The blade pierces the canvas right above his father's bright blue-grey eyes. The gaze that terrified him so years ago now seems so pathetic, so vacuous, as if the painter's hand was unable to grasp the full strength in those eyes—as if they weren't good enough to. Anyone else would think so, when faced with such a dismal portrait, but Harry knows the truth—the issue wasn't the painter, but his father. No hand, no matter how skilled, can capture what isn't there. Those eyes are empty because they've always been, even in life. If such a thing as a soul exists, his father has never had one.

The throwing knife lets out a gasp when Harry wrenches it out of the backing board, as if shocked by the rough handling. He traces the edge of the blade with a feather-light thumb as he turns his shoulders to the painting, clenching his teeth as he walks back to the desk on the opposite side of the room. It's been months since that night, and still he can't manage a single decent throw. He wasn't aiming for the forehead. A dull ache radiates from his middle, his body complaining for his lack of care.

He spins around. The knife leaves his hand and goes wide. It hits the corner of the painting and clatters to the floor. "Fuck." He grabs another off the desk and throws it. It misses again. Another. Again. And again. "Fuck, fuck!" He swipes the contents off the desk with a shout. "Fuck!" A kick at the corner of the desk. "Fuck," he gasps out, collapsing among the fallen blades. For an instant he can't breathe, and his fingers knot around his tie in an attempt to loosen it, but they're trembling too bad. The back of his head hits the first drawer. "Get yourself together," he mutters, so low he can hardly hear himself in the silence of the room. He can still hear the echo of his shout in his ears. It disturbs him. "Get yourself together, get yourself together."

He's never been good at handling frustration. His father has taught him from an early age the value of shouting, of breaking things—of the way it makes people cower away, of the way it must feel good, since he did it all the time. It doesn't feel good. It feels like becoming unspooled. In truth, lashing out only betrays a lack of control in yourself. If he can't control himself, what authority does he have to control others? For the past few years, he's prided himself in being quiet, in being collected. He's learned that fits of rage might scare others into submission, but that submission is only a passing thing. People can only be pushed so far before they snap. He would know.

Silence is the tool of power. Power is so often misunderstood. It's so often assimilated with strength, or with arrogance. In truth, it isn't any of those things—it's something much more slippery. It's the silence between words, the quietness of the night. It's the moment between lightning and thunder. It is seduction, too—the ability to make others do what you want them to. It isn't what you hear, but what you feel. And so, he's taught himself to be quiet, to rein it in. To know when to strike, and when to wait. To learn the weight of a word and the force of a gaze. To discover the difference between leader and warlord. His is an empire built on control, on careful study. He could never subject his future to the roll of a dice, a river's tempestuous waters between him and his throne.

He doesn't feel like that same person right now. The room around him feels like an illusion. His hand is still clenched around his tie, and he forces himself to let go. You're better than this. His fingers clench harder, smooth metal in his palm. The tip of the knife digs deeper into the cover of the book he knocked to the floor at his side, a jagged white line cutting the title in two. He registers it distantly—he's doing that, it's his hand, but it matters so little in the scheme of things.

From the other side of the room, his father's grey eyes stare at him coldly, as if to say, Look at you, my failure of a son, look at you. Who are you pretending to fool? It's fitting, in a fucked-up way. No matter how much time passes, he always ends up on the floor amongst broken things, with his father looking down at him in faint disgust. No matter how hard he tries to distance himself, he always goes back to being that child too scared to breathe too loud in his own house. That's the thing about power—it is not infinite, nor absolute. It is granted. It's what other people give you, not what you claim for yourself. It's the result of a bargain, voluntary or not. As such, it's a shifty, always evolving thing, never eternal. Harry know this—he built his castle of cards perfectly aware something as simple as a gust of wind could blow it away. A bargain is what separates him from nothingness. It's such a fragile thing to base an entire reality on, and yet it happens all the time, because among all those shifty, always-becoming things that make out the very fabric of the world, power is indeed one of the most influential ones.

Life is a stage and he's an actor turned director by popular consensus, perfectly aware that the same thing that made him could one day destroy him.

It's happening now.

Surely not many would agree, but he's always had talent in seeing the hidden traces of what will come, in connecting the lines before time.

He's losing control.

A ring comes from the bedroom, and Harry doesn't need to stand and check to know it's most likely Evie trying to get his attention.

