Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1004: New rules(2)

Marcus wore black the night he was to unsheathe steel against a Princely blood.

The world was a void, the darkness absolute. Only a sliver of a waning moon hung in the sky, an indifferent eye watching the man whose actions that night would either forge a nation’s future or dismantle it entirely. The moon offered no light, no guidance; it merely bore witness as Marcus blindly grasped at the moss-stones of the tower, using his raw fingertips as his only shepherds through the dark.

The man who held the fate of Yarzat in his calloused palm did not walk with a hero’s stride or announce himself with trumpets. He was a shadow among shadows. He knew with a terrifying certainty that if a single torch-beam caught him, if a single pebble skittered too loudly against the masonry, death would become his only companion, and the man he was to meet was famous for making death a slow, agonizing conversation.

His hand clamped onto a protruding weathered stone, and Marcus hung there for a moment, suspended between the abyss and the stars. He took a ragged breath, the cold night air stinging his throat, before reaching for the next handhold. Then the next.

He was so high now that the wind whistled through the crenellations like a mocking ghost. One slip, one cramp, and he would go flapping down to the very dirt he had been born in, the dirt he had spent his whole life trying to rise above, one that he now always cursed whenever he was made to pay the prince for that rise.

Retirement, my aching ass! he snarled internally, heaving his weight upward with a strained groan of his thigh muscles. I’m going to end up a damp red smear on the pavement all for that piece of work back in the palace!

He prayed to every god whose name he could remember, and a few he probably made up on the spot, that his hand would hold. This was the third "special request" he had been handed in less than half a year. The third! And like a sick joke, each one was a more creative way to get himself executed than the last.

He truly wondered if he had committed some unspeakable sin in a past life to deserve a Prince who didn’t understand the meaning of the words "well-earned rest." First, he’d been sent like a common arsonist to burn the Defender’s mines at the Fingers, choked by soot and skewered by arrows. Then, he’d been commanded to desecrate and maim the corpse of an Emperor, usurper or not, the man was royalty, and Marcus still felt the phantom itch of a curse on his skin from that business.Of course it had been satisfying enough then, but that did not make it any less dangerous.

And now? Now he was a mountain goat climbing the tower of a man who would likely peel Marcus’s skin off to make a new set of gloves if he caught him.

Like... the fuck? he thought, a hysterical bubble of laughter threatening to burst in his chest. Is there no one else in the entire Princedom who can climb a wall?Why is it have to be me?

He paused, hugging the stone as a pair of guards paced the battlements far below.

Marcus squeezed his eyes shut, thanking the gods for the sheer, lazy arrogance of men who thought their walls were too high to climb.

With one final, agonizing pull that made his shoulders scream, Marcus reached the ledge of the high window. He hung there for a heartbeat, his heart drumming a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He reached out a trembling hand and found, to his shock, that the heavy shutter was unlatched.

Well it was indeed summer...

Gods love a fool, he hissed.

He upheaved himself over the sill, tumbling into the room with all the grace of a landed fish. He landed on the thick, plush rugs of a royal bedchamber in the gray, pre-dawn light. He lay there for a second, gasping, the scent of expensive incense and stale wine filling his nostrils. He was in. He was in the sanctum of the would-be prince.

Marcus didn’t move for a long moment, letting the silence of the chamber settle over him, making sure his presence remained unknown. He stayed low and unmoving , but his eyes did not , darting across the opulence of a wealth that verged on the obscene.

Damn everything was so....was that a gold chair?

Astonished he crept closer, his calloused finger grazing the cold, unforgiving surface of a high-backed seat. It was of course gilded wood, but it nonetheless must have costed an eye. Marcus felt a surge of genuine disgust for that.

Even Alpheo, for all his power and the silver he poured into his legions, didn’t live with this kind of grotesque vanity. Here, it felt like the room was trying to buy the favor of the gods through sheer weight of bullion.

Is there no one normal in the Marcio’s family?

