AlexQ

@Alexq_auteur

Alex Q MMRomance Writer

Joined March 2025

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AlexQ @Alexq_auteur

5 months ago

When “Snow White” runs away to escape an arranged marriage and falls into the arms of the most feared “Hunter” in the empire. #ReadonX #mmromance #gayromance #omegaverse Chapter 1 The palace of Levantine rose along the coastline like a dare thrown at the sea – a massive structure of honey-colored stone and mullioned windows that caught, that evening, the glow of a thousand candles. Its pilastered façades, its slender turrets, its slate rooftops bristling with carved chimneys made the whole thing feel unreal, almost too grand for the city beneath it. Sailors out on the estuary claimed you could see it glittering before you ever spotted the harbor lights. It wasn't wrong. It was beautiful, probably. Jehan Whitesnow, for his part, mostly found it loud. He stood in the recess of a window in the great ceremonial hall, a glass of white wine in hand – barely touched – watching over the powdered heads and ceremonial wigs as the assembled nobility swirled beneath the chandeliers like moths around a flame. The music was good, he'd give them that. The musicians perched on their dais were playing a brisk, lively air that set heels clicking against the waxed parquet. Everyone appeared to be having a tremendous time. Jehan was bored out of his mind. He was nineteen years old tonight, and the only thing he actually wanted to do to mark the occasion was walk down to the harbor, stroll along the docks in the cold salt air, press his hand to the warm wood of a freshly caulked hull. He knew the Whitesnow fleet the way he knew his own face – better, maybe. His father, Albéric Whitesnow, the greatest shipowner in all of Itolie, had started teaching him sailor's knots before he could read. He'd taught him to feel whether a frame was sound just by rapping his knuckles against it. He'd taught him to read the wind on the water, to sense a swell two hours before it arrived. Albéric had been dead for three years, and those lessons Jehan carried the way other people carry grief : close to the surface, without a word. This wasn't the moment for that. His Excellency Lothaire de Glastobert, Governor of Itolie and Jehan's stepfather by virtue of a marriage contract signed eighteen months after his father's death, was cutting across the salon toward him, a smile on his lips, two fingers raised in his direction as if to say : stay there, I'm bringing someone. Jehan swallowed a sigh. His stepfather had the look tonight of a man very pleased with himself – which, in his case, never boded well. He had organized this ball with a suspect sort of generosity. The entire nobility of Itolie had been summoned, along with a considerable number of lords from the neighboring provinces. The invitations had been worded in flattering terms where Jehan was concerned – the Whitesnow heir, the son of our late and celebrated shipowner, our brilliant young man – and Lothaire had spent the evening steering him from one cluster of guests to the next, one hand resting in the small of his back with the performed tenderness of a proud father and the calculated pressure of a man very eager to close a deal. Jehan was the centerpiece of the evening. He had no illusions about that. He only had to watch the way people looked at him. He was used to being looked at – he was an omega, and while it wasn't written across his forehead, Alphas could smell it, with that faintly animal instinct that sometimes made them turn in the street, even through the scent he wore to dampen his own. But tonight, the looks had a different quality to them. There was something in the eyes of certain lords that felt too deliberate, too heavy – as though they had come not to a ball but to an auction where no one had yet officially announced the reserve price. Two counts had quarreled over the honor of asking him to dance. An elderly marquis – gray-haired, chest plastered with decorations – had looked him up and down with the detachment of someone appraising a horse. A young lord with extravagant sideburns had attempted a conversation about the virtues of country life, his eyes fixed on Jehan's neck with a steadiness that had made Jehan faintly sick. He had smiled. He had answered. He had turned away the moment protocol allowed. And now here he was, in his window recess, watching the salon door the way a man quietly calculates his odds of escape. The wine in his glass had gone warm. Outside, beyond the tall windows, the sea was black, and the harbor glittered with its lanterns. He could almost hear – imagined he could hear – the creak of timber, the groan of mooring lines, the low, living sound of a ship breathing at its berth. Lothaire was closing in, and behind him, a man Jehan didn't yet know but had already taken a dislike to, with that quiet certainty that sometimes arrives just ahead of a bad encounter. Lothaire made the introductions with the broad, slightly overwarm smile he reserved for occasions when he wanted someone to feel grateful to him for something. « My stepson, allow me to present the Baron de Rhalie, our distinguished neighbor from Sarthie. » He stepped back half a pace, as though clearing the floor – an unremarkable gesture on its face, but one Jehan felt at the back of his neck like a cold draft. The Baron de Rhalie was sixty-five, with yellowed-white sideburns and the build of a man who must have been imposing in his youth and had since simply thickened. He wore a burgundy velvet coat heavy with embroidery and looked at Jehan with an attention so undisguised it edged into insult – not the way you look at a young man you're meeting for the first time, but the way you