Julian’s heart was hammering. This was the only way he felt he could stop the Duke from leaving and creating an irreversible mistake. He wanted revenge on the Emperor, but not at the expense of the Duke getting charged for treason and thrown into the underground cellar.

They would figure something out. Later. He just needed the Duke to calm down first.

The Duke looked at Julian’s pleading face. He hadn’t thought of it. He hadn’t thought of the fact that after going through all that, Julian might have gotten traumatised.

And truly, Julian wasn’t saying all that just to keep the Duke from leaving and creating trouble with the Emperor. His body was already reacting to the experience. Being alone in the dark, being alone in a quiet place entirely, made him reenact the dread from the pit, like he was going through that hell over and over again.

It was sickening and frightening that he began to tremble without realizing it.

The Duke stared down at Julian’s hand. The thin fingers were white-knuckled, trembling with a frantic intensity that Alaric could feel through the fabric of his sleeve. The violence that had been ready to burst from his chest didn’t vanish—it just went cold for the meantime. It settled into his bones, heavy and still.

Right now, Julian was more important.

He didn’t offer a platitude. He didn’t promise to chase away the shadows with some grand speech. Instead, he simply sat down on the bed, careful not to brush Julian’s wounded thigh.

The heavy bedframe groaned under his weight as he settled onto the edge. Then, he reached out and placed his broad palm over Julian’s hand, pinning it flat against the silk sheets. His skin was cool, his grip firm and grounding.

"It’s okay. I’m not leaving your side," Alaric said.

His voice was low as he said this. He didn’t do anything else and just watched the way Julian’s breathing hitched, waiting for the tremors to subside.

Julian leaned back into the pillows, his chest heaving as his nerves fought to relax. The room was too quiet, the kind of quiet that let the sound of the owls cooing in the distance echo in his ears. But then there was the Duke’s presence—the faint scent of this man that drowned the memory of the stake protruding his thigh.

He listened to the steady, unbothered rhythm of the Duke’s breathing. It was a sensory anchor, dragging Julian out of the pit and back into reality, until there was no more danger.

Alaric didn’t move an inch. He sat there like a statue carved from granite. He didn’t try to soothe Julian with empty words; he just provided the weight Julian needed to stop floating away into his own terror.

Slowly, the frantic hammering in Julian’s chest began to level out. The fever was still there, but the sharp edge of the panic was dulled by the man sitting beside him.

"The light," Julian whispered, his eyes unfocused.

Alaric glanced at the flickering candles, then back to Julian. He didn’t call for a hundred more. He simply reached over with his free hand and adjusted the lamp on the bedside table, turning the wick up until the warm glow sharpened the corners of the room, leaving nowhere for a shadow to hide.

"Thank you...Your Grace." Julian whispered as the warmth of the fire reached his burning skin.

"Sleep," Alaric uttered.

Julian’s eyelids felt like they were made of lead. With the Duke’s hand pinning his own to the bed, he didn’t feel alone anymore. He wasn’t in the mud, but on a bed. He was under the watchful, silent eye of a man who looked ready to kill the dark itself if it moved too close to scare him.

What a wonderful feeling this was.

As Julian finally drifted off, the last thing he felt was the steady, unwavering pressure of Alaric’s hand gripping his own firmly, like he would not let go for anything in the world.

The room was stifling, thick with the scent of herbs and the metallic tang of dried blood that seemed to cling to the heavy velvet hangings. Julian’s breathing was as shallow as he slept. At least he was no longer in pain.

But every few minutes, Julian’s chest would hitch, a sharp, involuntary wheeze escaping his throat as his lungs fought against the lingering weight of the fever. His right leg, heavily bandaged and propped up, twitched in pain that made his brow furrow even in sleep.

He looked small, fragile even, his skin looking sickly grey, and this made the dark circles under his eyes look like bruises.

Duke Alaric had left the bedside and was sitting in the high-backed chair, his body as rigid as a funerary statue, as his mind was stuck in a loop. The same loop he had been living in for the last three days.

He kept seeing the way Julian’s eyes had lost their light completely. He kept feeling the terrifying coldness of Julian’s skin when he had reached out to him.

I was too fast, Alaric thought, his hand tightening on the arm of the chair until the wood groaned. I rode ahead and didn’t look back when I should have.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t looked back as he rode ahead. The ones he saw as he looked back did not belong to Julian, and as he gave up the hunt to go back for Julian, he had lost him.

It was a circumstance I could’ve avoided had I prioritised him more.

It was a simple, brutal thought. All he saw was a failure of leadership.

He had brought a scholar into a hunting ground meant for predators, and he had let the gap between them grow too wide. The pit, the snake, the stake—it was all just the cruel, random violence of the woods, and he had been the one to lead Julian right into it.

He stood up, the movement heavy and slow. He walked to the bedside, looking down at Julian’s face.

This time, he thought, Julian survived by a horrifying stroke of luck. Then what would happen the next time? What if the next time, the Emperor decided he wanted to be more open with his hate and get rid of Julian in front of many eyes? Would he be able to save him then?

The thought made him boil. He couldn’t be that incompetent. He refused to be. He would make sure to protect Julian, even if it cost him his life.

A soft, hesitant knock came from the door, but Alaric didn’t turn his head.

"Your Grace," a servant whispered from the hallway. "The Marquis Astrea and his sons... they have returned."