Chapter 16: The Unstable Element
The library felt contaminated after Kaelen's departure, the air still vibrating with his venom. Silas's cold, definitive proclamation—The child is mine—hung in the silence, a decree that had simultaneously protected me and painted a target on my back.
I expected Silas to go after his son, to contain the fallout. Instead, he turned his icy gaze on me.
"This changes nothing," he stated, echoing my own hollow words from the night before. His were more believable. "He is a contained problem."
"Contained?" My voice was shrill with disbelief. "He's a lit fuse, Silas! He's here, in the house!"
"He will be dealt with," he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He looked me over, his eyes assessing my trembling hands, my pale face. The clinical detachment was back, the brief vulnerability of the bedroom utterly vanished. "The stress is not good for the child. Clara will give you something to help you sleep."
He left then, to presumably "deal with" the unstable heir, leaving me alone amidst the scattered books. I didn't want Clara's sedatives. I wanted to barricade the door.
The house descended into an eerie, watchful silence. The staff moved like ghosts, their faces carefully blank. Kaelen was here, somewhere, a malevolent presence contained within the west wing. The Sullivan mansion had become a gilded prison with two dangerous inmates.
I saw him only once in the following days. I was taking one of my sanctioned walks through the indoor conservatory, a glass-walled paradise of exotic plants, when I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. I turned.
He was standing in the shadow of a large fiddle-leaf fig, half-hidden. He wasn't raving. He wasn't drunk. He was just watching me. His eyes, sunken and dark-rimmed, tracked my every move with a chilling, predatory stillness. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The message was clear: I am watching. I am waiting.
I quickened my pace, my heart hammering, feeling like a rabbit caught in an open field. When I dared a glance back, he was gone.
The encounter left me shaken. This silent, calculating Kaelen was far more terrifying than the raging one.
My only solace became the baby. Its movements were stronger now, distinct kicks and rolls that were impossible to ignore. In the dead of night, trapped in the opulent silence of my suite, I would lie awake, my hands on my stomach, tracing the outline of a foot or an elbow. It was in these moments, stripped of all pretense and strategy, that the truth would ambush me.
This was my child. Not just a weapon. Not just an heir. A baby. My baby.
A fierce, primal love would well up in me, so powerful it was terrifying. It was the same love I'd had for Lysander and Lyra, a love that was a strength and a vulnerability of catastrophic proportions. I had vowed to protect this child, to use it as a tool for vengeance. But now, feeling it move, the line between using it and loving it began to blur into nothingness.
One afternoon, seeking a reprieve from the suffocating atmosphere, I retreated to the library. I wasn't there for the key or the documents. I was there for the old photo albums, for a glimpse of the woman who had tried to build a safeguard for her son. Eleanor Sullivan.
I was sitting on the floor, a large leather-bound album open on my lap, tracing a picture of a smiling Eleanor holding a toddler-aged Kaelen, when a voice spoke from behind me.
"She was beautiful, wasn't she?"
I jumped, slamming the album shut. Kaelen stood there. He was cleaner now, shaved, dressed in dark, expensive casual wear. But the emptiness in his eyes was still there.
"Kaelen," I said, my voice tight. "I didn't hear you."
"You never do," he replied softly. He didn't approach. He just stood there, his hands in his pockets, looking at the closed album. "You're always so busy with your… plans. You never see what's right in front of you."
His calmness was unnerving. "What do you want?"
"I wanted to see the woman who replaced my mother," he said, his tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. "The woman who is giving my father the son he always wanted. The son I never could be."
He took a step closer. I scrambled to my feet, holding the album like a shield.
"He never loved me, you know," Kaelen continued, his gaze drifting around the room. "I was a product. A necessary component for the continuation of the Sullivan line. He shipped my mother off to die of loneliness in this mausoleum, and then he shipped me off to be 'fixed'." He looked back at me, a sad, twisted smile on his lips. "And now he has you. A newer model. A more efficient vessel."
"It's not like that," I said, the protest sounding weak even to my own ears.
"Isn't it?" He took another step. "Do you love him? Or do you love what he can give you? The money? The power? The safety?" His eyes dropped to my stomach. "Do you even want that child? Or is it just your ticket to the throne?"
His words were needles, each one finding its mark. He was holding up a mirror to my own calculations, and the reflection was ugly.
"You don't know anything about me," I whispered.
"I know you're just like him," he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Cold. Calculating. You use people. You used me that night. You used my vulnerability. And now you're using that thing inside you."
He was right. And he was wrong. The truth was a tangled mess I could no longer unravel.
"He'll use you up, too, you know," he said, his voice almost gentle. "When he has what he wants, he'll discard you. Just like he did my mother. Just like he did me. You're not special. You're just… useful."
He turned and walked away, leaving me standing there, clutching the photo album, his poisonous words slithering into my ears, coiling around my heart.
He was the unstable element, all right. But his instability wasn't just rage. It was a profound, insightful madness that knew exactly where to strike to cause the most damage.
He wasn't trying to physically harm me. Not yet.
He was trying to make me doubt everything. My plan. My resolve. My relationship with Silas. Even my feelings for my own child.
And as I stood alone in the silent library, the ghost of his mother smiling from the album in my hands, I felt the first cracks of doubt begin to form. The game was no longer just about winning.
It was about surviving the poison seeping through the gilded bars of my cage.