look at something you've already decided to acquire. His eyes, a dull and patient brown, traveled slowly from Jehan's face to his shoulders, lingered, and traveled back up. Jehan had the unpleasant sensation of being a length of fabric someone was rubbing between their fingers to judge its quality. « Charming», said the baron, and the word landed like a value assessment on a piece of merchandise. Jehan smiled – the polished, empty smile you learn in palaces – and inclined his head by exactly the degree protocol required. Not a half-centimeter more. « My lord. » Lothaire, who had a gift for not registering what he didn't want to see, mistook this economy of gesture for shyness and was amused by it. « My stepson is a reserved young man,» he said, with the condescending indulgence one reserves for children. « But he has a good mind, I assure you. » He placed his hand between Jehan's shoulder blades – firm, steering. « The Baron de Rhalie has a great interest in merchant shipping, Jehan,» he added. « I'm sure you'll have plenty to talk about. » It was a polite lie. Lothaire had not the faintest idea what the Baron de Rhalie found interesting, and cared even less. What he was engineering, with all the subtlety of a bricklayer laying mortar, was a proximity. An opening. The start of something he had clearly already finished designing in his own head. Jehan held up his end of the conversation for as long as was necessary – a few remarks about shipping routes, a neutral observation on the salt trade, a throwaway question about Massul, the capital and largest port of Sarthie – before excusing himself with calibrated grace : a friend spotted across the room, a drink to fetch, a low-grade urgency that nonetheless required immediate attention. The baron watched him go with the unhurried patience of a man who feels no pressure because he is certain of the outcome. It was that certainty, more than the look itself, that tightened something in Jehan's chest. He spent the rest of the evening maneuvering. That was the right word for it – there was nothing else to call this business of tracking the baron's and Lothaire's movements while appearing perfectly at ease, of choosing his positions in the room the way a captain picks his angles, of placing between himself and his pursuers now a cluster of ladies, now a column, now the generous bulk of a buffet table. He danced once, with the daughter of a local count, purely because it was the most efficient way to fill a quarter-hour with something Lothaire couldn't reasonably interrupt. He drank a glass he had no desire to drink, laughed at two or three jokes whose punchlines he didn't catch, and every time he felt the baron's gaze settle on his back – and he felt it, with the accuracy of a compass finding north – he changed course without appearing to. Twice, Lothaire tried to steer him back into the baron's orbit. The first time with the diplomacy of a man who still believes he has the situation in hand ; the second with a slightly sharper insistence, the hand once more in the small of his back, his voice dropped half a register. « The baron found you very pleasant company, Jehan. It would be courteous to go and speak with him again for a moment. » Jehan said he absolutely would, and went to speak with someone else. He thought about his mother. She had been bedridden for two weeks – a persistent fever that wasn't killing her but wouldn't let go either, wearing her down by degrees the way a tide hollows out rock. She hadn't been able to come down that evening. Jehan had known since the afternoon, and what he'd felt in that moment had been closer to discouragement than worry – which had shamed him, briefly. His mother's presence might not have changed much anyway. Lothaire knew how to work around her with the same broad smile he used on everyone else. But she would have been there, and for Jehan, that would have been enough. The candles burned lower. The musicians played softer. Groups broke apart in small clusters, guests called for their coats, carriages began clogging the courtyard. Jehan waited for the right moment – not so early that leaving looked like flight, not so late that someone might propose one last conversation – and took his leave with the practiced serenity of a man with nothing to hide and nowhere in particular to be. He climbed the staircase at an even pace, moved along the third-floor corridor past the portraits of previous governors staring into the middle distance with their requisite gravity, and finally pushed open the door to his room. He closed it behind him. Shot the first bolt. Then the second – an iron latch that was never used, rusted at the hinges, which held for a moment before giving. He stood still in the dark, hand still on the cold metal, listening to the sounds of the palace go out one by one. Footsteps in the corridor outside. He didn't move. They continued, receded, disappeared. He exhaled slowly. The baron's gaze kept coming back to him – that way he'd had of looking at Jehan as though Jehan already belonged to him, in some settled, foregone sense. Not quite desire. Something quieter than that. More assured. The patience of a man who has already gotten what he wanted and is simply waiting for it to be handed over. Jehan sat on the edge of his bed without lighting the lamp, eyes open in the dark, and found that the night had a particular heaviness to it this evening. He tried to sleep. He had made a genuine effort – had lain down, closed his eyes, counted the sounds of the palace going out one by one like candles being snuffed – but his body refused rest with the stubbornness of a hull taking on water. Something was working at him from the inside, a dull and shapeless irritation, like