The news of the massacre arrived in the form of a blood-stained scrap of a cloak and the absolute, suffocating silence of the dead.
Inside the private study male dormitory, Logan Kingsbane sat paralyzed. His breath came in shallow, jagged hitches that rattled his expensive silk doublet.
On the mahogany desk before him, the gold-trimmed quill he had been using to draft his "triumph" lay snapped in half.
Logan had always viewed himself as the true sun of the family, the legitimate golden heir who would eventually scrub the stain of Adonis from the family tree. He had sent ten of the Duchess's finest Shadow Guards, men who were trained to kill high-tier Swordmasters in their sleep.
"They... they are all dead?" Terrified, Logan whispered to the shadows of the room, "Every single one? In broad daylight?"
The messenger, a man whose very soul seemed to have been withered by what he had witnessed in the noble district, could only nod.
