The Conquest - Alpha and King

0001

~ Leo ~

I was cheating.

Not intentionally. That's the part I couldn't explain, even to myself. I wasn't doing anything differently. Same controller, same game, same Desmond sitting beside me on the rug like we'd been doing since we were kids. Nothing had changed on the surface.

Except something was different.

This was me hearing a voice inside of me, guiding me through every move before it happened. Every split-second window before Desmond's character could recover. It was divine intervention. Was it God?

Desmond's character exploded for the fourth time in a row.

He stared at the screen.

Then he stared at me.

"Okay," he said slowly, setting his controller down on his knee. "What is going on with you?"

"Nothing. You're just getting worse."

"Leo." He turned to face me fully, which Desmond only did when he was being serious. "I'm not getting worse. You're getting… different. Since last week you've been…" He gestured vaguely at the screen, at me, at the general situation. "Like this."

Since last week.

Since exactly one week ago, when my father died in a room two floors above us with scratches on his chest that nobody would explain, and the palace announced his death twice, once for the press and once for some other office that apparently existed and that I was not allowed to ask about.

Since the voice started.

It had begun small. A whisper at the edge of my thoughts that I'd initially dismissed as stress or grief or the particular madness of being seventeen and suddenly the most important person in a kingdom. But it kept coming back. Quiet and certain, like someone who knew they'd eventually be heard.

During games, mostly. It would tell me things. Left. Wait. Now. Tactical things. Precise things. Things that turned out to be correct every single time.

I'd told no one.

"I've just been practising," I said.

Desmond gave me the look. "You haven't left this room in four days."

"Practising mentally."

"That's not a thing."

"Everything is a thing if you commit to it." I picked up my controller. "Are we playing or are we having a feelings conversation, because I need to know how to arrange my face."

He opened his mouth.

The door opened first.

Desmond was on his feet before she'd fully stepped into the room, controller placed down, spine straightened. Years of palace conditioning, instantaneous and automatic.

My mother stood in the doorway in a deep burgundy dress that meant she'd come from something official. Her eyes swept the room once and landed on me with an expression I recognised as the opening position of a difficult conversation.

"Desmond," she said. "Please give us a moment."

He was gone before the sentence finished. The door clicked shut behind him.

I kept my eyes on the paused screen.

"Leonard."

"Genuinely this time. Legitimately. You can ask him."

"I don't need to ask him." She stepped fully into the room, "Your father has been dead for eight days."

"I know how long my father has been dead."

"And this," she said, with a gesture that took in the controllers, the screen, the general tableau of me sitting on the floor of my bedroom in palace-issue loungewear, "is how you're spending your time."

"I'm grieving," I said. "People grieve differently."

"People grieve." She clasped her hands in front of her. "You perform normalcy and hope I don't notice what's underneath it."

I didn't say anything to that.

Mostly because it was accurate.

Then she moved closer to me like she was about to start an interrogation. “Did you sleep with one of the maids?”

Oh shit!

Yeah right, I did kiss one of the maids.

I kissed her in the hallway, which in hindsight was not my brightest moment, but I did not sleep with her, and there is a very significant difference between those two things that my mother seemed completely uninterested in acknowledging.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

My mother looked at me for exactly three seconds. Then she turned her phone around.

There I was. On a screen. In full HD. Pressed against the wall with my hands in places that were, admittedly, not entirely appropriate for a palace corridor.

Oh.

"That could be anyone," I tried.

"Leonard."

"The lighting is terrible in that hallway. I've always said we need better lighting in that—"

"Leonard." Her voice dropped to that specific frequency that had been shutting me up since I was six years old. "Stop talking."

I stopped talking.

She set the phone face-down on the desk with the careful precision of someone trying very hard not to throw it. Then she folded her hands in front of her, and I braced myself, because folded hands meant she had prepared remarks.