a splinter you can't see but feel with every movement. The baron's gaze. That patience. That calm, settled certainty that had no need to justify itself because it rested on something already concluded. He got up around two in the morning, feeling his way through the dark, pulled his coat on over his nightshirt, and crossed to the window, where he drew back the heavy curtains. The city was asleep. The harbor still glimmered faintly with its last lanterns, a wavering line on the black water, and the sea beyond was a silent, featureless mass that only the moon gave any shape to. Jehan pressed his forehead against the cold glass for a moment, then unlatched the casement and stepped out onto the balcony. The night air was clean and salty, with that edge of late spring in Itolie that reminds you winter hasn't entirely had its final say. He breathed. It helped, for about ten seconds. Then the voices reached him. They came from below, muffled but distinct – the palace was old, its walls thick, but the windows of Lothaire's study faced the same façade as Jehan's balcony, two floors down, and one of them was cracked open. Jehan recognized his stepfather's voice first – that measured, faintly unctuous tone he used when closing deals he considered favorable. Then the other voice, lower, slower. The Baron de Rhalie. Jehan didn't move. He held his breath, even, as though the slightest sound might alert them, two floors below, in a closed study at this hour of the night. He didn't move, and he listened. The words reached him in fragments – the night swallowed syllables and gave back others with unexpected clarity, depending on the wind. At first he caught only inconsequential things : a reference to the return journey, a question about timing, something about Massul. Then Lothaire's voice rose slightly, with that particular emphasis he adopted when he wanted to reassure someone, and the words arrived whole, clean, without any possible ambiguity. « Of course, dear Baron. He will be in your luggage when you leave us. » A silence followed. Then the baron said something brief, and Lothaire laughed – that short, satisfied laugh of a merchant who has just signed. Jehan realized he had gripped the balcony railing without noticing. The iron was cold under his palms. Below, the conversation resumed, lower now, dropping back into murmurs. He wasn't listening anymore. He didn't need to. He will be in your luggage. Like a parcel. Like a crate of cargo loaded onto a Sarthian vessel bound for Massul, southeast of Levantine – a city he had never seen, in a country he didn't know, to belong to a man he had known for only a few hours, but whose reputation he knew far better than he would have liked. The Baron de Rhalie. Seven spouses before him – seven, like the seven notes of a scale someone had played straight through without flinching. Two women and five men, if the rumors were accurate, spread across thirty years of a conjugal life from which none of the partners had emerged alive or free. Some had vanished. Others had died of conveniently vague illnesses. Only one had survived long enough to be spoken of in lowered voices at dinner parties, and no one quite knew what had become of him afterward. The families had gone quiet. The baron had carried on. No court in the Empire had ever intervened – either because the evidence wasn't there, or because the baron had friends in the right places in Carthal, the capital. Most likely both. Jehan let go of the railing. His hands were white where they had gripped the iron. He went back inside without closing the shutters, sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, and stayed there for a long time staring at the wall without seeing it. The nausea was real – not a figure of speech, actual nausea, low and persistent, rising in his throat and refusing to go back down. The thought of that man touching him. Those hands – those thick, patient hands he had watched hold a glass that evening – laying themselves on him. He swallowed with effort. His stepfather had sold him. That was the word for it. He had extracted his mother's signature on a remarriage contract eighteen months after Albéric's death – while she was still in shock, still fragile as glass blown too thin – and now he was selling Jehan in exchange for what, exactly ? Political backing ? A debt wiped clean ? Some favor the baron had been holding over him for years ? Jehan didn't have the details and didn't need them. The outcome was the same either way. The clock in the corridor struck three. The sound passed through the locked door, traveled the length of the ceiling, faded. Jehan got up. Something had shifted in him in those five minutes on the balcony – not quite a decision yet, but something that comes before a decision, the way you feel the wind change before the storm is visible. He crossed the room, stopped in front of the wardrobe, opened it. Looked at his clothes for a moment. Then he began searching, in the back of the bottom drawer, behind the shirts his servants had folded into neat stacks, for the leather purse he had kept there for years – pocket money accumulated in small amounts since his father's death, carefully, without mentioning it to anyone, as though somewhere inside he had always known he would need it one day for something other than ordinary expenses. It was there. He weighed it in his hand. Heavy. Not as heavy as he would have liked, but enough to pay for passage, maybe, if no one looked too closely at where he'd come from or why he was in a hurry. Through the window he'd left open, the smell of the harbor drifted up to him – tar, salt, damp wood. The sea, tonight, had the feel of a promise no one had yet put into words. *** Next Chapter tomorrow

