Chapter 228 - -228
The payment method—Church gold, untraceable, delivered in stages.
The chain of contact—a deacon who answered to a bishop who answered to someone in the High Council whose name the man genuinely never learned.
The specific wording of the order as he remembered it: "’The Empress threatens the natural order. God’s work requires her removal. Use any means necessary but make it look accidental if possible.’"
All of it. Every detail the man had. Stripped out of him piece by piece, methodically, thoroughly, because every time he hesitated or claimed not to remember, Larus would look at the unconscious woman on the floor and the man would suddenly find more words very quickly.
When it was done—when there was genuinely nothing left, when the man had given up every scrap of information he possessed—he sagged in his chair and said through tears:
"Please. Let me go. Let us both go. I’ve told you everything, I swear I’ve told you ’everything’, there’s nothing else, ’please just let me—’"
Larus raised the knife.
"’Wait—’"
"You put poison in my wife’s face," Larus said.
Quietly.
The way you say something that doesn’t need volume to land. The way you state a simple, undeniable fact.
"You watched it absorb into her skin. You watched her fall. You watched her stop moving. And you thought that was ’acceptable’."
"I didn’t know she’d—I thought it would just—"
"What did you think you threw?"
The first crack in the emptiness. The first sign of something living underneath the ice—something furious and broken and ’dangerous’.
"A ’perfume’? You thought she’d feel ’blessed’? You thought the poison that has her trapped in her own body right now, unable to move, unable to speak, possibly dying while I sit here talking to you—you thought that was ’what’? A minor inconvenience?"
The man had no answer.
His mouth opened and closed but no words came out.
Larus looked at him for a long, long moment.
Then, very quietly:
"Guess what my answer to your request is."
The knife moved.
Fast.
Precise.
The man’s scream was brief.
---
Larus walked out of the dungeon slowly, deliberately, his footsteps echoing in the stone corridor.
His clothes were dark with blood. His hands. Spattered across his face and neck where he hadn’t bothered to wipe it away.
The corridor torches showed him in fragments as he moved through their light—illuminated, shadow, illuminated, shadow—and the guards stationed at the dungeon entrance looked at him and then immediately found the wall ’very’ interesting.
They did not ask questions.
They did not offer assistance.
They simply stepped aside and let him pass.
Larus walked to the officers’ washroom at the end of the east corridor. Locked the door behind him. Stood at the large basin.
Turned on the water.
It ran red for a long time.
Then pink.
Then finally clear.
He scrubbed his hands methodically. Under the nails. Between the fingers. Up past the wrists. Watching the evidence spiral down the drain.
Then his face. His neck. Anywhere the blood had touched.
When he was done, he dried his hands on a towel that immediately stained rust-brown.
Looked at his reflection in the polished mirror.
The beard, now fully visible in the lamplight, dark against his pale skin. The circles under his eyes like bruises. The eyes themselves that had gone somewhere in the last three days and hadn’t entirely come back.
He thought about her face on the pillow.
Peaceful. Warm. Unreachable.
’Rest,’ he had told her. ’I’ll finish the work.’
He rolled his sleeves back down carefully, fastening each button with steady fingers.
The Church.
He had a name now—not a personal name, but a position. A bishop in the High Council. Someone who thought they were untouchable, protected by layers of hierarchy and holy authority.
They were wrong.
You didn’t need to know someone’s name to destroy them. You needed to know what they cared about. What they were protecting. Where they thought they were safe.
Larus knew all three now.
He straightened his collar in the mirror.
Ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face.
The man looking back at him was a stranger.
Someone cold.
Someone capable.
Someone who had discovered exactly what he would do for the person he loved, and the answer turned out to be: ’anything’.
He walked back toward the palace proper.
Somewhere above him, in a quiet room facing east, Heena breathed slowly in and out.
Sixty-two breaths per minute. He’d counted.
’Take all the time you need,’ he had said.
He meant it.
He had work to do anyway.
The Church thought they could hide behind layers of bureaucracy and religious immunity.
They were about to learn otherwise.
Larus walked through the palace corridors, his footsteps measured and even, and every servant who saw him coming found a sudden pressing need to be somewhere else.
Because the gentle prince who smiled at everyone and never raised his voice?
He was gone.
And what had taken his place was something much, much more dangerous.
Something with nothing left to lose.
Back to present .
A stunned silence in Heena office.
Heena kept staring at the guard, as if waiting for him to suddenly correct himself, to laugh it off and admit it was all some absurd misunderstanding.
But he didn’t.
If anything, the worry in his eyes deepened.
And that was it.
A sound slipped out of her—small at first, almost like a breath that lost its way... and then it broke.
A laugh.
It burst out of her without restraint, sharp and bright, echoing through the room as if it had been waiting for the perfect moment to escape. She doubled over, one hand clutching her stomach as the laughter took over completely, uncontrollable, unladylike, utterly genuine.
"Ah—" she tried to speak, but another wave hit her.
Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, spilling over as she shook her head, wiping them away with the back of her hand. Her shoulders trembled, breath uneven, the sound of her laughter filling the silence the guard didn’t dare interrupt.
She leaned forward, placing her hand against the table for support, then slowly rested her chin on it, still catching her breath—though the faint, lingering chuckle refused to leave her lips.
Her gaze lifted back to the guard, amusement dancing in her eyes now, something dangerously alive beneath it.
"...So," she murmured, voice still threaded with laughter, "I didn’t bring home a kitten."
A pause.
The smile that followed was slow. Knowing.
"Looks like I adopted a tiger instead."
And somehow... that realization didn’t scare her at all.
She looked at the window and at that moment she really missed this double-faced husband of hers.
.
.
Back to Marus Kingdom
Larus looked at her coolly. "Hello, stepmother."
He didn’t bow. Didn’t show any deference whatsoever.
The women’s faces tightened with suppressed anger. They’d expected proper greeting, the respectful bow he used to give.
The guard behind Larus glared at them with unmistakable threat.
The women immediately trembled and bowed hastily. "Forgive us, Your Highness. We... forgot ourselves."
Larus looked at them with barely concealed mockery. "It’s fine. These things happen. After all, you’re all getting older. Memory fades with age."
The insult landed like a slap. These women, who spent fortunes maintaining their youth and beauty, went pale with rage they didn’t dare express.
They made small talk—asking about his journey, his health, the Empire—but it was all hollow formality.