Midnight arrived and the palace went completely silent. Not the silence of safety but the silence of a place holding its breath, where every guard had settled into position and every corridor had emptied and the only sound was the wind pressing itself against the old stone walls like it was testing for a way in.
Silas lay on top of the sheets fully dressed underneath the dark silk pajamas he had put on over his clothes an hour ago. His eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling and his body was still in the practiced way of someone who knew how to wait without wasting anything on the waiting. He had counted the guard rotations twice through the window and memorized the gap between them.
Twelve minutes. That was what the family had to work with. The scratching came at exactly the moment he expected it.
Faint. Precise. Three short and one long. A signal he had known since he was seventeen years old.
He moved to the window without turning on a light and eased it open and looked out into the dark. A black rope had been dropped from somewhere above the roofline and a figure was descending it with the controlled speed of someone who had done exactly this kind of thing many times before. The figure reached the window ledge and pulled the mask up.
Jax. His younger brother looked at him with eyes that held three things at once. Relief and urgency and the particular expression of someone who had already prepared for the possibility that this reunion would last less than two minutes.
"We thought you were dead," Jax whispered, his voice barely carrying over the wind. "The whole family thought you were gone. Come on. The car is sitting at the east gate and the driver has four minutes before he has to move."
Silas shook his head once. "I don't have the drive." He kept his voice at the same level as Jax's, low and flat and moving no air.
"The Prince has it. I need to find his private safe before I go anywhere." Jax's expression shifted into something harder.
"Forget the drive, Silas. Leave it." He leaned closer to the window. "You don't understand what this Prince is."
"He has been hunting our family for two years. Not the King. Him specifically. He has resources and patience and he plays a longer game than anyone Father has gone up against before."
"Get on the rope right now and we sort the rest from the outside."
Silas looked at him for a moment. He understood what Jax was saying and he understood it was not wrong. But the drive contained names.
Real names. People embedded in positions that would take years to rebuild if exposed.
Leaving without it was not a clean exit. It was a delayed disaster.
He reached for the rope. The lights came on.
Every lamp in the room at once, flooding the space with sharp brightness that hit Silas's eyes like something physical. He turned fast and his body moved into a defensive position before his mind had finished registering what he was seeing.
Alaric stood at the door. Fully dressed. Completely calm.
A silver pistol held in his right hand at a downward angle that was not threatening yet but made clear it could become threatening in less than a second.
He did not look like a man who had been woken up. He looked like a man who had been waiting in exactly that spot for exactly this moment and had found the wait acceptable.
"Amnesia," Alaric said. The word came out with something attached to it that was almost a laugh but landed nowhere near warm.
"You genuinely believed I would accept that. A Mafia enforcer. A man they call the Ghost. Forgot how to crack a safe."
"Forgot how to fight. Forgot everything except how to look confused." He tilted his head slightly.
"I have to say I expected more from you."
He raised the pistol and fired once. Not at Silas. At the rope.
The shot was clean and precise and the rope snapped and Jax's voice came up from the dark below in a short sharp sound that cut off too quickly.
Silas was at the window before the echo finished moving through the room. His hands gripping the frame.
Looking down into the garden where a shape was already being surrounded by guards who had been positioned there long before midnight arrived.
"Jax." The word came out of him with a force he had not planned.
Alaric was behind him before he finished turning. His arms came around Silas and locked his wrists behind his back with a grip that knew exactly how much pressure to apply to make movement pointless without causing damage.
His mouth came close to the side of Silas's neck and his voice dropped into something low and deliberate.
"Your brother is alive," Alaric said. "He will stay that way as long as you stop making decisions that require me to adjust that."
His grip tightened slightly. "And you. You are finished with the game you have been playing since you opened your eyes in that bed."
"I gave you the space to run it because I wanted to see how far you would take it." A pause.
"You took it far enough."
His Alpha scent filled the room without warning. Heavy and dark and pressing into every corner of the space like something that had been held back and was no longer interested in being held.
Silas felt it hit him like a change in air pressure. Surrounding him completely.
Reaching past the surface of things and finding something underneath that responded before he could stop it.
His head was still not right from the fall two nights ago. The combination of that and the scent and the grip made the room shift slightly at the edges.
"I am going to make you forget the Mafia ever had a claim on you," Alaric said.
"I am going to make sure that by the time this is finished you will not be pretending to belong here."
His hold shifted, pulling Silas back against him with a certainty that had nothing uncertain inside it.
"You will simply belong here."
Silas said nothing. Not because he had nothing to say.
Because the part of him that always had an answer, the part trained in cold rooms by harder men than this, was doing something it had never done before.
It was listening. And that frightened him more than the gun.