Alexq_auteur's tweet photo. When “Snow White” runs away to escape an arranged marriage and falls into the arms of the most feared “Hunter” in the empire.
#ReadonX #mmromance #gayromance #omegaverse
Chapter 1
The palace of Levantine rose along the coastline like a dare thrown at the sea – a massive structure of honey-colored stone and mullioned windows that caught, that evening, the glow of a thousand candles. Its pilastered façades, its slender turrets, its slate rooftops bristling with carved chimneys made the whole thing feel unreal, almost too grand for the city beneath it. Sailors out on the estuary claimed you could see it glittering before you ever spotted the harbor lights. It wasn't wrong. It was beautiful, probably. Jehan Whitesnow, for his part, mostly found it loud.
He stood in the recess of a window in the great ceremonial hall, a glass of white wine in hand – barely touched – watching over the powdered heads and ceremonial wigs as the assembled nobility swirled beneath the chandeliers like moths around a flame. The music was good, he'd give them that. The musicians perched on their dais were playing a brisk, lively air that set heels clicking against the waxed parquet. Everyone appeared to be having a tremendous time. Jehan was bored out of his mind.
He was nineteen years old tonight, and the only thing he actually wanted to do to mark the occasion was walk down to the harbor, stroll along the docks in the cold salt air, press his hand to the warm wood of a freshly caulked hull. He knew the Whitesnow fleet the way he knew his own face – better, maybe. His father, Albéric Whitesnow, the greatest shipowner in all of Itolie, had started teaching him sailor's knots before he could read. He'd taught him to feel whether a frame was sound just by rapping his knuckles against it. He'd taught him to read the wind on the water, to sense a swell two hours before it arrived. Albéric had been dead for three years, and those lessons Jehan carried the way other people carry grief : close to the surface, without a word.
This wasn't the moment for that. His Excellency Lothaire de Glastobert, Governor of Itolie and Jehan's stepfather by virtue of a marriage contract signed eighteen months after his father's death, was cutting across the salon toward him, a smile on his lips, two fingers raised in his direction as if to say : stay there, I'm bringing someone. Jehan swallowed a sigh. His stepfather had the look tonight of a man very pleased with himself – which, in his case, never boded well.
He had organized this ball with a suspect sort of generosity. The entire nobility of Itolie had been summoned, along with a considerable number of lords from the neighboring provinces. The invitations had been worded in flattering terms where Jehan was concerned – the Whitesnow heir, the son of our late and celebrated shipowner, our brilliant young man – and Lothaire had spent the evening steering him from one cluster of guests to the next, one hand resting in the small of his back with the performed tenderness of a proud father and the calculated pressure of a man very eager to close a deal. Jehan was the centerpiece of the evening. He had no illusions about that.
He only had to watch the way people looked at him. He was used to being looked at – he was an omega, and while it wasn't written across his forehead, Alphas could smell it, with that faintly animal instinct that sometimes made them turn in the street, even through the scent he wore to dampen his own.
But tonight, the looks had a different quality to them.
There was something in the eyes of certain lords that felt too deliberate, too heavy – as though they had come not to a ball but to an auction where no one had yet officially announced the reserve price. Two counts had quarreled over the honor of asking him to dance. An elderly marquis – gray-haired, chest plastered with decorations – had looked him up and down with the detachment of someone appraising a horse. A young lord with extravagant sideburns had attempted a conversation about the virtues of country life, his eyes fixed on Jehan's neck with a steadiness that had made Jehan faintly sick.
He had smiled. He had answered. He had turned away the moment protocol allowed. And now here he was, in his window recess, watching the salon door the way a man quietly calculates his odds of escape. The wine in his glass had gone warm. Outside, beyond the tall windows, the sea was black, and the harbor glittered with its lanterns. He could almost hear – imagined he could hear – the creak of timber, the groan of mooring lines, the low, living sound of a ship breathing at its berth.
Lothaire was closing in, and behind him, a man Jehan didn't yet know but had already taken a dislike to, with that quiet certainty that sometimes arrives just ahead of a bad encounter.
Lothaire made the introductions with the broad, slightly overwarm smile he reserved for occasions when he wanted someone to feel grateful to him for something.
« My stepson, allow me to present the Baron de Rhalie, our distinguished neighbor from Sarthie. »
He stepped back half a pace, as though clearing the floor – an unremarkable gesture on its face, but one Jehan felt at the back of his neck like a cold draft.
The Baron de Rhalie was sixty-five, with yellowed-white sideburns and the build of a man who must have been imposing in his youth and had since simply thickened. He wore a burgundy velvet coat heavy with embroidery and looked at Jehan with an attention so undisguised it edged into insult – not the way you look at a young man you're meeting for the first time, but the way you look at something you've already decided to acquire. His eyes, a dull and patient brown, traveled slowly from Jehan's face to his shoulders, lingered, and traveled back up. Jehan had the unpleasant sensation of being a length of fabric someone was rubbing between their fingers to judge its quality.
