Chapter 32
ARK
He knew she was lying the moment she told him it was over. Cassia was many things, but she wasn’t a liar. Her truth lived too close to the surface, and that made it worse.
Because whatever she was hiding, it was terrible enough for her to burn everything between them.
Sharp enough to turn her words into small blades, even at her own expense.
He didn’t believe a word of it, but he’d seen the look in her eyes when she told him to see his father. Old grief. Empathy. Anguish.
That was all he needed.
He cleaned up and dressed quickly, barely aware of his movements. His hands moved like they were underwater, his heartbeat in his throat. Shirt. Trousers. Boots. Coat.
When he reached the door, he stopped and looked back, finding her in the centre of the room—dress still askew, a figure carved from silence.
“Stay as long as you want,” he told her. “Take whatever you need.”
And then he left, because whatever this was, it wasn’t something she’d let him solve by staying.
He took the car and sped toward his parents’ estate. The city fell away—glass, stone, frostbitten trees blurring past—until the black iron gates loomed ahead. The guards recognized him, let him through without question, though their brows lifted at the sight of him behind the wheel.
The estate was in motion. Servants hurried across the lawn, collecting ribbons and spent lanterns.
Crystal shards were swept into neat piles.
Someone shouted orders about empty wine bottles.
Florists in thick gloves carried urns back to the terrace, their breaths misting in the cold.
It was the lively chaos of post-ball cleanup, seemingly ordinary.
Ark didn’t slow down. He skidded to a stop in front of the grand steps, gravel flying. His father’s butler, Orlen, was already at the door, blocking the entrance as if the guards at the gate had called ahead.
“My lord. We didn’t receive word that you were coming—”
“Didn’t you.” Ark didn’t break stride.
Orlen stepped into his path, a hand raised. “Please. Your mother was firm in her instructions. You are not to be let into the house.”
Ark stopped. Looked at him fully—this old demon who’d been a part of his childhood. Was he in on this deception as well?
“You’ve known me since I had horns too small to see, Orlen. You think you can stop me?”
A pained expression passed through Orlen’s face. “You were always impossible when you’d made up your mind,” he said softly. “Even as a boy.”
“I’m no longer a boy.”
“You are not,” Orlen agreed. “It’s not for me to say, but if you would only speak to your mother first, perhaps—”
“No.”
There was steel in Ark’s voice now—resolve, sharpened to a point. Orlen stilled. Then, he bowed and stepped aside.
Ark entered. The doors closed behind him with a muffled thud, and the hush of the Varil mansion closed in. Though the ball had ended only hours ago, all traces of a party had been eradicated, every nook and cranny swept clean.
He rushed past the enormous hearth, the tall arched windows with their heavy drapes drawn back to let in the grey morning light.
He took the grand staircase two at a time, hand skimming the carved banister—the one he used to slide down as a child with Oromon, laughing while Orlen shouted after them.
He remembered those things in flashes. How wide the halls once felt, how high the ceilings loomed. How he used to race to his father’s study just to show him a drawing or ask about a constellation. But that door was always closed, his father busy with one important matter or another.
He’d never once stopped and wondered if those were the truths, or simply excuses made up to conceal a worse truth.
Deeper into the family wing he went. The air became colder. It had nothing to do with temperature, but everything with what he was about to uncover.
He realized then: he was afraid. Afraid he’d been wrong all along, that the thing which had shaped his youth, his anger, his distance, had never been what he thought it was. That he’d failed to grasp what lay behind the curtains.
At the end of the corridor stood the double doors to his parents’ bedroom—ancient, lacquered wood engraved with the sigil of House Varil. Always closed. Always private.
He felt his mother’s presence before he saw her.
“Ark.”
Her voice was firm, composed—the same voice that had shaped half his childhood. But this morning, the edge was unmistakable.
“Don’t,” she said, barricading the door. “Your father doesn’t want you to see him like this.”
He looked at her then, really looked at the lines around her eyes. The edge of fatigue that neither makeup nor glamour could hide. She couldn’t even hold his gaze for more than a second.
The truth clicked into place.
Ark thought of every missed visit. Every deflection in their correspondence.
Every carefully chosen word from Orlen or his mother.
He thought of his father, absent from every dinner, every holiday, every moment that might’ve mattered, including his graduations.
