Chapter 4:

  "No Feelings, No Farewell"

  Arc 1: Chapter 4

  POV: "???"

  Andrew approached.

  And here, the memory shifts and slides, invading the shadow's point of view for the first time. His fingers, which knew the weight of a sword and the chill of stone, hovered a hair's breadth from Alice's deathly pale skin. It was a veil he had no permission to tear.

  It was then that Oliver's voice echoed in his mind. Not a gentle memory, but a blow. Clear and painful like the tolling of a funeral bell:

  "Hey, brother… this is my woman. The woman of my life."

  The phrase did not come with the sweetness of the living brother, but with the dead brother's eternal accusation. Andrew recoiled as if her skin were burning coal. Without a word, without a glance, he turned. His steps echoed in the empty corridor, a strategic retreat from the only battle he refused to win. He left her alone in the middle of the study, wrapped only in the silk robe and in a humiliation so sharp that it quickly curdled into pure fury.

  Months dragged on. The pressure was no longer a whisper, but a siege. The father, the leaders of other houses, the newly discovered prophecies—all converged on Andrew like crows pecking at a corpse, waiting for him to move. He finally yielded. Not from desire, not from duty, but from exhaustion. The consummation was an administrative act, cold and efficient, carried out in the dark, without kisses and without names.

  A year later, against all the coldness that conceived him, Raphadun was born. And the world stopped. The boy bore the rare gift of teleportation — with no trace of the Light. The prophecy breathed again. A month later, Luna came. The Definitve Light had returned after eighty years, and its price was two children and a marriage in ruins. On that day, the light emerged from the place where she was born, illuminating every noble present; that was the moment, that was the sign.

  On the birthing bed, exhausted and drenched in sweat, Alice saw something she judged impossible: Andrew smiled. A minuscule smile, almost imperceptible, awkward, directed at the baby he held with arms as rigid as if holding a weapon, but with clumsy tenderness in the thumbs that caressed the tiny face.

  But that smile was not for her. It was a breach in his fortress, and through it only the light of the children passed. Nothing changed between the two in the great desert of their chambers. "I hate my husband," Alice repeated to the mirror every morning, and the words sounded increasingly like a worn spell whose power she feared was fading. "And I always will."

  As the children grew, the hatred had to learn to wear masks. It became a coexistence governed by protocol, a non-aggression treaty signed before the cradles.

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  "Why don't Daddy and Mommy ever sleep together?" Luna asked one day, her voice a squeak of innocence that pierced both their armored hearts.

  They tried. For the first time in years, they lay side by side in the enormous bed, a desert that suddenly seemed too small. The story for the children was read in shifts, their voices never mingling, only alternating in the air like two birds of different species. It was an act. But it was a joint act.

  The next day, Alice woke to a strange and tempting aroma wafting into her room: fresh coffee. She went down to the kitchen. He had prepared the drink. For her. There was no note, no word, no glance. Only a fine porcelain cup placed in her spot at the table, steaming silently like a flag of truce raised on contested ground.

  It was the first gesture. A minuscule hole dug into the ice wall between them.

  Years of minimal gestures passed. Silences that were a little less cutting. Glances that, when they crossed by accident, fled a little less quickly.

  On the twins' sixth birthday, the castle buzzed with preparations. Ribbons, sweets, the rare sound of children's laughter echoing on the stones. Alice was adjusting Luna's flower crown when she noticed his presence closer than necessary. Andrew, holding a balloon that looked absurd in his warrior hands, opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again.

  "The… the cake," his voice sounded rough, like an iron door long unopened. "The confectioner asked if… if the children preferred chocolate or vanilla."

  "The confectioner. It was the confectioner who asked, Andrew," she replied, her voice not merely dry but sharp, correcting him as if he were a servant who had mistaken a title. She turned before he could process the blow, leaving him alone with the absurd balloon and the sting of that cruel precision.

  Later in the party, in the garden. The afternoon sun caught in her hair, and for a second, Andrew's heart—an organ he judged fossilized—gave a stupid jolt.

  Then he saw the man. A young noble from the House of Mages, an old acquaintance from the days when Alice still laughed. The man approached with a relaxed smile, and his arms rose in a gesture that did not ask permission—an embrace from someone who still believed he had rights over her.

  Andrew moved before the thought formed. It was not a decision. It was an ancestral reflex, a possessive surge that crossed the courtyard in a surge of shadow and fury. His fist—the same hand that had hesitated a hair's breadth from her hair that distant night—connected with the intruder's jaw with a dry and satisfying crack, the sound of bone contesting its place.

  The noble fell like a sack of flour, his smile now transformed into a mask of shock and pain. He fled, fearing the darkness before him.

  The world stopped. The birds fell silent. Andrew breathed deeply, the air burning in his lungs. He turned to Alice, the protective instinct still pulsing in his veins, a hot and foolish wave of something resembling possession.

  "Are you okay?" The question came out hoarse, born from a place so primitive and genuine that he himself did not recognize it.

  The look she gave him was not gratitude. It was pure and absolute contempt.

  "No!" Her voice was a blade. "What the fuck are you doing, Andrew? I don't need your help! I don't want your help!"

  She advanced one step, and he—the man who had faced beasts of the Infernal Zone — recoiled.

  "What did you think?" She spat the words, each one a small stab. "That because we lay together once, because you gave me two children, now I'm your real wife? Your property?"

  Her green eyes were no longer flaming. They were glacial. Diamond tips dipped in poison. And then she delivered the final blow, the devastating truth both had avoided since the wake:

  "I will never love anyone but Oliver! NEVER! He was everything you will never be! And you… you are just the shadow left behind!"

  Alice left. Not furious. With a terrible and cutting dignity.

  Andrew stood frozen on the path. The crack of his fist still echoed in the air, but it was an insignificant sound compared to the thunder her words had made inside his skull. At his feet, the young noble groaned, trying to rise. Andrew did not see him.

  He saw only the image of his brother, smiling easily, and the memory of his own voice, years ago, whispering in the dark: "It is not your war yet."

  He had been wrong.

  This was his war. And he had just suffered the first and most devastating casualty.

  Not from an enemy, but from the woman who, by decree of destiny and her hatred, was his wife.