The Third Son Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 10
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 10 - Thomas Mycroft thought the border’s monsters were a far‑northern problem—until soldiers and children vanish from his own barracks and a cold, clever thing begins to pull at men’s minds. Bound to a direwolf pack and a weaponized knowledge stone he only half understands, Thomas rides north to rip the rot from the ground. But while he hunts the heart of a ruin that feeds on the living, merchants and nobles conspire in the city below. His wife, Princess Regent Catherine, faces knives.
Caution: This Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Romantic High Fantasy Horror Mystery Magic Slow Violence
The lamp was dying, but Catherine didn’t reach for the wick.
She sat alone in her writing room, listening to the silence press against the walls. The sputtering flame cast jumping shadows across the stone, making the heavy oak furniture seem to breathe. She placed her forearms on the desk, the heavy wood drawing heat from her skin.
She looked at the regency papers for the tenth time.
They were written on heavy vellum, scented with the sharp bite of iron gall ink and the waxy sweetness of the royal seal. Thomas’s signature was there, a sharp, angular scrawl that looked like a blade cut against the scribe’s fluid elegance. Catherine ran her finger down the list of clauses, her lips moving silently as she locked the words into her memory.
She pressed her thumb into the red wax; it was cool and hard. She tilted the page, searching for any crack or bubble in the seal, knowing Varric would look for defects; she found none.
Catherine folded the papers, the vellum resisting the crease, and placed them in the center of her desk.
Then she unfolded them again.
Paper burns.
She pressed her thumb harder against the seal.
Men lie.
Catherine pushed the regency document aside and pulled a sheet of rough sketching paper toward herself. She dipped her quill, clamping her wrist against the edge of the desk to stop the tremor, and wrote.
She didn’t pray; she made lists.
Defensible points, she wrote at the top.
1. Nursery Wing corridor—narrow, two men abreast maximum.
2. Kitchen service stair—verify lock integrity.
3. West Gallery—blind corners.
The ink scratched loudly in the silence. The corridors she’d hung with tapestries were becoming choke points, and the galleries were becoming kill zones.
She started a second column. Personnel.
Under Move Peter: Alis, Brina, Sella.
Under Protect Peter: Shepherd.
Under Carry Messages: Jory, Brina.
Under Watch Noble Wings: Mina (check boot mud types at mudroom).
She paused, and the quill hovered, ink pooling, threatening to drip. Time was running out; she could feel it the way she felt the weather changing, like a pressure behind her eyes.
Third column. She slashed the heading onto the page.
Risks.
Lord Varric: Household ordered three crates of lamp oil yesterday. Arson?
Master Hollen: Two new bodyguards, move like predators. Mercenaries.
Eastern Gate: Harnish has gambling debts.
She wrote until her hand cramped, noting every shadow, every whisper, every discrepancy in the castle’s rhythm. If she named every threat, surely she could see them coming.
The lamp sputtered and died.
Smoke hung in the small room as Catherine exhaled and capped the inkwell. She stood, her joints popping, and gathered the papers.
She moved through the connecting door into the nursery.
The warmth hit her first, the physical weight of animal heat and woodsmoke. The hearth was banked low, glowing like a red eye in the dark.
Frost lay in the center of the rug, a mountain of silver-white fur. As Catherine’s boot touched the floorboards, the direwolf’s head lifted, and its yellow eyes found her and held. There was no growl, just awareness, absolute and patient, Frost watching her the way a predator watches the tree line.
Catherine moved to the crib.
Peter was asleep with one small fist curled against his cheek; his breathing rose and fell, soft and rhythmic, the only sound in the room.
As she stood over him, something loosened in her chest, and something else tightened. Both feelings were equally fierce.
She felt a tug at her ankle.
Catherine looked down as three pups tumbled over her boots. The gray male, the bold one of the litter, had latched onto her woolen skirt and was shaking his head with tiny, ferocious growls.
She dislodged him gently with her toe; he sneezed, tumbled, and lunged for the fabric again.
“At this rate, I’ll greet the court in shreds,” she whispered.
Frost huffed through her nose, and the gray pup abandoned the skirt and tackled his sister instead.
Catherine checked the crib latch; it was solid. She tucked the blanket away from Peter’s face before turning to check the window latch; it was locked.
She couldn’t lock the future out, so she locked the room instead.
The hair on her arms rose. She scanned the dark corners, listening for anything that didn’t belong. The room was clean ... for now.
Morning came not with light, but with noise.
The castle woke in layers: bakers first, then grooms, then maids, and finally the heavy, indolent stirring of nobility. By the time sunlight hit the high towers, the service corridors were a highway.
Catherine moved through it all with a ration slate tucked under her arm. Her dress was the kind she wore when auditing pantries: simple, dark blue, practical, and unadorned.
She needed to be seen doing nothing of importance.
She paused near the scullery entrance.
“Morning, Jory.” The boy was hauling a sack of onions that looked heavier than he was.
“Your Highness.” He tried to bow without falling over.
“Don’t bow, you’ll spill them. Tell the cook that the flour delivery is short two sacks. I’m checking the ledger now.”
“Yes, Mum.”