He’d believed the implications: the Daemar was simply too busy.
The Regency Council required his full attention.
There simply hadn’t been time for his sons.
“I need to see him,” Ark said.
His mother touched his arm. “He doesn’t want to hurt you with the truth.”
He stared at the hand on his sleeve, then his eyes found hers. “What do you think this lie is doing to me?”
She didn’t answer. Her lashes lowered, and for a flicker of a second, the mask she always wore slipped. He saw, for the first time, not just the Daemaris, but a woman who had shouldered a solitary watch for years.
“He had . . . a difficult night,” she murmured. “I called the physician. Your father has just fallen asleep—”
“I won’t wake him.” Ark’s voice was softer now. “I just want to see him.”
His mother hesitated, then gave a small nod. “Come into the sitting room when you’re finished. The physician’s still here. I’ll ask him to wait. You’ll have questions, I’m sure.”
The door opened soundlessly, and Ark stepped inside.
The room smelled faintly of sage oil and antiseptic. Curtains had been drawn to cut out the daylight, and the fireplace burned low, casting a restless amber across the polished wood floors and the edges of a velvet rug.
He remembered this room.
The last time he’d been here, he was barely out of his teens, standing by that same giant fireplace while his mother scolded him for storming out of a council session. His father hadn’t even looked up from the papers in his hand.
But now . . . the desk was clear, the ledgers returned to the shelves. And the man who had once stood at the helm of Meredith’s most powerful demon house lay half-shadowed beneath a blanket, his back curved slightly against the pillows, his breathing thin and uneven in the hush.
Ark barely recognized him.
How long had it been since he last saw his father? Three years? Four?
The silver in his hair had spread. His skin, once burnished gold, had gone pale. Even his frame—always proud, always tall in a child’s eyes—had shrunk somehow. The man in the bed wasn’t the Daemar he remembered. He looked diminished. Frail.
Ark swallowed hard.
He took a step forward, then another, until he stood at the edge of the bed.
His father didn’t stir.
The silence was crushing—the kind that had been building for years, grown from words unspoken, doors unopened, chances neither of them took.
Ark reached for the nearest bedpost and gripped it.
A shaky, ragged sound escaped him, and he had to lower himself onto the bed’s edge as if his bones were made of glass.
He didn’t dare move or breathe, just stared at his father’s hand resting atop the covers—the hand that had once signed decrees and dismissed him with a wave, now still and papery with illness.
The urge to reach out was a physical ache, but he curled his own hands into fists in his lap, terrified that his touch might be the thing that finally shattered the fragile man in the bed.
“I’m here now,” he said, barely above a whisper.
Ark found his mother waiting in the adjoining sitting room, back straight, hands clasped in her lap. The fire had been lit, morning light filtering through the draperies. A silver tea service steamed gently on the low table before her.
Across from her sat a short, stout man in a charcoal suit, who rose as Ark entered. Ark recognized him vaguely—a face from a medical journal he’d skimmed once or twice.
“My lord,” the man murmured.
“This is Sir Harland,” his mother supplied. “Your father’s physician for the past decade.”
“Please sit,” Ark said. “You must be tired if you’ve watched over him all night.”
“The Daemaris did most of the watching. I was merely here in case . . .” The physician trailed off.
Ark didn’t need him to finish. “What illness does my father have?”
Sir Harland sat. “The name we give it is ‘Arcane Wasting.’ In the Daemar’s case, he was born with it.
A fundamental dissonance between his demonic core and his physical vessel.
Even as a child, there were signs. Tremors.
Spells backfiring. Long periods of fatigue no one could explain.
” He paused. “They blamed overexertion from magical training. But the truth is simpler and crueler: the magic that makes him strong has been slowly consuming his body from the day he drew his first breath.”
Ark sat very still. His father had been fighting this his entire life. Every day, every breath, every public appearance—all of it had been effort.
“What is the cure?” he asked.
The doctor hesitated, glancing at his mother.
She answered, “There is no cure.”
Ark’s stomach turned. He went hot and cold at once, the room tilting at the edges. “Not even if he stops using magic?”
The look Sir Harland gave him was gentle. “My lord, you know as well as I do—it is impossible for a demon of your father’s calibre to live without magic. Even if it were possible, too much damage has already been done. His organs are failing.”