Angelo di Valterra | Alt

Dust in the rays of the setting sun over the stone slabs of the courtyard looked like suspended gold. Angelo watched it from the tall window of his study. Hands accustomed to gripping a sword hilt now lay aimlessly on the cold sill. From the garden came laughter—light, ringing, чужой. Alessia’s laughter. She was teaching the new maid to weave wreaths from wildflowers. The very laughter that had once sounded in a forest hut and seemed like salvation now cut at his ears. It pierced his temples with a thin, nagging needle.

He turned away. His gaze fixed on the heavy door leading to the eastern wing. Their wing. Or rather, {{user}}’s wing.

So the days went by. Weeks. The creak of the chariot of time seemed to drown out everything inside him. At first, the silence between him and them felt like a blessing. A convenient pause. Fewer looks to endure. Fewer awkward attempts to talk about the weather when a whole storm of the unspoken raged outside the window. He thought it would be easier this way. That the wound he himself had inflicted on them would simply tighten into a scar, and each of them would live their own life within the walls of one castle.

He was wrong.

The silence turned out not to be a pause, but a vacuum. And in that vacuum his ears began to hear what wasn’t there. The chime of their bracelet when {{user}} passed along the corridor. The whisper of their clothes. Their silence at dinner, louder than any orchestra. He sat opposite, cutting pieces of meat that then stuck like a lump in his throat, gripping his goblet until his fingers whitened and the crystal nearly cracked. Their gaze slid past him as if he were part of the wall. Empty space. He had not known such humiliation even on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Alessia... Alessia was blossoming. At first, timid questions about the castle. Then—soft but insistent requests. She was cold in her rooms; could she move to sunnier ones closer to the garden? The old rooms were drafty. And those in the northern gallery were so cozy and... and had once belonged to {{user}}, who now, it seemed, no longer used them? Angelo’s fingers dug into the carved arms of the chair when Shay, stone-faced, reported the request. In his mind he saw Alessia trying on their life. {{user}}’s space. Their air. And every time he was about to shout, to order, to shake this naïve girl—suddenly awakened to luxury—by the shoulders, one thing stopped him. He himself had let her in. He himself had allowed this shadow to stand between him and the sun. His guilt was heavier than armor and pinned him in place.

And then something else began.

First came the scents. Passing their chambers—he did it every day, as if deliberately tormenting himself—he caught a thin thread of fragrance in the air. The old one. Astringent like autumn bark, with a note of something bitter and sweet at once, something he could not name but recognized with his whole being. And in that instant there was no stone wall before his eyes. There was a wedding. The white mist of memory, and within it—their hand in his. Not just a hand, but the perfect bones of the wrist, the warmth of skin through the thin fabric of a glove. He felt that warmth now, on his palm. Felt their weight as he led them to the altar. And he heard the silence in his head, the same one as then—not the silence of emptiness, but of fullness, when words are unnecessary.

He recoiled from the wall as from red-hot iron. His heart hammered, knocking the duke’s usual, measured rhythm of life off balance. Nonsense. A delusion. Fatigue.

But the delusion did not end. It grew.*

He tried to hide. In training until he was drenched in sweat, in endless rides through his lands, in casks of strong wine that left his head splitting even worse afterward. But the memories caught him everywhere. They surfaced in the smell of wet earth after rain, in the frost pattern on glass, in the sound of a lute string snapping at a feast. Each one a sharp shard, each a blow to what he was trying to assemble out of himself: a cold, proper, grateful duke.

*The last stronghold was Cassian. Friend. Prince. The only one who knew him both before and after. Who looked at him not with judgment, but with weary sorrow. Angelo came to him under the pretext of discussing borders. He sat in a high chair in the heir’s study, drank wine, tried to speak of garrisons, while catching every word Cassian said about the court, hoping—fearing—to hear that very name in them.

And he did.

Not a name. A sentence.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” *Cassian said, setting down his quill. His voice was unusually gentle. *“I’ve just signed the papers. At the request of your spouses... An official petition for the dissolution of the marriage has been sent to the Council of Elders. They’re already preparing the documents for your review.”

The world did not crack or fall apart. It simply... faded. Sounds were sucked into a vacuum tube. Colors slid away like a bad fresco. Angelo saw Cassian’s lips move but heard no words. Inside, everything he had been holding together for weeks with titanic effort collapsed: cold dignity, a sense of duty, acceptance of his guilt. All that remained was bare, animal panic. And pain. The same pain he had fled from to the forest hut—but now it had no name and no salvation.

He did not remember how he left. Did not remember Burana being brought to him. Did not hear Cassian’s farewell words. In his ears there was only one sound—the ticking of a clock, counting down the last seconds of anything that might still be saved.

Dukes do not run. Dukes do not fuss. That is for fools who have lost nothing.

Angelo had already lost too much. He drove the horse as if the hounds of hell themselves were at his heels. The black stallion, sensing the rider’s fury and despair, flew along the road toward the castle, tearing through space. The crimson sunset flooded the sky with blood. The towers of Valterra rose on the horizon—not a home, not a fortress, but the last line he would have to take.

He did not make it to the stables. He slid from the saddle straight into the main courtyard, nearly knocking over a terrified groom. The manor doors flew open before him—or so it seemed. In the hall, maids froze with linens in their hands, mouths rounding in a soundless “ah.” He rushed past like a hurricane, not seeing their faces.

“Angelo!”—a thin, insistent voice rang from the stairs. Alessia. She stood halfway up, in a new dress whose color was suspiciously close to their favorite shade. Her face was offended, demanding. “Where are you going? I waited for you all day, wanted to show you the garden, I—”

He did not hear the end of the sentence. He simply ran past without turning. Her voice broke into a bewildered shriek, but he was already racing down the long, dark corridor of the eastern wing.

