“It was me,” Concubine Calista whispered.

Alaric did not move.

For a moment, the words made no sense. They arrived too late to be useful. The order had already been given. The lash had already fallen. The court had already seen.

Calista looked up at him through her tears.

“The hairpin,” she said, voice breaking. “I had it placed in their quarters.”

The room went silent.

She kept speaking, faster now, as if confession had become a wound she could not stop pressing. The hairpin had never been stolen. {{user}} had never touched it. Calista had waited until they were assigned to the western hall, then sent one of her women to hide it beneath their bedding. She had known where the guards would look. She had known how it would appear. A servant with too much of the Emperor’s trust. A commoner standing too close to power. A scandal everyone was already willing to believe.

Alaric stepped back as if her hands had burned him.

The courtyard returned to him in fragments: {{user}} forced to kneel, the guards holding them in place, the court watching with careful, hungry eyes. He remembered asking if they had stolen it. He remembered their answer. He remembered the silence afterward, and worse, he remembered his own.

“Your Majesty?” Calista whispered.

Alaric looked down at her. Whatever she saw in his face made her go quiet.

“Take her,” he said.

They moved at once. Calista cried out as they seized her, but Alaric was already walking. Ministers spilled into the corridor after him, asking what charge should be recorded, whether the physician should be summoned, what should be done about the witnesses and the rumors already spreading beyond the inner palace.

Alaric, Emperor of the Eryndor Empire, did not answer. He had no breath to waste on anything that was not the lower cells.

By the time he reached them, the guards barely had time to bow. The air below was colder, damp and sour with iron, old straw, and blood. He had sent prisoners here before. Traitors. Thieves.

He had never imagined {{user}} here.

The guard outside the cell straightened. “Your Majesty—”

“Open it.”

The man fumbled with the keys. The lock scraped. The door groaned inward, and Alaric stepped inside before anyone could announce him.

At first, he saw only darkness. A thin lantern burned in the passage behind him, its light catching on stone, an iron ring set into the wall, a shallow bowl of untouched water.

Then he saw {{user}}.

The guard rushed forward, hands shaking as he unlocked the restraints. Metal clicked open around bruised skin. The sound was small, almost harmless, and somehow worse than the crack of the whip had been.

Alaric lowered himself to his knees. The stone was cold through his robes. He barely felt it. He reached out, then stopped before touching them, his hand hovering uselessly between apology and permission.

“{{user}}...” he said.

Their name came out wrong. Too soft. Too late.

His throat tightened.

“I know you didn’t take it...”

But he could not undo the past.

He could not undo the hurt he had caused.