46. Lazarus
The study is my sanctuary as well as my war room. Walls of dark wood panelling surround me while the air is dense with the ghost of my father’s cigars. The massive windows overlook the formal gardens, a rigid geometry of boxwood hedges and gravel paths. Order imposed on nature.
It’s a lie, a beautiful, fragile lie, just like everything else in this fucking house.
I move to the sideboard, pouring myself two fingers of Scotch from a crystal decanter despite the fact it’s far too fucking early to be drinking. I need the fire in my throat, the anchoring bitterness.
And I need to face the window just for a second longer, to compose the mask before I turn around and face the man I know is waiting for me.
“Lazarus.”
His voice is closer. Not a request for attention anymore, but the beginning of an attack. I know this tone. It’s the one he uses right before he slides the knife home, so smoothly you don’t realize you’re bleeding until you’re already cold.
I turn to see him standing in the centre of the Persian rug. The morning light carves sharp angles from his face, leaving his eyes in shadow.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” he says.
The world narrows to a pinpoint. The glass in my hand suddenly feels like a block of ice. My entire body freezes, a system-wide shutdown. I can’t even feel my heartbeat. It’s just gone, leaving a hollow, echoing void in my chest where it used to be. He knows. The thought is a silent howl.
He knows, he knows, he knows.
I force the muscles in my throat to work. The words scrape out, raw and unfamiliar. “What do you mean?”
It’s a pathetic defence, a child caught with his hand in the sweet jar and his slight, pitying smile tells me he knows it. He leans forward slightly and the scent of him, whiskey and expensive cologne, invades my space.
“Don’t insult me, Lazarus. Not you.” His voice is low, a conspiratorial murmur that is infinitely more menacing than a shout.
The mask of the calm U.S Chapter Lord has been stripped away.
The real Charles is here; the sharp, watchful man who misses nothing.
“You’ve fallen down the very same hole your dear brother crawled into.
The hole he dug with his own hands and sealed himself inside.
” He tilts his head, a predator sizing up its wounded prey. “You’ve fallen for a pretty cunt.”
A flash of sheer, incandescent anger whites out my vision for a second.
It’s not a word for her. It’s a vile, reductive, ugly word for a thing of spitting fire and ancient pride.
For the woman who looks at me as if I am not a title, not a bloodline, but just a man.
A man she has the audacity, the breathtaking, terrifying audacity to truly see.
My hand tightens on the glass, and I have to consciously restrain myself from hurling it into his face just to shatter that cold, analytical calm. The violence of the feeling is a revelation.
My voice when I find it is a low growl, vibrating with a rage I can barely contain. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He’s utterly unmoved. He just looks back at me, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips.
“Don’t I?” He leans closer, close enough now that I could reach out and touch him.
Close enough to strangle. “Tell me, Lazarus, is it a coincidence? You, a man who prides himself on his logic, his strategy... tell me it’s a coincidence that she has Ines’s face.
Tell me it’s a coincidence that she is also Esau, of that same cursed bloodline too. ”
He pauses, letting the horror of it sink in, letting me see it through his eyes. The pattern. The perverse, repeating pattern.
“So, which is it?” he asks. “Do you and your brother just share a type? A biological predilection for the daughters of our enemies? Or have you both simply decided that the cardinal sins are a shopping list to be ticked off? Pride, greed… lust. The lust of the flesh and the lust of power, all tangled up in one forbidden, treacherous little body.”
My infuriation is complete. It’s a beast with claws, shredding my insides.
It’s rage at him for saying it. It’s rage at myself because from the outside, stripped of the agonizing, soul-deep truth of it, he might be right.
That’s the worst of it. He has taken the most profound, terrifying and beautiful thing I have ever felt, and he has held it up to the light, showing me only its warped, monstrous shadow.
But my rage is a luxury I can’t afford. I see, with a chilling clarity, the precipice I’m standing on.
To defend her, to scream her name, to articulate the shape of her defiant soul, is to prove his point.
So I swallow the hot, caustic bile of my anger and say nothing.
