Chapter 188 - 187: The True Traitor Behind It All!

"Grand Duke, Caelestis!" he called out, and it took only seconds for Caelestis to appear near the stairs. Eleanore appeared moments later, moving quickly despite the late hour, her robe hastily tied.

"We have him," Victor said. "Alive, which took considerably more effort than I’d have liked. He’s the one the Grand Duchess described as working in the greenhouse."

"Victor—" Eleanore descended the stairs, her eyes sweeping over the state of him, the torn sleeve, the bruise already blooming along his jaw. "You’re all wrecked." She stopped before them, her gaze flicking briefly to Laurent and Azriel just as beat up as Victor. "What happened?"

"There was an explosion," Laurent explained, his voice still a little unsteady. "Caused by this man."

Eleanore turned her gaze to the unconscious man, studying the slack, unfamiliar face for a long moment before it clicked into place. The same nondescript features she’d glimpsed once AT the greenhouse, easy to overlook, which had likely been the entire point. She looked back to Caelestis, who had been descending the stairs just behind her, his expression unreadable in the low light of the hall. "That’s him."

Caelestis stood beside Eleanore, his arm curling protectively around her shoulder, the gesture automatic now, something his body did before his mind caught up to it. "Put him in the cell. Question him. I want to know everything." He looked at Victor.

"Yes, my lord."

"But first—" Caelestis stopped them before they could move, his eyes catching on the raw scrape along Victor’s forearm, the way Laurent favored one leg. "Tend to your wounds." He gestured toward the butler, who had already appeared with a lamp and a look of quiet alarm, ready to summon whatever was needed. Only then did Caelestis leave with Eleanore, his hand still resting warm against her shoulder as they disappeared down the hall, her fingers finding him at the small of his back, steadying him as much as herself.

—

"He calls himself Theon," Victor said once the two of them were alone walking to the cell, the prisoner had been kept. "Ordinary enough on the surface, the kind of man you’d walk past in a market without a second glance. But whatever he’s involved in, it isn’t ordinary at all."

Victor rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion evident beneath the words, the adrenaline of the fight already draining out of him and leaving something heavier in its place.

"From how you described the black substance, I’d say that’s very likely the case," Caelestis said, as they made their way toward the cell where Theon had been locked away, their footsteps echoing down the narrow stone corridor.

Victor sighed. "I want to be there when you question him."

The Grand Duke stopped at that, squinting slightly, though there was no real argument in it. "You will be."

They arrived at the same cell that had briefly held Adena, the memory of that night still clinging faintly to the space, the cold, the silence, the sense of something wrong having passed through it.

Theon looked considerably less composed than he’d been in the woods, the fight clearly gone out of him now that he was cornered with no shadowy magic left to hide behind. He sat slumped against the far wall, wrists bound, the bravado that had carried him through their first encounter entirely absent now, replaced by the pallor of a man who understood exactly how little room he had left to maneuver.

"Name," Victor demanded, arms crossed, Caelestis standing silently beside him with an expression carved from stone.

"Theon," the man said finally, his voice was rough. "My name is Theon."

"And who sent you, Theon?"

A long pause followed, his eyes darting between the two of them before he seemed to deflate entirely, whatever resolve he’d been clinging to finally breaking under the weight of the silence. "Raiden Thornberry," he said. "I was hired to gather intelligence on Grand Duke Lancaster. His habits, his weaknesses — anything that could be used against him."

"You were sent to spy on the Grand Duke, not the Duchess?" Victor pressed.

"No!"

Caelestis grabbed his arm, something sharp flickering across his face before he mastered it. "It was probably the black magic."

Caelestis’s expression didn’t change as he stepped closer to Theon, his shadow falling long across the man’s slumped form. "Thornberry," he repeated slowly, as though testing the weight of the name aloud.

Theon nodded.

"Why," Victor pressed, "would Thornberry need intelligence on Caelestis specifically? What does he want with it?"

Theon hesitated, and for the first time, genuine fear flickered across his face, not fear of them, Victor realized, but fear of something else entirely, something that made his hired courage look thin by comparison. "If I tell you everything, I’m dead either way," he said. "Thornberry doesn’t forgive loose ends. But if I don’t, you’ll kill me yourselves. So I suppose there’s no version of tonight where I walk away clean."

"Talk," Caelestis said, his voice low and dangerous, "and I’ll decide how generous I’m feeling afterward."

Theon exhaled shakily, his bound hands twisting against each other. "Thornberry’s been positioning himself for years, quietly building leverage over anyone connected to the crown, hoping to use it eventually to strengthen his own family’s standing. You, Grand Duke, are one of several targets. The poisoning was me. But the attack at the border — that wasn’t me. I only ever gathered information and tried to leverage the people precious to you."

"And the black magic in Adena?"

"Not mine, and not something I have any knowledge of," Theon said quickly, too quickly, the words tumbling out with the particular urgency of a man desperate to distance himself from something far worse than his own crimes. "I don’t deal with that. Whatever’s inside that girl — or was — that’s beyond anything Thornberry’s hired me for. I can’t say for certain whether that dark magic is connected to Viscount Thornberry at all."

Victor and Caelestis exchanged a grim look. Two separate threats, apparently, tangled together in ways that were only beginning to unravel, each one dangerous enough on its own without the added weight of the other.

Caelestis studied him for a long moment, something calculating settling behind his eyes, the same look he wore when weighing troop movements or trade negotiations — a man already several steps ahead. "You’ll testify to all of this, formally, if it comes to that."

"If it keeps me breathing, yes."

"Then we understand each other." Caelestis turned toward the door without another word, and Victor fell into step beside him, both of them leaving Theon slumped against the cell wall, the flicker of the single lamp the only company he’d have until morning.

"What do you make of it?" Victor asked once they’d climbed back to the main floor, their voices lowered despite the empty corridor, the household long since asleep around them.

"I think Thornberry is guilty of exactly what Theon says he’s guilty of," Caelestis said. "I also think Theon is telling the truth about not knowing everything. Whatever’s happening with the black magic, with Adena — it’s separate. Or at least separate enough that a hired spy wouldn’t have been told about it."

"Two threats, then. Tangled together, but not the same."

"That’s my read as well." Caelestis’s jaw tightened, and for a moment something almost weary passed over his features before it vanished again beneath the composed mask he wore so easily now. "Which means catching Thornberry solves one problem and leaves the larger one entirely untouched."