Catherine walked on at a steady pace, nodding to a maid carrying linens, then stopping to inspect a chipped flagstone. To any eyes watching—and she could feel the eyes—she was the dutiful chatelaine, oblivious to the blades being sharpened in the dark.
Catherine slipped into her small side office near the kitchens. It was cramped, used mostly for tallying supplies, and some might say a foolish place for a regent to hide, but her instincts said to stay low, near the ground.
She closed the door, and the latch clicked, separating her from the corridor’s noise.
Catherine moved to her desk, where last night’s lists were folded into her ledger. She spread the slate, picked up chalk, and began copying choke points onto the back, disguising them as cleaning schedules.
The door opened without a knock.
Catherine froze; she hadn’t heard footsteps.
Lady Maria stood in the doorway in her deep-forest-green robes. She didn’t look at Catherine, but looked at the slate, then at the parchment Catherine had tried to bury under the ledger.
Lady Maria stepped inside and closed the door.
“You’re building a fortress out of paper,” she said.
Catherine didn’t move.
“Paper becomes law, and law keeps swords in sheaths.”
Lady Maria moved deeper into the room, touching nothing, observing everything. “Law is a story we agree to tell; when belief dies, the law dies with it, and all you’re left with is paper.”
“Then I’ll reinforce the paper.” Catherine’s voice tightened. “I’m securing routes, vetting staff. When they look for a crack, they’ll find a wall.”
Lady Maria didn’t sit. “You’re trying to solve a murder before it happens; you think if you count enough locks, the blow will never land.”
“I’m protecting my son.”
“You’re hiding.”
Catherine stood, her chair scraping against the stone floor.
“Hiding? I’m standing in the path of the most powerful men in Virden, taking a regency that half the council thinks belongs to a man. I’m not hiding; I’m digging in.”
“Catherine, I want you to accept that you can’t prevent the attempt.”
The words landed like a fist.
“Accept it?” Catherine’s voice dropped. “You want me to accept that they’ll try to take Peter? That they’ll try to kill me?”
“Yes, because until you accept it, you’re frantic, reacting to ghosts.” Lady Maria gestured at the slate. “You’re sealing doors and shifting guards. If you barricade the nursery today, Lord Varric will sense your fear, and he’ll hunt you; if you confront Master Hollen about his mercenaries now, he’ll just hide them better.”
Lady Maria stepped closer, and her voice softened, but the intensity remained.
“Fear makes you easy to steer, Catherine. You don’t stop a storm; you weather it.”
Catherine looked at the chalk dust coating her fingers. The lists suddenly seemed like a child’s game.
“Then what?” she demanded. “Give me a list; tell me what fixes this.”
Lady Maria’s mouth curved, but it wasn’t quite a smile.
“You want a checklist because it feels like safety, and I can’t give you that; there is no list.” She paused. “Stop thinking like a guard captain and start thinking like a ruler.
“You must be the bait.”
“Bait?”
“Exposure, proof, containment,” Lady Maria said, holding her gaze; “that is what you do. You can’t stop them from striking, but you can choose where the blow lands, and you can dictate the ground to ensure you’re standing when it passes.”
Catherine stared at the mage, the refusal still lodged in her chest like a stone. Thomas was leaving; the stone wouldn’t move just because she wished it to.
“You want me to let them try,” Catherine said.
“I want you to be ready when they do.” Lady Maria turned toward the door. “And stop writing lists of locks, because they can be picked.”
Catherine left the office twenty minutes later. She didn’t return to the nursery, but instead went to the kitchens.
Heat rolled over her, thick with steam as she walked into the realm of roasting fowl, baking bread, the clash of pans, and voices shouting over voices.
It was perfect cover.
She moved to the main prep table, pretending to check bread counts.
“Seventy loaves, Your Highness,” the master baker said, wiping floury hands on his apron, “unless the Rangers are eating double again.”
“Seventy is fine.”
She wasn’t looking at the bread; she was looking for the predators.
Jory stood near the spit, turning a pig. He caught her eye and scratched his ear; the signal. Message delivered.
Then she felt it: something was wrong in the room.
Two men in livery stood near the scullery door, eating apples. They wore the colors of House Varric, but their boots were wrong: heavy riding leathers, scuffed and mud-stained, not the soft indoor shoes of house servants. They watched the room with the casual, bored arrogance of men paid to carry steel.
A pack waiting for a signal to hunt.
She noted their faces: a broken nose on the first, a scar tracking through the second one’s eyebrow. She didn’t glare; she pointed at a tray of tarts.
“Those are for the high table,” she told the baker. “Make sure they don’t vanish before dinner.”
She moved on through the scullery, into the narrow, damp corridors that ran behind the castle’s major arteries.
She took the service passage beneath the Great Hall, a miserable stretch of stone that swallowed voices after ten paces, and hence perfect.
Cullen was already there. He didn’t lean against the wall; he stood in the deepest shadow of a stairwell arch, perfectly still, a smudge of charcoal until he stepped forward.
He checked both directions, his eyes giving nothing away.
“Your Highness.” His voice was a dry rasp.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” Catherine said, keeping her voice low.
“You’re not. Lord Varric is shifting his rhetoric: he’s stopped talking about ‘rights’ and now talks about ‘continuity.’ He’s priming the court to accept a change in management.”