Page 75 of The Amber Sunburst

But there he is, back to Alexander, blond head bent over a book in his lap.

“Kallias,” Alexander sighs.

“Alexander,” he responds like his normal self, a shine of life in his dark eyes.

When Kallias starts the routine with the tiles and the lock Alexander dawdles behind him like a duckling. The tension in the air is unnervingly one-sided—like Kallias is trying to ignore whatever happened last night.

So it’s a shock when, moments after they sit down, Kallias looks up at him, thinking face on, and says, simply, “I’ll come with you.”

He says it like it doesn’t mean anything; like Alexander might laugh it off or throw it away; like Kallias hasn’t become his entire world in a time so short it scares him.

“What?” he asks, like an idiot.

“I’ll come with you,” Kallias repeats, and then, in a rare moment of hesitation, “If—If you still want me to.”

“What?” he asks again and Kallias’ brows furrow. “Yes! I mean, obviously yes.”

“Right,” Kallias drawls, one brow up.

“Yes. Yes, of course, yes. You just caught me off guard. No hesitation. Yes.”

“Okay.” Kallias half smiles. “You have to keep your promise, though.”

“What promise?” he asks, though he’s certain he already knows.

“I said I’d make you tell me the truth eventually,” Kallias says, walking around to sit on the table next to Alexander’s book.

“I’m Alexander,” he supplies, barreling on before Kallias has the chance to scowl. “Alexander Jameson. Prince of the Holy American Empire.”

For once, Kallias looks surprised.

“Prince?”

“And heir. Or, not anymore, I guess,” he says. He tries to pass it off as sarcasm, but even he can hear its sad tinge.

“So, someone else wanted the throne.”

“I… have a brother.”

It almost hurts to let his brother permeate this space, but if this is what it takes to keep Kallias then he’ll do it. He’s starting to think he’d do anything.

“Cain.”

Kallias stays quiet but his eyes are attentive. It’s comforting, kind of, to know that he can finally, finally tell the truth.

“We share a face, me and him. A birthday, a mother, a father, and that’s about it. He’s my mother’s son more than anything else. She never hit him hard enough to change that. Not like she did with me.” Alexander taps lightly on the slit in his eyebrow, a whispered reminder of his mother’s rage.

He can’t even remember why she did it. Just that he was standing, showered with her love one second, and bleeding on the ground the next.

“I sort of wish she had; maybe then he wouldn’t have measured his worth on her opinion of him. But even then, you’d think the razor in her hand and the pool of blood on the floor would have convinced him not to trust her judgment. I think it just made it worse.”

He pauses when Kallias puts a finger to the scar on his brow, so gentle he has to pay close attention to feel it. This close up, it’s easy to get lost in Kallias’ eyes, dark as night, and keep talking.

“Cain picked the wrong parent to favor. I think he realized that by the end. My dad had the real power, and he wasn’t like my mom. He loved with every part of himself. An enigma at his most comprehensible. He never believed in the religious stuff but led a religious country; he filled his days with tinkering but tamped down any technological development; he loved fiercely but showed it rarely.

“And my dad and I, we were… Well, not inseparable—I was a problem child desperate for attention and he was a king with too much on his shoulders—but we knew each other where it mattered.

“Cain, though? We never really knew Cain. Not enough to help him when he fell into his grief. Not enough to keep him from turning into something…” he pauses. Because what did his brother become, by the end?