« Charming», said the baron, and the word landed like a value assessment on a piece of merchandise.
Jehan smiled – the polished, empty smile you learn in palaces – and inclined his head by exactly the degree protocol required. Not a half-centimeter more.
« My lord. »
Lothaire, who had a gift for not registering what he didn't want to see, mistook this economy of gesture for shyness and was amused by it.
« My stepson is a reserved young man,» he said, with the condescending indulgence one reserves for children. « But he has a good mind, I assure you. »
He placed his hand between Jehan's shoulder blades – firm, steering.
« The Baron de Rhalie has a great interest in merchant shipping, Jehan,» he added. « I'm sure you'll have plenty to talk about. »
It was a polite lie. Lothaire had not the faintest idea what the Baron de Rhalie found interesting, and cared even less. What he was engineering, with all the subtlety of a bricklayer laying mortar, was a proximity. An opening. The start of something he had clearly already finished designing in his own head.
Jehan held up his end of the conversation for as long as was necessary – a few remarks about shipping routes, a neutral observation on the salt trade, a throwaway question about Massul, the capital and largest port of Sarthie – before excusing himself with calibrated grace : a friend spotted across the room, a drink to fetch, a low-grade urgency that nonetheless required immediate attention. The baron watched him go with the unhurried patience of a man who feels no pressure because he is certain of the outcome.
It was that certainty, more than the look itself, that tightened something in Jehan's chest.
He spent the rest of the evening maneuvering. That was the right word for it – there was nothing else to call this business of tracking the baron's and Lothaire's movements while appearing perfectly at ease, of choosing his positions in the room the way a captain picks his angles, of placing between himself and his pursuers now a cluster of ladies, now a column, now the generous bulk of a buffet table. He danced once, with the daughter of a local count, purely because it was the most efficient way to fill a quarter-hour with something Lothaire couldn't reasonably interrupt. He drank a glass he had no desire to drink, laughed at two or three jokes whose punchlines he didn't catch, and every time he felt the baron's gaze settle on his back – and he felt it, with the accuracy of a compass finding north – he changed course without appearing to.
Twice, Lothaire tried to steer him back into the baron's orbit. The first time with the diplomacy of a man who still believes he has the situation in hand ; the second with a slightly sharper insistence, the hand once more in the small of his back, his voice dropped half a register.
« The baron found you very pleasant company, Jehan. It would be courteous to go and speak with him again for a moment. »
Jehan said he absolutely would, and went to speak with someone else.
He thought about his mother. She had been bedridden for two weeks – a persistent fever that wasn't killing her but wouldn't let go either, wearing her down by degrees the way a tide hollows out rock. She hadn't been able to come down that evening. Jehan had known since the afternoon, and what he'd felt in that moment had been closer to discouragement than worry – which had shamed him, briefly. His mother's presence might not have changed much anyway. Lothaire knew how to work around her with the same broad smile he used on everyone else. But she would have been there, and for Jehan, that would have been enough.
The candles burned lower. The musicians played softer. Groups broke apart in small clusters, guests called for their coats, carriages began clogging the courtyard. Jehan waited for the right moment – not so early that leaving looked like flight, not so late that someone might propose one last conversation – and took his leave with the practiced serenity of a man with nothing to hide and nowhere in particular to be.
He climbed the staircase at an even pace, moved along the third-floor corridor past the portraits of previous governors staring into the middle distance with their requisite gravity, and finally pushed open the door to his room. He closed it behind him. Shot the first bolt. Then the second – an iron latch that was never used, rusted at the hinges, which held for a moment before giving. He stood still in the dark, hand still on the cold metal, listening to the sounds of the palace go out one by one.
Footsteps in the corridor outside. He didn't move. They continued, receded, disappeared. He exhaled slowly.
The baron's gaze kept coming back to him – that way he'd had of looking at Jehan as though Jehan already belonged to him, in some settled, foregone sense. Not quite desire. Something quieter than that. More assured. The patience of a man who has already gotten what he wanted and is simply waiting for it to be handed over.
Jehan sat on the edge of his bed without lighting the lamp, eyes open in the dark, and found that the night had a particular heaviness to it this evening.
He tried to sleep. He had made a genuine effort – had lain down, closed his eyes, counted the sounds of the palace going out one by one like candles being snuffed – but his body refused rest with the stubbornness of a hull taking on water. Something was working at him from the inside, a dull and shapeless irritation, like a splinter you can't see but feel with every movement. The baron's gaze. That patience. That calm, settled certainty that had no need to justify itself because it rested on something already concluded.