He hasn't slept once in the past thirty-six hours. Alouette has been gone for twelve hours. She isn't keeping to the main streets, and she thought it funny enough to explicitly let him know she won't let herself be tracked. He can't even be angry, for he's the one that let her in on too many of his secrets. But he needed her trust, and he needed the Palace to stay away. Still, he should've thought of replacing the system. It truly is on him for not expecting her not to be cowed. He hardly miscalculates so.

Gone for twelve hours. That's seven-hundred-and-twenty minutes, forty-three-thousand-and-two-hundred seconds, approximately eight-hundred-and-forty miles of distance from the Palace. But she isn't taking the main roads, so it's likely less. Maybe three-hundred-and-fifty miles? Five hundred? She mustn't be still in Northfair, that is certain. She wouldn't have escaped to stay in his capital.

Six hundred, maybe?

He shouldn't have let her go. It was foolish and needlessly risky to let her go. There's no real guarantee that she will indeed come back—as always, it's a matter of variables and statistics. He may have the best tools available to find her sister, but she has knowledge of the Revolution he simply doesn't possess.

Four-hundred-and-fifty?

While it is likely she will be forced to come back, there's a non-dismissible likelihood that she might discover other options—maybe escaped members of the Revolution, maybe Ezra Larson himself. If she joined hands with him, it would be a problem. In his plans for the future, he doesn't count her amongst his enemies.

Five-hundred-and-thirty?

The ring comes out of his bedroom again, and this time he stands up and walks to the door. He turns back. The room is a disaster; everything that was on his desk is on the floor, and his father's gaze seems to reach him here too, in the doorway.

Harry turns off the light and leaves.

Another ring; she's becoming surprisingly insistent. He'd get angry, if he hadn't been locked inside his rooms with no outside contact for the past twelve hours. Yet—it is a little disturbing to know she's grown daring enough to perform a wellness check on him. He dislikes the way she keeps overstepping boundaries.

Three-hundred-and-ninety?

He leaves his rooms. Despite it being afternoon, no one is around—it might have to do with keeping up appearances, since he wasn't available for most of the day. That wasn't appropriate of him. He keeps slipping, and slipping.

He walks into his office without sparing Evie a second glance. Something inside him is uneasy, fidgeting. He's terribly restless—for some reason. Reality is slipping, slipping through his fingers. The fragile system he built is showing signs of decay, at last. It's been a long time coming, he supposes. Every ruler worth their salt knows power is uniquely based on consensus—lose it, and it's over. He has no doubt this is the reasoning behind the events of tonight.

His heart thunders in his chest, so heavily he's momentarily left winded.

If he doesn't make a move now, it won't be long before someone daring enough tries to take him down.

They'll try to take him down.

It's already happening.

It's been happening.

His breath quickens.

He's losing control.

Six-hundred-and-twenty?

He's losing control.

It is slipping, slipping.

He's been trying so hard.

So hard.

They can't even guess at the things he's done to be where he is right now. The alliances he's formed. The people he's lost. The ones he's killed. The voice of his sister through the door the night she died and the gaze on his mother's face the last time she looked at him, the gunshots that broke the air and the people that fell and the sting of the corner of the desk against his hip when he fell back back and the glass on the floor and the broken shards and the hare and the hare and the hare and the body on the floor and his father's smile his smile and the stairs at his back and the dark room dark locked locked dark, and his father's eyes the eyes and words and red red dripping red dripping dripping—

He hits the desk with a shout. The folders fly on the floor. A glass shatters. Pain lances through his middle and he crouches on the ground with a gasp, his hands stinging because of the way he slammed them into the desk. White flashes in his vision, and he shuts his eyes. Stop it stop it stop it just stop it.

He needs clarity. He needs—

Something touches his arm. "Sir—"

Harry's hand flies out and slaps it away, hard. "Don't fucking touch me," he spits out. He's hardly aware he stood up at all, but he's several feet away from the person that interrupted him—Jayden Bryce, he sees. Rage burns through him with a surprising strength, white and hot. "Don't ever touch me again. Who do you think you are?"

The boy's eyes widen. "I just—I... Do you need help? I—"

"Leave."

Bryce doesn't move. "Are you sure? You—"

Harry stares him down, hard. "I said, leave." His heart is thudding too quickly in his ears and his hand itches to fly to his middle, but his voice is low, glacial.