He turned to the mahogany desk, and he laid out what he held in his pocket.With that he took a deep breath

The distractions were over. It was time for the main course.

He turned toward the massive, canopied bed.

There, sprawled across silk sheets that cost more than Marcus’s entire village, lay Merelao Marcio. The nephew of Lavus, the heir apparent, a title that was becoming more and more unsure now than ever before.

Marcus froze as he laid eyes on the man.

Even with the moon as a meager witness, the man was a sight that bordered on the divine. Merelao’s hair was a wild, unruly cascade of gold, spilling over the pillows in waves. His face was a masterpiece carved by an artist through bone; his brow was smooth, his jawline carved with a precision that seemed impossible for a creature of flesh. He looked like an angel fallen from the grace of the Gods, his features so soft and perfect that Marcus found it hard to reconcile the rumors of the Mad Bull, with the sleeping beauty before him.

He could have been mistaken for a woman, or a statue carved by a master, were it not for the sheer, brutal physicality of the man. Even in sleep, Merelao’s presence was a threat. His chest was broad, his shoulders thick with the kind of hard-earned muscle that came from a lifetime of the hunt and the sword. Despite holding the dagger, despite the darkness, Marcus felt a cold sweat prickle his neck. He was pissing himself blind at the thought of those eyes opening.

Don’t look at the face, Marcus told himself, his grip tightening on the hilt of his blade until his knuckles turned white.

He steeled his heart, pushing away the hesitation that the boy’s angelic visage had planted in his mind. He took one silent step forward, then another, the floorboards silent beneath his practiced tread. He reached the edge of the bed, the shadow of his blade stretching across Merelao’s throat.

How easy it would have been to simply plunge the steel. A single, downward thrust, and the Mad Bull of Kakunia, would be nothing more than a beautiful corpse and a historical footnote.

Why did I take this? Marcus’s mind screamed in a panicked loop. There’s no exit. There’s no gold in the world worth having my skin flayed off a square inch at a time by the Royal Executioners.

The hesitation was a poison, so Marcus did what he always did when the fear became a wall: he leaped.

He launched himself onto the bed with the desperate violence of a cornered animal. His knee drove into Merelao’s chest, pinning one of those massive, tree-trunk arms into the silk mattress. He felt the sheer, terrifying density of the man’s muscle beneath him, it was like trying to hold down a spring-loaded trap threatening to burst open.

Merelao’s eyes snapped open.

They weren’t the eyes of a panicked dreamer; they were an avalanche of the gods’ own wrath. They were a deep, piercing aquatic blue, swirling with a sudden, lethal intelligence as they focused on the man looming over him. Marcus felt the weight of that gaze like a physical blow. Even with a dagger pressed against the Prince’s windpipe, Marcus felt like he was the one on the backfoot, the one being hunted.

But he was not.He was the one holding the blade on the fucker’s neck.

He opened his mouth to deliver the message Alpheo had burned into his brain, but the words died in his throat. He felt a sudden, rhythmic movement on the far side of the massive bed. The silk sheets shifted.

He immediately realised his mistake.

The rich prick wasn’t alone.

A girl sat up, her hair a tangled mess of chestnut silk. Her eyes went wide, reflecting the glint of Marcus’s blade in the dying moonlight. She looked from the scarred, sweating assassin to her patron?Lover?Fucker? Anyway he looked upon Merelao with a horror so profound it threatened to shatter the silence of the tower in a single, piercing scream.

If she screamed, the door would burst open. If she screamed, Marcus was a dead man walking.

He didn’t think. He leaned in, putting his full weight behind the dagger until the edge of the steel began to indent the soft skin of Merelao’s throat. A single bead of royal blood, dark and precious, blossomed against the silver. Marcus turned his head toward the girl.

"Scream," Marcus hissed, his voice a low, vibrating growl of pure malice, "and he fucking dies before your breath hits the air!And with him, so you’ll follow!If you care about his life you’ll do what is smart!"

That at the very least, succeeded in shutting her up.