"You are seventeen years old. In three months, you will be eighteen. In three months after that, you will be crowned King of Jevenex." She said each sentence like she was nailing something to a wall. "And this is what you're doing with your time."

"It was just a kiss."

"In the hallway."

"People kiss in hallways."

"Not the Crown Prince." Her eyes were doing that thing where they went very still and very cold at the same time. "Not with the staff. Not while his father's funeral wreath is still on the front gate."

That one landed.

I didn't say anything.

She exhaled slowly, and when she spoke again her voice had changed shape. Still firm, but something else underneath it. Something that felt almost like exhaustion. "I've decided you're going to school."

I blinked. "Sorry?"

"Briarwick Academy. You start Monday."

"I'm home-schooled."

"Were home-schooled," she corrected. "Past tense."

"I have six months left. Six months and I'm done with secondary school entirely, and you want to pull me out now and send me to…"

"A real school. With real students. Real teachers. Real consequences." She smoothed the front of her dress. "It'll be good for you. Good for the country, too. The people like seeing the Crown Prince as one of them."

"I am nothing like them, with all due respect."

"No," she agreed, and somehow that was worse than an argument. "You're not. Which is exactly the problem."

I stared at her. She stared back. I did the mental calculation of every possible angle of resistance and found exactly none of them.

She's actually doing this.

"Fine," I said, because what else was there. "But Desmond comes with me."

She blinked. "Desmond."

"Admit him as a student. I'm not walking into that place alone."

She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't fully read. Then, drily, "Should I just have you two married and be done with it?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't a joke." But the corner of her mouth moved. Barely. Almost human.

The silence stretched between us, and then something shifted in her face. The architecture of it changed, the sharp angles softening into something I rarely saw from her. Something that looked uncomfortably close to worry.

She sat down slowly.

"Leo." Her voice was different now. Quieter. The Queen had left the room and my mother was sitting in her place, which somehow made everything feel more serious, not less. "I know this past week has been… I know it hasn't been easy. Losing your father. The way everything happened." She paused, her hands still in her lap. "I know you're carrying things you haven't said out loud."

I kept my face neutral. Gave her nothing.

"I just need to ask you something." She hesitated, which she never did. My mother did not hesitate. The fact that she was hesitating now made the back of my neck prickle. "Have you been… experiencing anything? Since your father passed?" Her eyes were careful. Too careful. "Any changes. Feelings that seem different. Anything that feels…" She searched for the word. "Unfamiliar?"

The room went very quiet.

The voice. The way I can suddenly hear things I shouldn't be able to hear. The way the games feel different now, like something in my brain rewired itself overnight.

I looked at my mother's face. At the way she was watching me. Like she already knew the answer. Like she was hoping I'd lie.

"No," I said.

Nothing changed in her expression. Not relief. Not disappointment. Just that same careful stillness.

"Alright," she said softly.

She stood, smoothed her dress again, and walked to the door. No dramatic exit. No final cutting remark. Just the quiet click of the latch behind her.

I sat in the silence she left behind and stared at the space where she'd been.

She knew what to ask.

Which meant she already knew something was happening to me.

Which meant the answer to every question I'd been carrying since my father died wasn't lost.

It was just being kept from me.

By her.

0002

~ Leo ~

The convoy was my mother's idea.

Five vehicles. Matching. Moving through the streets of Jevenex at the kind of measured, deliberate pace that made people stop on pavements and pull out their phones. I watched them through the tinted window, the double-takes, the pointing, someone actually grabbing their friend's arm and directing them to look.

By the time we reached Briarwick the news had apparently already broken, because there were students lining the front courtyard in a way that suggested they had not simply been passing through.

I stepped out of the car.

The sound that went up was not quiet.

I straightened my blazer, looked at the building in front of me, and thought about how three months ago I would have found this amusing. The screaming, the phones, the girl near the gate who appeared to be having some kind of medical episode over my existence.

I felt nothing in particular about any of it.

That was new too, a