Chapter 5 - The Weight of Inheritance
The aftermath was a bloodbath that couldn't be scrubbed away. Damon sat in the hallway, the smell of gunpowder and metallic blood filling the air. He looked at the nursery door. It was closed, bolted from the inside.
"Elara?" he asked, his voice tight.
The door opened. She looked at the bodies strewn across the carpet, then at Damon. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She simply walked over, stepped over a cooling corpse, and touched Damon’s arm.
"They won't stop, will they?" she asked.
"No," Damon said, his face a mask of iron. "They won't."
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"Then you have to stop being the architect," she said, her voice echoing with an adult’s gravity. "You have to be the king."
Damon realized she was right. His grandfather had been a brute, but he had understood one thing: you don't build an empire by managing it. You build it by declaring it. And the time for management had passed.
