Arik changed before he crossed the threshold.
Not visibly, not in any crude way a stranger could have pointed to and named, but in the colder, more disturbing sense that the air around him seemed to lose all patience at once. Whatever remained of the brother in the corridor, whatever faint ease Damian's interruption and Mezos's insolence had pulled back into him, stayed outside with the warmer ether light.
By the time the suite doors opened, only Goliath entered.
That was the version the consorts knew.
Not Arik as Michel and Ophelia knew him, not Arik as Cecil was annoyed into laughter, and not Arik in the impossible, private world of family. No. The man who crossed into Ilyan's rooms was the heir stripped of softness, the old warlord refined into modern tailoring and palace authority, the one who could make beauty feel like a liability simply by looking at it too long.
Even Mezos feared that version of the Crown Prince.