He got up around two in the morning, feeling his way through the dark, pulled his coat on over his nightshirt, and crossed to the window, where he drew back the heavy curtains. The city was asleep. The harbor still glimmered faintly with its last lanterns, a wavering line on the black water, and the sea beyond was a silent, featureless mass that only the moon gave any shape to. Jehan pressed his forehead against the cold glass for a moment, then unlatched the casement and stepped out onto the balcony.
The night air was clean and salty, with that edge of late spring in Itolie that reminds you winter hasn't entirely had its final say. He breathed. It helped, for about ten seconds. Then the voices reached him.
They came from below, muffled but distinct – the palace was old, its walls thick, but the windows of Lothaire's study faced the same façade as Jehan's balcony, two floors down, and one of them was cracked open. Jehan recognized his stepfather's voice first – that measured, faintly unctuous tone he used when closing deals he considered favorable. Then the other voice, lower, slower.
The Baron de Rhalie.
Jehan didn't move. He held his breath, even, as though the slightest sound might alert them, two floors below, in a closed study at this hour of the night. He didn't move, and he listened.
The words reached him in fragments – the night swallowed syllables and gave back others with unexpected clarity, depending on the wind. At first he caught only inconsequential things : a reference to the return journey, a question about timing, something about Massul. Then Lothaire's voice rose slightly, with that particular emphasis he adopted when he wanted to reassure someone, and the words arrived whole, clean, without any possible ambiguity.
« Of course, dear Baron. He will be in your luggage when you leave us. »
A silence followed. Then the baron said something brief, and Lothaire laughed – that short, satisfied laugh of a merchant who has just signed.
Jehan realized he had gripped the balcony railing without noticing. The iron was cold under his palms. Below, the conversation resumed, lower now, dropping back into murmurs. He wasn't listening anymore. He didn't need to.
He will be in your luggage.
Like a parcel. Like a crate of cargo loaded onto a Sarthian vessel bound for Massul, southeast of Levantine – a city he had never seen, in a country he didn't know, to belong to a man he had known for only a few hours, but whose reputation he knew far better than he would have liked.
The Baron de Rhalie. Seven spouses before him – seven, like the seven notes of a scale someone had played straight through without flinching. Two women and five men, if the rumors were accurate, spread across thirty years of a conjugal life from which none of the partners had emerged alive or free. Some had vanished. Others had died of conveniently vague illnesses. Only one had survived long enough to be spoken of in lowered voices at dinner parties, and no one quite knew what had become of him afterward. The families had gone quiet. The baron had carried on. No court in the Empire had ever intervened – either because the evidence wasn't there, or because the baron had friends in the right places in Carthal, the capital. Most likely both.
Jehan let go of the railing. His hands were white where they had gripped the iron. He went back inside without closing the shutters, sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, and stayed there for a long time staring at the wall without seeing it.
The nausea was real – not a figure of speech, actual nausea, low and persistent, rising in his throat and refusing to go back down. The thought of that man touching him. Those hands – those thick, patient hands he had watched hold a glass that evening – laying themselves on him. He swallowed with effort.
His stepfather had sold him. That was the word for it. He had extracted his mother's signature on a remarriage contract eighteen months after Albéric's death – while she was still in shock, still fragile as glass blown too thin – and now he was selling Jehan in exchange for what, exactly ? Political backing ? A debt wiped clean ? Some favor the baron had been holding over him for years ? Jehan didn't have the details and didn't need them. The outcome was the same either way.
The clock in the corridor struck three. The sound passed through the locked door, traveled the length of the ceiling, faded. Jehan got up. Something had shifted in him in those five minutes on the balcony – not quite a decision yet, but something that comes before a decision, the way you feel the wind change before the storm is visible. He crossed the room, stopped in front of the wardrobe, opened it. Looked at his clothes for a moment. Then he began searching, in the back of the bottom drawer, behind the shirts his servants had folded into neat stacks, for the leather purse he had kept there for years – pocket money accumulated in small amounts since his father's death, carefully, without mentioning it to anyone, as though somewhere inside he had always known he would need it one day for something other than ordinary expenses.
It was there. He weighed it in his hand. Heavy. Not as heavy as he would have liked, but enough to pay for passage, maybe, if no one looked too closely at where he'd come from or why he was in a hurry.
Through the window he'd left open, the smell of the harbor drifted up to him – tar, salt, damp wood. The sea, tonight, had the feel of a promise no one had yet put into words.
***
Next Chapter tomorrow

