All Chapters of Crimson oath : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Darkness lingered behind Rowan’s eyelids, and for a while that was all there was — a dull ache pounding behind his skull, and underneath it, the scent of cedarwood, leather, and something faintly metallic. Blood, maybe. His own. He forced his eyes open. The ceiling above him was ivory, carved with mouldings too ornate for anything but an old palace. A crystal chandelier caught the morning light and scattered it across the room in small, glittering pieces. For one disoriented second, he thought he might be dreaming. Then the alley came back. The gunshot. Kael. Rowan sat up too fast and hissed as pain lanced through his skull — a bandage had been wrapped neatly around the back of his head. Someone had treated him. That unsettled him more than if they’d simply left him to bleed. The room stretched out around him, all dark oak and floor-to-ceiling windows draped in charcoal curtains, a fireplace big enough to stand inside. Everything about it said wealth. Everything about it also sa

The question lingered in the cold night air. Who taught you how to escape? Rowan’s heartbeat stumbled, and his mind raced through a dozen lies, each weaker than the last. “I watch a lot of crime movies.” Kael’s expression didn’t change. “You mapped patrol routes. You counted my guards. You identified the blind spots in under twenty minutes.” He took one deliberate step closer, close enough now that Rowan could smell cedarwood and something colder underneath it. “Movies don’t teach that.” “I was trying to survive.” Kael searched his face for something — fear, guilt, the shape of a confession — and found instead a stubborn pair of hazel eyes that refused to look away. “…Interesting.” The word had barely left his mouth when the explosion hit. The ground shuddered beneath them. Glass rained from the mansion’s western wing, and a heartbeat later alarms tore through the estate, red emergency lights flooding the gardens in pulses. For the first time since Rowan had met him, Kael look

The mansion never truly slept. Even past midnight, sound moved through it in ways Rowan had learned to track without meaning to footsteps on marble two floors down, the soft click of a guard's radio, the faint hum of cameras swiveling on their mounts. Someone was always watching. He'd stopped finding that unsettling around day three. Now it was simply a fact of the building, like the cold that pooled in the east wing no matter how high the heat was set. Tonight, he intended to find out who was watching him from *inside* the walls, not just the hallway. He'd noticed it two nights ago a servant's eyes flicking to a specific point on the wall before catching themselves. A guard's patrol route that skipped one stretch of corridor entirely, like it wasn't worth walking past. Small things. The kind of things a person only noticed if they'd spent years learning to notice small things, and some part of Rowan that he still didn't fully understand had never stopped doing that, not even here.

Kael didn't sleep. By the time the sky over Blackhaven turned the color of a bruise, he had already summoned three of his father's oldest contacts, men who dealt in secrets the way other men dealt in currency. They arrived one by one through the servants' entrance, hoods up, faces carved from the same distrust that lived in Kael's own chest now. He met them in the study — the same room where he'd told Rowan the truth the night before, where the air still felt thick with it. "The Valen fire," he said, sliding a photograph across the desk. It was grainy, decades old, taken from a distance. A burning house. A silhouette in the doorway that no one had ever identified. "I want to know who was watching that night. Not who started it. Who *watched*." The oldest of the three, a wiry man named Draven with a voice like gravel, studied the photo for a long moment. "There were whispers," he said slowly, "about a man who collected things. Photographs. Names. People who should've stayed buried."

Rowan was in the library when Kael found him, standing at the tall window with his arms crossed, watching the grey morning settle over the courtyard like it hadn't decided yet whether to rain. He didn't turn around when the door opened. He'd learned the sound of Kael's footsteps by now — the particular weight of them, unhurried even when something underneath him was not. "You didn't sleep either," Rowan said. "No." "That's twice this week." Rowan finally turned, and whatever he saw on Kael's face made the rest of the sentence die in his throat. He'd gotten good, these past weeks, at reading the house — reading Kael, reading the guards, reading the particular silence that meant something had shifted somewhere out of sight. This was that kind of silence. "What happened." Kael crossed the room and set the folded note down on the low table between them, the same way he'd set it on his own desk hours before, like putting it down gently might soften what it said. "Read it." Rowan pick