Faint panic passes through Bryce's gaze, and he turns around and leaves. The door closes after him, and Harry is alone.

Power is such a fickle thing, indeed. Bryce was trained to kill, and Harry hasn't slept for the past thirty-six hours. In a fight, he doubts he'd come up on top. But power isn't about strength, and so Bryce bowed and cowered away all the same, unaware that a single action from him could've ended an empire. If power is a doorway, loyalty is the lock and seduction is the key. Yet, the whole structure is so fragile. So little it would take to bring it down.

He would know.

Seven hundred?

No, seven hundred is too many. She can't have gone that far—he'd know.

He's losing control. He's gone too far to lose it all like this. He needs to take action—real action. He must stop playing—while he was fooling around with the Revolution, things happened. His plans were stolen, his makeshift organisation hijacked. His city, the city he's done everything for, was attacked.

What now?

Four-hundred-and-seventy?

A knock on the door.

Two-hundred-and-fifty?

Wishful thinking.

He needs to recollect himself.

"Sir?"

He snaps to attention. Jackson is standing in the doorway, a grave look on his face. He's holding a few papers, in an absentminded way. He's still dressed in his clothes from last night. Harry is too. "Unless you have something that requires my attention, leave." There must be something of the wounded animal in his voice, because Jackson sends him an odd look.

He isn't foolish enough to say a word about it, though, so he clears his throat and says, "It's about the buildings, sir."

Harry scoffs, looking away. Through the floor-to-ceiling window Northfair glints, a hypnotic siren in the darkness of the late afternoon. Outside, he can see the disaster that was wrought upon it, the destroyed buildings, the chaos in the street. No one has ever dared to make a move so close to him, before, aside from the Revolution. Yet, this is no Revolution. He recognises his enemies by sight.

"It's a message, sir," Jackson says behind him.

Harry's eyes narrow. "A message?" Jackson's reflection in the mirror is uneasy, fidgety. There's something he's not saying, and Harry already knows what it is. He's always known. It's been a long time coming. He's always known they'd come for him, at last.

He's tried for so long—so long. He did all he could, he paved every road that could be paved, but it wasn't enough. Nothing was ever enough. The truth is, there is no saving it—any of it. It'll devour and devour until nothing's left but ashes and debris. His father knew this—he liked it. But that's the thing—such a system could never last, and in the end he found out the hard way.

He's never wanted this to happen, not truly. In a distant way, maybe, but that isn't the same as having to face it directly. He was starting to hope he'd found a way to avoid it, and yet there they are. The system demands blood, an empire in the making, a thing of darkness that feeds on everything and everyone it believes it doesn't need.

He's never wanted to be involved in this. He's only twenty-six, but he already feels so weary. His enemies are constantly at his throat, and at times he feels more like a cornered animal than a leader, as if everyone's only waiting for him to snap.

Maybe he already has.

And he has no intention of going down without a fight. If they want to come at him at last, he will be ready to face them. He may not win in the end, but he certainly won't lose, either.

He raises his chin defiantly. "I don't take messages in the form of explosions," he says. "Find out who did it."

Jackson steps from one foot to the other, unsurely. Harry can't see his expression in the reflection, but he knows what he's thinking all the same. It's madness to go against them. He's just one man. "Sir—" he tries, but his voice dies out—there's no kind way to put it, so he'd never dare to speak it aloud. The Palace might not survive the blow.

Harry meets his eyes through the reflection. Beyond it, the lights of Northfair enlighten the black sky, glorious and unaffected. "I want names."

Names. They're such a dangerous thing to want these days. When anonymity and secrets make up the very net of reality, the truth is worth as much as currency. Look in the wrong place, it's over. Be caught looking, it's also over.

But Harry is done being pushed around.

Jackson gives him a short nod, his position stiff, and there's no denying he might feel a little sick, already. "Very well, sir." He turns and leaves.

Harry's eyes trace the skyline of his city, and a feeling he can't identify pervades him when he finds it changed. It makes him want to destroy everything—an unpleasant feeling he no doubt inherited from his father. But he was impulsive and weak, and Harry is everything but. He's studied the inner workings all his life, and as far as power goes, his system is remarkably flawless.

After such long inactivity, doing something feels strangely good.

Five-hundred-and-ten?

A half-smile curves his lips.

Maybe.