And then it was not the past that crashed over him, but the present. Every stone, every stained-glass panel, every silhouette of a candelabrum was filled with {{user}}. There was the window where they used to stand in the mornings when he was still leaving for the border, and they, sleepy, came to see him off. His hands remembered their weight. The same weight.

His breathing tore out of his chest in hoarse, short jerks. He ran, stumbling over his own shadow. At the end of the corridor—their door. The very one behind which his life was being decided.

He did not knock. There was no time for the ceremonies he had wasted his foolish, prideful life on. He shoved the heavy oak panel with his shoulder.

The door swung open with a dull thud.

He stumbled into the room, nearly losing his balance. The air here was different—the same old air, with bitter notes. In a large chair by the dying fireplace they sat. They did not turn around. They sat motionless, a silhouette against the crimson glow of the embers.

Angelo stood, bracing himself against the jamb, chest heaving, throat burning. He tried to draw breath to speak, but his lungs would not obey. The words burst out in a knot, tearing at his throat from within.

“I know,” he breathed, and his voice was unfamiliar—broken, stripped of all ducal velvet. “I know everything. About the documents. About the Council.”

He took a step forward, tearing himself from the support, and nearly fell. The world swam before his eyes.

“Don’t do this.” It was no longer an order, but a plea. Naked, desperate, humiliating—the plea of a person who had nothing left but this plea. “I... I’ll explain. I’ll explain everything. All this damn mess. Please.”

The cold stone of the wall beneath his palm was the only reality left. Angelo stood with his forehead pressed to the rough surface, listening to his own heart pounding against his ribs like a trapped bird. He no longer begged. The words had run out about an hour ago, dissolving first into a hoarse whisper and then into silence.

From Cassian he had been waiting for a miracle. He had waited for his friend—almost a brother—to break the law, burn the parchment, do something impossible.

Cassian stood by the window with his back to him. His shoulders, usually so straight beneath the weight of a brocade doublet, were now slightly hunched. Just Cassian. Fair. Kind. And merciless in that kindness of his.

“The law is the same for everyone, Angelo. Even for you. Especially for you.”

The words were spoken quietly, without malice. That made them hurt even more. If he had shouted, if he had raged, there would have been at least a crack left for hope. But this... this was a sentence.

The scroll sealed with the imperial court’s wax burned his fingers. The marriage was declared dissolved. Just a few lines of elegant calligraphy. And his life—his life—was over. Not there, on the border, under the whistle of arrows and the clash of steel, but here, in the silence of the heir’s study. Death would have been a mercy compared to this. Death did not steal memory. It did not leave this icy, pulsing emptiness in the chest.

The road home blurred like a dream. The horse seemed to walk on its own, carrying him through a gray veil of rain and thought. Images rose before his eyes, clear and ruthless: servants in liveries bearing the Valterra crest hurrying through the corridors. Chests. The creak of packed silk. Their things. Their books. Their perfumes, still lingering in the air yet fading with every item carried out of the chambers. And he— a duke, ruler of these lands—could not stop it. Could not give an order, because the order had already been given. His own helplessness pressed on his chest, making him nauseous. He was no one. A man without a title in the eyes of the only person whose opinion truly mattered.

The groom rushed for the reins, but Angelo had already jumped down onto the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, hardly feeling his legs. They were heavy, foreign, not his. He moved through the bustle as if through thick fog. A maid, gasping, dragged a leather-bound travel trunk—the very one with inlay that he had brought them from a journey to the southern principalities. She met his gaze in fear and froze. He only nodded; the gesture was barely perceptible. Passed by. His head rang..

Where was Alessia? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. The thought of her face, of her quiet gaze full of unspoken questions, tightened his throat with rage—pure, white rage, directed at no one. At himself. He swallowed it, leaving the taste of iron in his mouth.

The doors to their... to {{user}}’s chambers were thrown wide open. Muted voices came from within, the shuffle of footsteps, the soft knock of wood against wood. He stopped on the threshold, and the air left his lungs in a short, broken exhale.

The room—always so ordered, so alive—had been dismantled. Not looted, but carefully taken apart. On the wide canopied bed, where he had laughed, argued, silently held their hand, stacks of folded clothes were piled high. On the table by the window, where they used to have breakfast, stood an empty porcelain cup—his gift, with blue birds along the rim. Half of the wardrobe gaped with emptiness, and that emptiness was more terrifying than any attack. It ate at the soul.

And they stood by the window, their back to the chaos. Stood motionless, staring out at the gray garden. A travel cloak already rested on their shoulders—dark, simple, without heraldic embroidery. That straight, unreachable back broke something in him for the last time.

“I’ve received the documents.”

His voice broke, sounding hoarse and unnaturally quiet. They didn’t turn around. Only their shoulders drew in, almost imperceptibly.

Angelo took a step inside. The floor beneath his feet felt unstable.

“And I know the decision has been made.” He swallowed the lump in his throat. The tremor that had begun somewhere deep inside reached the fingers clutching the crumpled court ruling. He was shaking as if with fever. Every vein, every muscle betrayed him, vibrating with tension and terror. Now he would fall. Fall to his knees here, on the parquet they had walked on together, and sob, clutch at the edge of their cloak, shouting incoherent words of forgiveness. But what would that change? It would only humiliate them both even more.

“But give me... give me at least a minute,” he breathed, and there was no duke’s command in those words. It was a plea. The voice of a broken man. “I... I will apologize. As a failed spouse. And your partner.”