Chapter 241: Chapter 241: The Blind Spot 2

MAILAH FELT THE SHIFT before she understood it. The warmth that had followed them through the museum—leftover heat from a stolen kiss, from shared laughter and the soft, rare ease between them—thinned, as if a window had been opened to let something colder in.

She followed Grayson’s gaze.

At the center of the room, in a simple glass case, lay a disk etched with infernal runes. The surface was matte, drinking in the light rather than reflecting it. The runes seemed to shift when she stared too long, as if they were only pretending to be still.

The placard beneath it read:

Relic of the Infernal Wars

Origin: Unknown

Recovered from a private collection

Grayson went very still.

“That was mine,” he said quietly.

Mailah’s breath caught. “You… remember it?”

“I remember holding it,” he replied, his voice low with disbelief. “I remember what it does.”

“And… how it got here?” she asked gently.

“No.”

The word came out sharper than intended.

The silence that followed had weight. It pressed into the corners of the room, into the careful spacing between display cases and the polite murmurs of visitors who felt, inexplicably, that they should move on.

Mailah watched Grayson as something old and feral stirred behind his composure. It wasn’t rage yet. It was recognition without context—a wound remembering pain before the mind could name it.

He took a step closer to the case. The glass was thin. Human-made. Breakable.

“They took it,” he said, sounding so sure.

Mailah reached for his arm, fingers light but grounding. “Grayson—”

His jaw tightened. “Humans collect what doesn’t belong to them. They display my history like a curiosity.”

“They probably didn’t know,” she said. “To them, it’s just—”

“Just an artifact,” he cut in. “Just a story. Just a thing.”

The air around him seemed to hold its breath. Mailah could feel the tension building in his stillness, the way his control gathered itself like a tide preparing to break.

She stepped in front of him, forcing his attention back to her. “This isn’t theft,” she said softly. “It’s preservation. They didn’t steal it from you. We don’t even know how they got it.”

“That doesn’t absolve them.”

“You can’t punish people for ignorance,” she said. “That’s not justice.”

His gaze darkened. “Justice is irrelevant.”

A family drifted past behind her, their voices low and distracted, their presence suddenly jarring in the charged quiet between them.

Mailah became acutely aware of where they were.

Public. Fragile.

One wrong move away from becoming a spectacle she couldn’t undo.

“Then what is this?” she asked. “What if you were the one who donated it?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes flicked back to the disk, to the runes that no human curator had understood well enough to fear.

When he spoke, his voice was controlled to the point of strain. “It doesn’t belong here.”

“No,” Mailah agreed. “But neither do you. And you’re here. Learning. Trying.”

His attention snapped back to her. “Do not compare me to an object in a case.”

“I’m comparing what you’ve both lost,” she shot back. “Context. Truth. Meaning.”

The words landed. Not as an accusation, but as a truth he didn’t want to hear.

“You defend them,” he said.

“I’m trying to protect you,” Mailah replied. “From becoming the man who doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he gets what he thinks he’s owed.”

For a moment, he looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her at all. Then something in him shifted—small, painful, necessary. He took a step back from the case. His fists clenched, then loosened.

“This world reduces my losses to labels,” he said quietly. “I will not accept that.”

“And I won’t accept being collateral damage to your anger,” Mailah said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. “Not again.”

The almost-date was over.

What followed was not a single argument, but a fracture that widened with every step they took away from the case.

The museum’s gentle order felt suddenly oppressive.

Grayson moved with too much purpose, as if the building itself were an obstacle. Mailah matched his pace, refusing to be dragged by his mood, refusing to shrink herself to accommodate it.

Outside, the city felt louder. Sharper. The sky pressed low over glass and steel.

“You came here to remember,” she said as they crossed the threshold into open air. “Not to reclaim.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Grayson replied.

Mailah stopped walking.

The words echoed too cleanly in the open air, as if he’d already decided what the truth was and simply needed the world to catch up to it.

“You’ve seen it,” she said, turning to face him. “What are you going to do with that?”

His silence stretched, dense and impenetrable. It wasn’t hesitation. It was calculation.

Mailah exhaled slowly. “Grayson… you don’t actually know it was taken from you.”

His gaze flicked to her, sharp. “It was mine. It is in a museum. That is theft.”

“Or,” she said carefully, “you gave it to them.”

