Three Doors, All Open
The gun oil smelled like church incense to Elara Vane — something ritual, something sacred, though the men who'd taught her to love that smell would have laughed at the comparison. She sat at the long mahogany table in her father's study, a strip of felt spread before her, the disassembled pieces of her Sig Sauer arranged with surgeon's precision: slide, barrel, recoil spring, frame. Her fingers moved without her eyes needing to guide them, muscle memory doing the work of a decade's discipline while her gaze stayed fixed on the man across the room.
Edmund Vane didn't sit when he delivered his briefings. He stood, always, hands clasped behind his back, as if sitting might suggest some softness he couldn't afford to display, even in private. The study's high windows threw late afternoon light across his face in long amber bars, aging him in stripes — Forty-one and still built like the soldier he'd been before he became a king, silver hair cropped close, eyes the same flat gray as his daughter's.
"Matthew Vincent," he said, and the name came out of his mouth like something distasteful, a stone he wanted spat rather than spoken. "Heir apparent. Sole heir, in fact, since his…