Chapter 70
Seth arrived at exactly eight o'clock.
He always did, as though the clocks themselves adjusted to suit his precision.
His suit was sharp, his hair already combed back, and the thin crease between his brows suggested he had been running numbers in his head long before the morning fog had lifted.
While most people were still sipping coffee and fumbling for their keys, Seth was already five moves ahead in a game they hadn’t realized had started.
He was halfway up the front steps when Lurick appeared at the castle’s main doors.
The coat he wore was dark and neatly buttoned, its collar stiff against his neck, while his face revealed nothing of what he carried behind his silence.
The gray light of early morning clung to the stone walls like breath on glass, cold and unmoving.
Seth spotted him before Lurick had taken more than three steps past the castle’s heavy oak doors.
He didn’t call out.
He didn’t need to.
His gaze locked onto Lurick with the kind of directness that made small talk irrelevant.
His polished shoes clicked against the stone in a steady rhythm, the sound precise, metered, deliberate.
His pace didn’t shift, but his attention sharpened, as if he’d been waiting for this moment since before the sun had risen.
“So?” he asked, voice low but cutting through the morning stillness like a scalpel through silk.
There was no greeting, no soft lead-in.
Just the question, tossed like a gauntlet between them.
Lurick didn’t break stride.
His hands remained tucked in the pockets of his coat, shoulders squared, eyes fixed on the gravel drive stretching ahead.
His boots struck the ground with a hollow, echoing weight that seemed louder in the silence surrounding the castle.
He looked like a man walking toward a verdict he didn’t want to deliver.
“I think she’s cracked,” he said, and his voice held no drama, only the flat certainty of someone who had turned the idea over too many times in his mind and found no better word.
The phrase hung in the air for a moment, heavier than it had any right to be.
He didn’t elaborate.
Didn’t glance sideways.
As though saying it once was enough.
As though repeating it might make it worse.
Seth gave a tight, thoughtful nod and adjusted the front of his blazer with both hands, tugging the fabric until the lapels lay perfectly smooth across his chest.
It was a practiced motion, automatic, but layered with something more, like he was donning a shield before stepping into battle.
Then he turned slightly, falling into step beside Lurick with a practiced ease, like this conversation was just another meeting on his tightly scheduled day.
“Define cracked,” Seth said, voice even, but with a hint of something sharper underneath.
Not sarcasm.
Not disbelief.
Impatience, maybe.
Or maybe something closer to frustration, carefully disguised behind his businesslike calm.
His eyes didn’t leave Lurick’s face.
He wanted the answer.
But more than that, he wanted it to make sense.
“She says she’s from another version of this place,” Lurick said, eyes flicking across the length of the drive ahead as if the explanation might be etched into the cracks between the stones.
His voice didn’t rise or fall, just carried the words like they were too strange to handle with anything but care.
“A parallel world. Same kingdom. Different time.”
He paused, jaw tight.
“She’s convinced of it. Not like a theory. Like a memory.”
Seth didn’t stop walking.
He didn’t slow or glance over.
But one brow arched upward, just slightly, a quiet tell from a man who didn’t show his cards unless he had to.
“Alternate realities now?” he said, tone dry enough to scrape bone, but not quite dismissive.
There was something else buried beneath the surface, an edge, a flicker of unease, quickly tucked away.
He wasn’t laughing.
“She called me Rian,” Lurick said after a moment, like it cost something to admit.
He didn’t look at Seth when he said it.
Didn’t have to.
Seth’s mouth twitched at the corner, not quite a smile, not quite a wince.
It was the kind of expression he wore when the facts were absurd but inconveniently real.
“Well,” he said slowly, weighing each word before placing it, “that’s weird.”
His tone was still composed, still precise, but quieter now.
Then, after a beat, “But not unexpected.”
He sounded like a man setting bricks into mortar, building a narrative he didn’t want to believe in, but knew he’d have to, if the foundation was solid enough.
“She thought I was him,” Lurick said, the words landing with quiet weight.
“Or close enough to confuse the difference.”
His eyes stayed forward, fixed on the curve of the drive as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Seth while saying it aloud.
“There was this moment, maybe ten, fifteen seconds, where she looked right at me and smiled like I’d come back from the dead.”
He paused, the memory clearly replaying behind his eyes.
“It took her a while to realize I wasn’t him. Longer than it should have.”