Chapter 212: Chapter 212: Not the only one

For a little while after that, time ceased behaving like something measurable.

It became a sequence of smaller things instead. Frederik’s uneven breathing under the blanket. The weight of him in Rafael’s arms. Gregoris was standing so close that Rafael could feel the heat of him even through the exhaustion still hollowing out his bones. The soft crackle of the fire. The silence left behind by everyone wise enough to retreat.

At some point Rafael slept, and Gregoris sat down beside the bed.

Frederik made a noise so offended and indignant that Rafael woke, already irritated on his behalf, only to find Gregoris holding the child with the kind of grave concentration usually reserved for battlefield maps and assassination briefings.

That, in retrospect, should have warned everyone.

Because Frederik did not grow into a peaceful child.

He grew into a Frasner.

Onlookers visibly recalculate the household every few months and conclude, with mounting concern, that Gregoris had somehow produced a second version of himself at reduced height and increased speed.

By two, Frederik had learned how to go unnervingly silent before doing anything dangerous.

By three, he had developed the deeply unpleasant habit of appearing beside people without warning, as if the household’s motion-sensor wards and low-grade ether security mesh simply failed to register him as a proper obstacle.

By four, the estate staff no longer asked where he was with panic.

They asked where he was with the drawn, controlled tone of people trying not to alarm Rafael before confirming whether the child had slipped into the lower training wing again, deactivated a practice lock, or crouched beneath Gregoris’s desk while tactical projections moved above his head in blue ether light.

He usually had.

Natalie, for her part, adjusted beautifully to the presence of a younger brother who looked as though their father had been copied by a very determined magical-industrial process.

At first she loved him with all the delighted authority of an older sister who had asked for a sibling and intended to enjoy the result. She held his hand crossing palace corridors with active ether traffic. She corrected his manners. She read to him from interactive story tablets and traditional books alike, depending on her mood. She reported his crimes with the crisp righteousness of someone who wanted justice but not actual punishment.

By the time Frederik was six, however, her role had shifted into something closer to elegant management.

“Natalie,” Rafael said one afternoon after receiving yet another report that their son had been found in Gregoris’s office under the floating tactical display table, absolutely silent and apparently content to sit there while district threat maps rotated above him in projected ether grids. “Why did no one notice he was gone for twenty minutes?”

Natalie, who was twelve and already carried herself with enough composure to make lesser nobles adjust their posture unconsciously, looked up from the strategy game she was playing in real time with Arik across a split ether screen and said, with faint weariness, “Because he likes testing the perimeter.”

Rafael stared at her.

On the low table between them, the game board shimmered in layered blue-gold projections, half physical surface, half ether-rendered battlefield. Arik’s current formation hovered over the map from his side of the palace connection, neat, aggressive, and irritatingly well-balanced for a boy his age. Natalie had one hand resting near the control ring, her last move still glowing in thin silver lines across the projected terrain.

She added, “Also because he doesn’t trigger the internal alerts unless he wants to.”

That made Rafael go very still.

“Excuse me?”

Natalie flicked two fingers over the board, redirecting a unit with the absent competence of someone who had long ago learned to multitask in a household full of Frasners. “He figured out which corridors have passive ether scans and which ones rely on motion confirmation. If he moves slowly enough and uses the blind spaces near the old west support columns, the system delays flagging him.”

Rafael put a hand to his chest.

Across the ether link, Arik paused mid-move. His image enhanced slightly in the projection, black hair catching the cold shimmer of the interface, his expression carrying that dangerous family calm Damian’s sons seemed to inherit too early.

“He does that at the palace too,” Arik said.

Rafael turned toward the projected board with immediate outrage. “And no one thought to tell me this?”

Arik, with the composure of a prince who had clearly decided this was not his administrative failure, replied, “I thought you knew.”

“That,” Rafael said with feeling, “is never the reassuring answer people think it is.”

Natalie, traitor to maternal loyalties, moved another piece and said, “Frederik assumes if security can’t catch him, the problem is security.”

From the doorway, Gregoris’s voice arrived, calm and entirely too unsurprised.

“Accurate.”

Rafael turned his head slowly.

His husband stood there in dark civilian tactical wear, one sleeve still rolled back from whatever ether-linked briefing he had clearly left half-finished, expression unreadable in the way that usually meant he was being monstrously reasonable in advance.

Rafael narrowed his eyes. “No. Not accurate. Alarming.”

Gregoris crossed the room, glanced once at the floating game map and then at Natalie. “Did he breach the outer perimeter?”

“No,” Natalie said. “Just the office wing again.”

“Then he was testing response time, not perimeter.”

Rafael stared at both of them.

“I am surrounded,” he said at last, “by people who say clinically horrifying things in perfectly normal tones.”

Arik’s projected mouth curved, just slightly.

Natalie finally looked properly sympathetic, which only made Rafael distrust her more. “Papa,” she said, “he’s six.”

“That is even more terrifying.”

“Well…” Natalie paused, made her move across the ether-lit board, and continued, “he is still afraid of disappointing you.”

“Not the only one in this family,” Gregoris said with a low chuckle as he reached for a glass of water.

Rafael turned his head slowly.

Arik, visible in cold blue projection from the other side of the palace connection, went very still in the elegant, self-preserving way of a prince recognizing that something amusing was happening to someone else and wisely deciding not to interrupt it.

Natalie, traitor that she was, did not even pretend she had not heard it.

Rafael narrowed his eyes at his husband. “I beg your pardon?”

Gregoris took a sip of water with the composure of a man who had survived wars, uprisings, ether breaches, and marriage and evidently feared none of them enough to retract a statement.

“You heard me.”

“That,” Rafael informed the room with great dignity, “was an extremely reckless thing to say in front of impressionable children.”

“Natalie is not impressionable,” Gregoris said.

Natalie moved another unit across the projected battlefield and said, without looking up, “No.”

Arik, monstrous little opportunist, added from the ether screen, “Neither am I.”

Rafael pointed toward the projection. “No one asked you.”

“I know,” Arik said, clearly enjoying himself now. “I contributed anyway.”

Insufferable. Every single one of them.

Rafael looked back at Gregoris. “Explain yourself.”

Gregoris set the glass down. “Frederik watches your face before he answers anything important.”

Rafael blinked once.

That was not the direction he had expected, which made it substantially worse.

Gregoris continued, calm and merciless. “Natalie does too. She’s just better at hiding it.”

Natalie finally lifted her gaze from the board.

To her credit, she had the decency to look faintly embarrassed.

Rafael put a hand to his chest. “I am being emotionally ambushed in my own sitting room.”

Gregoris’s mouth shifted by a fraction. “Accurate.”

Rafael stared at him in betrayal. “Stop agreeing with things that damage my peace.”

From the corridor came the near-silent sound of a door easing open.

All four of them noticed at once.

Frederik appeared in the doorway a second later, pale-haired, silver-eyed, and suspiciously clean for a child who had apparently just spent twenty minutes testing household security. He stopped when he realized the room’s attention had landed on him and went very still.

There it was that tiny hesitation. That quick, silent check of Rafael’s expression.

Rafael saw it.

Natalie saw that he saw it.

Gregoris, curse him, looked not even remotely surprised.

Frederik’s gaze flicked once from Rafael to Gregoris, then to the floating game map, as if calculating whether retreat remained strategically viable.

It did not.

“Come here,” Rafael said.

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