The King marched into the hallway like a man who had never once in his life been told no and fully intended to keep that record intact. His eyes were cold and greedy, moving across the tower with the practiced sweep of someone who had spent decades walking into rooms and taking whatever was inside them. He looked at Alaric expecting to find what he had always found in his son's face when he appeared without warning.
Uncertainty. The particular kind of tension that comes from a lifetime of trying and failing to be enough for a man who had decided from the beginning that enough was not something he intended to offer.
What he found instead made him stop walking.
