Her Heart, His obsession

23. Cold Hearts Can Beat

Demetrious was curious to see what was happening outside. The order issued by Dante to the commanders was to get to their duties at their headquarters immediately but Demetrious wanted to get some information on the size and weapons of Dante's army. He slowly left his room for downstairs by teleporting smoothly without getting any attention. Luckily for him the head quarters of all divisions were in a large circle. So luckily for Demetrious all he had to so was to look outside.

He was hoping that Edward was not going to see him neglecting his duties. He didn't want to disappoint him. Those two brothers worshiped him for some reason and Demetrious felt uncomfortable about how much they looked up to him and let him give opinions about important decisions.

Demetrious was baffled how Edwin and Edward did not despise him. He could never understand their indifference to his track record of empathic actions that not many dared think about. He did not expect a warm welcome at all. These two commanders looked ordinary on the outside. Edward was a workaholic who had no time for anything else but reading, extracting secrets from artefacts, discovering spells and checking that all the files were arranged accordingly from all the research done by the enforcers. Edwin also was a hard worker too but had time for dating girls. He was a typical teenager who loved to talk about his dates and his efforts to be romantic. Unfortunately for him, girls feared him and his position as a commander so he was dumped after a few dates by the girls who probably loved him as well. Commanders and army enforcers were known to be possessive and cruel even when it came to their partners visiting families, they would not allow it as freely as other nobles did. Demetrious had the theory that since Edward and Edwin were from a broken home, they despised the idea of dominating their partners and throwing their powers at the weak to terrorise them like the other commanders did.

Having a positive experience with Edwin and Edward had not made Demetrious naive. He was still wary of working alongside Dante's commanders. During his house arrest when Eros and Leona were trying to protect him from the threats that had taken their older son, he had endured the visits of these commanders. He also was well aware of the rumours that were circulating about him and his defiance.

Demetrious used palace gatherings as the opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversations of these commanders. The tracker cousins, Lucia, Tanya and Flora seemed to blame him most for defying their master resulting in an angry Dante who revealed the extent of his anger in their mandatory daily meetings. According to Flora, one of the trackers had once made her seconds late in responding to Dante and he had condemned her to spend 3 months on night shift training of trackers. Dante had also obviously had executed the tracker who made her late. Tanya and Lucia had agreed that Dante was only this harsh when Demetrious violated protocols and automatically had to be let off easily as a Ronas.

Alexander, Nathan and Benjamin all believed he needed some training in the dungeons to eliminate any trace of his empathy that they had witnessed him showing. If it wasn't for those three he could have gotten away with breaking and entering into the dungeons and head quarters of servants. But those three were highly skilled nobles who had trained their enforcers to work like their lives depended on it. Whenever he was arrested and brought by them to Dante for breaking the rules, those three used to try to influence Dante's verdicts. They volunteered themselves many times to mentor Demetrious and kick the empathy out of him. But luckily Dante preferred to give him night shifts and curfews. He preferred sleep deprivation to the company of those horrific warlocks any day.

On the other hand, Xavier and Sean never blamed Demetrious for anything. They looked at him as Dante's blood relative who's defiance reflected badly on his trainers at Phoenix academy. They had made sure to bring this to the attention of Dante who had acted fast to send enforcers to arrest all people who had ever taught Demetrious anything. They were taken to Benjamin and Nathan who interrogated them for weeks and some were lucky to walk free because of their family's ranks amongst the nobles. But many of them especially non Arkansans were not seen again. Xavier later tried to make up for the negligence of his trainers when he assigned himself to train him personally during his three month house arrest. Dylan had also assisted him many times especially when he was teaching him spells on how to obstruct or intercept illegal crossings through summon calls and teleportations. Dylan was an expert in the field. After all he had helped capture many vampires and freedom fighters for Dante to get him promoted.