Alexq_auteur retweeted

a子 @a95177612

4 months ago

🐯さん

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AlexQ @Alexq_auteur

4 months ago

@a95177612 Awesome 😍

AlexQ @Alexq_auteur

4 months ago

@TracyClark132 The most fun was the 'Ghost' scene when the master sit behind his student to correct his move on the clay. The hardest was the grieving. The student had lost his twin sister and it was very hard not to make it tragic, to keep it subtile.

AlexQ @Alexq_auteur

4 months ago

Hands of Ashes available on Amazon now 😊 https://t.co/ox3vbkAN4m Summary: When love and art intertwine to reshape broken souls Shin Cooper arrives in Andalusia haunted by a promise made to his vanished twin sister—to honor her memory at a pottery workshop led by the celebrated yet enigmatic Lisandro Torres. They couldn't be more different: one carries the weight of grief and a deep aversion to pottery, the other is a master whose hands have shaped art history. But under the scorching Spanish sun, between the shadows of a painful past and glimpses of an uncertain future, their souls collide. Through clay, silence, and stolen glances, Shin and Lisandro find each other. The young man with calloused builder's hands and the renowned artist, trapped by his own fame, rediscover together the transformative power of creation—and the bloom of an unexpected love. Hands of Ashes is an ode to vulnerability and rebirth, a captivating tale where grief paves the way for love and art becomes a universal language to heal wounded hearts. A slow-burn, emotionally intense MM romance set against the breathtaking backdrop of Southern Spain. #mmromance #agegap #BookLovers #RomanceReaders