The idea seemed to hit him sideways. His brows drew together, as if the possibility irritated him more than angered him.

“You don’t remember anything from your exile,” she went on. “Not the places you went, not the choices you made. For all we know, you decided to put it somewhere safe. Or out of your own reach.”

“I would not willingly hand over the Ember Sigil.”

She held her ground. “You don’t know that.”

The words didn’t land like an accusation. They landed like a truth he never wanted to hear.

His jaw tightened. He looked back at the museum doors, then away. “Then someone who knows will tell me,” he said.

Without another word, he turned and headed for the car.

Mailah followed, irritation simmering beneath her ribs. He hadn’t acknowledged her point. He hadn’t acknowledged her at all.

The drive to Ashford Manor was quiet in the worst possible way.

Not the comfortable silence of people who didn’t need to fill space with words—but the brittle quiet of two people thinking separate, clashing thoughts in the same enclosed space.

Mailah watched the city slide past, her reflection layered over glass and shadow. She wasn’t afraid he would snap at her. That wasn’t the problem.

She was angry.

Angry that he had come so close to losing control in the museum.Angry that he hadn’t apologized.Angry that he hadn’t even looked at her since getting in the car.

It was as if she were an accessory to his momentum. Present, but not considered.

By the time Ashford Manor loomed into view, all dark stone and old arrogance, her jaw ached from how tightly she’d been holding it.

The car barely stopped before Grayson was out, already striding toward the main entrance.

“Seriously?” she muttered, scrambling out after him. “You could at least pretend I’m here.”

He didn’t slow.

She hurried to keep up, irritation sharpening her steps. The manor doors opened to them as if sensing trouble.

They didn’t find Lucson or Ravenson first.

They found Mason and Carson.

In a bedroom.

In a situation that required no explanation.

Mailah registered the sound before she registered the sight—low, breathy moans, laughter threaded through them, the unmistakable cadence of bodies too close together to be decent.

Grayson should have heard it.

He didn’t stop.

Mailah, distracted by her own thoughts and irritation, followed him straight through the doorway—

—and immediately shrieked.

“Oh my god!”

She spun around, slapping her hands over her eyes. “I did not consent to this level of trauma!”

Behind her, Grayson didn’t even flinch.

“Mason,” he said flatly. “Carson. Why is the Ember Sigil in a human museum?”

There was a sudden scramble of movement behind Mailah, followed by muttered curses and hurried whispers. She risked a glance over her shoulder.

Mason and Carson had frozen mid-chaos.

Naked. Entangled with a group of equally naked women who looked—uncomfortably—human.

Mailah’s stomach twisted. If she hadn’t walked in, would they have even stopped?

The women giggled as Mason murmured something to them under his breath. A moment later, they gathered their clothes and slipped into an adjacent room, still laughing, still whispering.

Mailah stared at the closed door.

“Were those… human?” she demanded, finally turning back, arms crossed tight over her chest.

Carson coughed and reached for a robe. “What? It was just for fun. We didn’t enthrall them or anything.”

Grayson’s eyes burned brighter at that.

Mailah glared at both brothers. “That doesn’t make it better.”

Carson tied his robe and gave her a grin. “You can look at me more comfortably now. We’re decent.”

She glared even harder. “You two are unbelievable.”

“Please,” Mason said dryly, pulling on pants. “This is barely scandalous by our standards.”

Grayson didn’t look at them. His focus was singular, sharp. “The Ember Sigil,” he repeated. “Why is it in a museum?”

The humor drained from the room.

Mason’s expression shifted first. Then Carson’s grin faltered.

Finally, Mason met Grayson’s gaze.

“You donated it.”

The words seemed to hit the room like a dropped blade.

Grayson stared at his brother. “I did not.”

“You did,” Mason said. “Three decades into your exile. You told us it needed to be somewhere you couldn’t reach. Somewhere you wouldn’t be tempted to reclaim it.”

Silence stretched thin and dangerous.

Mailah looked at Grayson’s face as something fractured behind his eyes—not rage this time, but something colder.

Something closer to loss.

“And you never told me,” Grayson said quietly.

Carson shifted uncomfortably. “We assumed you wouldn’t want to remember that.”

Grayson’s gaze dropped, just for a second.

Then he looked up again.

If Mason was telling the truth…

What else had his other self done that he would never remember?

And what kind of man had he been… to choose to give a very important artifact away?

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