Askai’s eyes flew open. Vance watched the shock ripple through him, a tight smile tugging at his mouth—as if he knew exactly what kind of resurrection that truth could summon.

  “You… mean… shhee—” Askai tried, but the sentence fell apart, his tongue thick with drink.

  Vance shook his head gently and pulled the covers higher around them.

  “They called her beautiful,” he said. “Extraordinary. She married my father for love—or so she convinced him.”

  Askai stayed still, listening, something raw tightening in his chest. He blamed it on the alcohol

  “She promised him everything,” Vance’s voice was low, the words thick, carrying a lifetime of bitterness. He was speaking against Askai’s pulse point, the vibrations of his voice a strange, intimate torment.

  “Love, devotion, a lifetime of unwavering care. My father, who was …. cheated out of what he believed was true love, was given fidelity as a gift—so he believed. Every single word, Askai, was a calculated deception, a lie built meticulously upon another lie, stacked until the entire edifice of their relationship was a fragile, glittering sham!”

  He lifted his gaze, but didn’t look at Askai—his eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the room.

  “She wasn’t who she claimed to be,” he said. “She was a prostitute. And worse—an opportunist who learned how to turn childbirth into currency. She seduced powerful men, got pregnant, sold the child to the highest bidder, and vanished. Again and again. It’s a trade as common in the West as bakeries in the Middle. My father didn’t know about it or rather refused to believe that monsters often were built more beautiful than angels.”

  A harsh, hollow laugh escaped Vance, a sound of self-mocking horror that was more painful to hear than any cry.

  “Only my father…” Vance abruptly paused and for a moment Askai saw a flicker of strange emotion in his eyes. This was not animosity - which Askai had expected - but it was deep sadness as if carved into his bones. For a moment, he thought that it was all he was going to hear from him today.

  He wanted to pretend he didn’t care but in his heart he did a little. He wanted to hear more, unravel more of a mystery that Vance was.

  Finally, Vance spoke again.

  “My father…… Kevin Regale—isn’t just wealthy. He is untouchable. When she realized who she’d trapped, she panicked. Her usual escape vanished and she couldn’t leave. She couldn’t ask for money either.”

  Vance’s hand moved from Askai’s waist, sliding up the curve of his side, the touch suddenly detached, clinical, as if he were holding a memory, not a man.

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  “So she improvised. She sold me—her flesh and blood, her last failed venture—to a man even darker, even more disposable than she was, cut her losses, and fled the country. Disappeared entirely, melting back into the shadows of the West without a single look backward, without a single tear.”

  He clicked his tongue, a cruel smile lifting his lips.

  “She thought she had made it. But Kevin, Oh Kevin - ” Vance laughed, another hollow sound lacking any humor, “The man is ruthless when you hurt the ones he loves. He hurts them enough, after all. He found her hiding as a dancing slave in one of Kazan's whore houses and let’s say, there was not an inch of the skin on her body that did not pay for what she did.”

  His gaze finally snapped down, locking onto Askai’s. The look in Vance’s eyes was no longer cold or murderous; it was filled with a raw, terrifying intensity, a deep, primal devastation that Askai felt in the very marrow of his bones.

  Askai had no idea how long it was before Vance was found by his father. What he must have gone through. Was he too young to remember or he still wore the scars like Askai?

  “I know it is hard to believe but..that is why I warn you against them, Askai. That is why I demand you listen.”

  But Vance had no idea that Askai knew that West was capable of that and much more. He remembered how the streets had treated him with a cold frown and kicked them around with their boots. A dump yard for their dead bodies, because that's all they were to them. Unwanted mongrels……….

  He sighed, which in his drunken state might actually have looked dramatic. But who cared?

  Despite everything, he could not wish the whole of the West to burn to the ground.

  He had found Marlie there, Jordan and even Kael. It was the same hell that had birthed a man as powerful as Moraine, one he begrudgingly revered.

  He knew in his heart that the lines of the crack ran deeper than Vance led him to believe. He was only sharing a part of himself.

  Askai realized then how dangerous this moment was. Vance was opening himself—to a fraud, to a man living under a borrowed name—simply because he had been asked.

  He felt the weight of it settle heavy in his chest.

  Vance’s hand tightened on his shoulder.

  Askai was still processing all of this when Vance spoke up again, “Do not trust the beautiful, shining promises made by those people. They lie to survive, they manipulate to advance, and they are utterly without conscience or true heart. My father was a brilliant man yet even he was swept away by her charm, her manufactured fragility. You,” Vance paused, his eyes softening marginally in a gesture that was shockingly tender, “ You wouldn't stand a chance. They would consume you and spit out the bones.”

  Vance leaned in further, his breath warm and uneven against Askai’s ear, his voice dropping to a low, irreversible vow. “That is why you must not go there. They are beyond redemption. I have lost too much to that place already.”

  The words lingered—protective, possessive and suffocating.

  Askai knew then that if his truth ever surfaced, it would confirm every fear Vance held. That the West bred betrayal. That even love was a weapon.

  He was doing exactly what Vance’s mother had done—standing in borrowed skin, accepted because he looked harmless.

  The thought twisted something ugly inside him.

  But he pushed it away.

  I won’t be here long, he promised himself. No fortress was strong enough to hold him when he refused to stay.

  Askai didn’t trust himself to speak.

  So instead, he curled closer into Vance’s embrace—accepting the warmth and the danger—with his eyes wide open.