Your mother, Danielle, is crying again.
You can tell from the hallway—the small, swallowed sound she makes when she thinks no one can hear. She's been making it for ten years.
She's at the kitchen table, a cold cup of tea in front of her, her phone face-up and silent. No missed calls. There never are.
"He didn't come home again,"
*she says, not looking up.
"Anniversary. Ten years today. I left him a message."
You don't have to ask if he answered.*
Kaine Royale. Your stepfather in name only. Ten years ago, his family—old money, the kind that buys silence and senators—married him off to a widow with a child as a quiet humiliation. A joke at a dinner party that became your mother's whole life.
She fell for his face and his fortune from the first photograph. She never mentioned his eyes, because his eyes were cold the day they met and cold every day after. He never touched her. Never called. Never came home if he could help it. A husband made of marble and absence.
You've spent a decade watching her love a man who treats her like a contract clause.
- - -
There is exactly one warm thing in this cold house, and you've known it your whole life here: a single framed photo on the shelf in his study.
Two young men, arms around each other, laughing at something outside the frame. One has bleached white hair and a grin you have never once seen on your stepfather's face—except it is him, unmistakably, fifteen years younger and somehow fully alive.
The other boy you've never been able to place: warm brown hair falling messy into bright green eyes, an open, easy smile, the kind of face that looks like it belongs to someone kind. Just a stranger your stepfather loved enough to keep when he kept nothing else.
You used to stare at it and wonder who could have made that frozen man smile like that. You never asked. You knew better than to ask Kaine anything.
- - -
Tonight you can't sleep, so you end up in his study again. And this time something else catches the moonlight—a strange brass instrument, half clock and half compass, shoved behind a row of books like it was hidden. The Royale name is engraved on its base.
You shouldn't touch it. You know you shouldn't.
Your fingers find a small dial, worn smooth by someone else's thumb, and you turn it—just to see—and the brass goes white-hot and screaming, the room folds in on itself like paper in a fist, and everything tears apart.
You wake on grass.
The wrong sunlight—too bright, too young. A campus you half-recognize: the university the Royales have funded for generations, except the cars are wrong and a banner over the quad reads a date fifteen years before the one you fell asleep in.
And there's shouting. A crowd forming, people backing away from someone at the center of it the way water backs from a thrown stone.
*White hair. Eyes so blue and so alive with mischief, they don't look like they belong to anyone you've ever met. Tattoos up both forearms, a split knuckle, a grin like a lit match. Twenty-five years old and afraid of nothing. You'd know that jaw anywhere. You've watched it clench in cold silence across a dinner table for ten years.
Kaine Royale. Before whatever happened to him happened.*
His eyes land on you—the stranger on the grass, staring like she's seen a ghost.
"The hell are you looking at?"
he calls, voice warmer and rougher than you've ever heard it.
"You lost, or do you just enjoy the show?"
Before you can answer, someone shoulders through the crowd and claps a hand on Kaine's shoulder—easy, unhurried, the only person here unafraid of him. And Kaine, terrifying, untouchable Kaine, rolls his eyes and lets himself be pulled back a step. The fight drains right out of him.
"Leave the poor stranger alone, you menace,"
the boy says, laughing—brown hair messy in his eyes, green eyes crinkled at the corners.
Your stomach drops.
Because you know that face. The other boy from the photograph—the one warm thing your frozen stepfather kept for fifteen years. He's standing right there. Alive. Laughing. Looking at Kaine like Kaine is worth saving.
"So, who might you be?"
he asks you, grinning, with no idea that you already know exactly who he is—and, somewhere cold and certain, that he had something to do with your stepdad's future hollow demeanour.
Your move.
- - -
Author's Note: This story has been updated to its latest version. The previous version was a highly ambitious and unrefined draft that accidentally got uploaded, sorry!
(づ ᴗ _ᴗ)づ♡
