Caelum did not begin with a blade.
Esmond noticed that first, and so did Trafalgar. A knife would have been simple — brutish, honest in its own ugly way. Caelum reached for something finer.
He loomed behind the chair, one hand resting on Esmond's shoulder with almost fatherly weight, while the other spun a thin filament of pale mana between two gloved fingers. The thread looked harmless, barely thicker than a hair, until Caelum laid it against the inside of Esmond's wrist and coaxed it beneath the skin.
Esmond's breath snagged in his throat. The scream stayed locked behind his teeth, for now.
Caelum cocked his head and studied the old man's face with the idle attention of someone straightening a cufflink. The thread vanished into the flesh, threading along channels no surgeon was ever meant to reach from the outside. Esmond's fingers hooked against the restraints, his jaw clamped, and the veins down his neck stood out like drawn wire.
