforts eased you and which commands bent your will least; he catalogued your reactions with the curious eye of a man measuring assets.

Occasionally his tone would soften at a private word, and you suspected, terrifyingly, that a strand of care threaded his control. “I would prefer you willing,” he murmured once, eyes on the smoke. “But willingness can be learned.” Sometimes he added, quieter, as if confessing to himself: “It is better you survive cleanly than drown in resistance.”

You understood then that nothing about your fate was accidental. The prince had decided you were useful, and he intended to shape you. You were not property in the crude sense—he did not keep you in chains—but you were held all the same: restrained by politeness, by favors, by the terrible convenience of his protection.

He shut the door behind you. You felt his intent settle over you like iron, winter. Outside, the world resumed its polite rituals. Inside, the future narrowed to the space between your two faces and the weight of the sentence he had spoken: You will be useful to me