Page 33 of Savage Crown

I don’t know.

If I admit that, I might never stop.

I finish binding her wound in silence, my movements slower, more careful than before.

Then I rise, turning away, putting distance between us.

"You did well," I say, voice cold. Detached.

She doesn’t move for a long moment. "You don’t mean that." She turns and walks away before I can respond.

I don’t move until the door clicks shut.

Then—only then—do I exhale, pressing my fingers against my temple.

I’m not pissed at her. Not really. I’m pissed at myself. For caring. For sending her on that mission in the first place. For—fuck, I don’t know. I’m just pissed.

15

RYLAN

The envelope is waiting for me when I return to my study.

It’s a simple thing—no seal, no name. Just dark parchment, folded with precision, left exactly where I would find it.

Someone had been here.

Someone had walked through the fortress of my home, through the guarded halls of the Midnight Den, and left this.

I don’t move right away.

I listen.

The room is silent, save for the faint crackling of the fire. The air is still, no trace of another presence lingering. But that means nothing. The kind of people who send messages like this—the kind of men who slip past doors and guards and all the barriers I’ve built—don’t leave traces unless they want to be found.

A slow exhale. I reach for the parchment.

My fingers barely brush the surface before I feel it.

A shift. A pulse.

Dark magic.

Not active, not dangerous—not a curse. But a signature. A whisper of power laced into the fibers of the paper. A calling card.

I flip it open with careful fingers, scanning the inked words inside.

They are few. Precise. Too sharp, too intimate.

I read them once. Then again.

And my breath slows.

The past is not as buried as you think.

It’s waiting. Watching. And it wants what was stolen.

Shall we dig up the bones together?

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