I just stare at him, letting my silence be my shield.
He sees it; the shift in my posture, the strategic retreat. His smile widens, just a fraction. He thinks he’s won a point, and then he says the words that change everything.
“If you want my support, then you need to get rid of the girl.”
The air leaves the room. “Excuse me?” I manage. The words are nothing, just air shaped into a question. My mind is roaring.
“Don’t play the fool. It doesn’t suit you.
” He leans back, beginning to make a slow, deliberate circle around me.
A shark. “You think I don’t see it? Every meeting, every manipulated report, every carefully placed doubt you sow among the families.
You’re building a scaffold, Lazarus. A scaffold for a coup. You’re going to take his power.”
He’s seen it. Of course he’s seen it.
He’s been watching my blueprint unfold. Every line I drew in secret, he’s evidently been tracing with his finger.
He stops right in front of me. “I am not so stupid as everyone else. I am not blinded by pity for a ruined man, or by fear of your authority. I see you, and I will support you.”
An ally? In this pit of vipers? If I was a fool, I’d convince myself that that is all he is. A friend, an ally, but he’s not finished.
“I will support you,” he repeats, his eyes like flint.
“I will give you my voice, my influence, every scrap of leverage I’ve spent my life accumulating in the shadows of this place.
But I will not do it if you commit the same offences he has done.
You are about to stage a revolution based on the premise that your brother is unfit to rule because he was a reckless, passionate fool who brought us to the brink of ruin.
And what do you do? You install the exact same flaw at the heart of your own regime before it even begins.
The instrument of your family’s greatest humiliation, of Konstantine’s utter destruction is back in this house, even if she’s wearing a different face.
Get rid of her. Cut out the weakness. Now, before she metastasizes. ”
I stare back at him. I see the brutal, elegant logic of it.
It’s the same logic I would have used a year ago, before I knew the feel of her hand on my chest. He is asking me to trade her life for his loyalty.
A human sacrifice on the altar of my ambition.
The study, with all its heavy, masculine solidity, feels like it’s closing in on me.
And then, the door opens.
A new presence fills the frame, and the air literally shifts in pressure. Konstantine. He doesn’t knock; he never does. He just appears, like a walking slab of granite in a tailored suit. Behind him Zayn wheels in, his muscular frame imposing even in the confines of the chair.
“Gentlemen,” Konstantine says, his voice a low, measured baritone. It’s a statement, not a greeting. “Are we ready for today’s business?”
The spell shatters. Charles takes a smooth, unhurried step back and the predator’s posture instantly melts away, leaving only the efficient Chapter Lord behind.
I am left standing in the wreckage of the last ten seconds, my mind reeling, my world balanced on a knife’s edge.
I still say nothing. I can’t. If I open my mouth, I don’t know what will come out. So I just give a short, sharp nod. A dismissal of the previous conversation, a concession to the present moment.
Konstantine walks into the room, a leather portfolio tucked under his arm and takes his customary seat in the high-backed chair opposite my desk. He settles into it, opens the portfolio and begins arranging the day’s documents with a quiet, efficient rustle of paper, utterly confident.
Zayn positions himself near the window, his presence a silent, watchful force.
And that’s when I see it. My brother is sharp, is rational.
His eyes, which meet mine for a fleeting, electric second as he glances up from his papers, are clear and focused.
They hold none of the fog of madness, none of the internal horror.
They are the eyes of the man I grew up with, the man I followed into hell.
They are cunning, competent, and they are watching me.
Today, my brother is sane. Today, my brother is competent. Today, my brother is a rival who can actually fight back.
The clock isn’t just ticking. It’s a drumbeat now, a frantic, percussive rhythm in my blood. The window is closing. My brother is awake, and Charles has me by the very throat.
“The first item on the agenda is…” Zayn begins, his voice droning with a horribly normal cadence.
I move to my desk, my legs feeling like they belong to a stranger and I take my seat. With all the strength I can muster, I play my part, I play the perfect brother. The perfect spare.