Chapter 147: The Devil’s Trade
He sank back into the chair, the wood groaning under the sudden, dead weight of his collapse. His hand clawed at the fabric over his heart, fingers hooking into the fine silk as if trying to physically stitch his chest back together before his soul could leak out.
Every breath he took was a jagged, shallow tremor that rattled in his throat, echoing the sound of a man watching his entire reality crumble into fine, grey ash. The silence of the room felt predatory, pressing against his temples until the pulse there thrummed like a trapped bird.
"Go on," he choked out, the words scraping against his raw throat. He didn’t look at her; he couldn’t. "I want to know it all. Every godforsaken word. Don’t leave a single shard of this nightmare buried."
"I will," Olivia replied.
a slight tremor ghosted through her tone—a hairline crack in the porcelain mask she wore so well. She smoothed her skirts with a slow, deliberate motion, her knuckles white against the dark fabric.
"Before I do... I need you to summon Jeremy."
"Jeremy?"
Mathias blinked, the name sounding foreign, a jarring note of domesticity in the middle of a massacre. His mind, battered and slow, struggled to keep pace with the shifting tide of the conversation. He looked at her then, searching for a reason in the hollow depths of her eyes.
"The ducal physician," she clarified.
Her face returned to that unsettling, marble-like stillness, a statue of a woman carved from grief and ice.
"The expert on toxins. I have a question for him—one that has lived in the back of my mind for years, a suspicion I have carried like a lead weight. I need to be certain, Mathias. If I am to finish this tale, I need the clinical truth to bridge the gaps of my memory."
Mathias stared at her for a long, agonizing heartbeat, his chest heaving. The request was a cold blade of reality cutting through the emotional haze. He offered a dazed, weary gesture of consent, his hand falling limp against the armrest.
"Fine," he muttered, his voice barely a ghost of its former authority. "Summon him."
"Olivia," he whispered, the sound cracking
"Do not force yourself to go further. Your face... you look as though you are bleeding from the inside."
"No, do not worry for me," she replied. "I should have told you this an eternity ago, Mathias. All this silence, all this hoarding of ghosts in the dark corners of our marriage... it has only poisoned us. If we are to rebuild anything from these ruins, I must speak. I must drag these shadows into the light."
She paused for a heartbeat, her eyes clouding over with a grey, suffocating haze. She wasn’t in the drawing-room anymore; she was back in the cold, sunless corridors of her memory.
"During my second pregnancy, with Elias... I was paralyzed. It wasn’t the weight of the child that broke me, but the fear that history was a circle, waiting to repeat its most violent curve.
I was terrified, Mathias. Every footstep in the hallway sounded like my father’s boot. Every closing door sounded like the end of the world."
She looked at her trembling hands, then balled them into fists.
"That is why I barricaded myself in my chambers, if you recall. I turned that room into a fortress, a tomb of my own making."
"I remember," Mathias muttered, his brow furrowing as he tried to reconcile her words with his memories. A flicker of old guilt crossed his face.
"I thought... I truly thought it was merely the exhaustion of the term. I thought you had simply grown weary of me, and of the world outside your door."
"It was the pregnancy, yes, but not the physical burden of it. It was the terror. I stayed within the walls of this duchy, hiding behind locked doors and heavy drapes until my state was undeniable—until the life inside me was too large to conceal any longer."
She let out a short, jagged breath, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"I thought that if I stayed hidden, the monsters wouldn’t find us. I thought silence was a shield. But I was a fool, Mathias. I stayed hidden until the news finally reached my father... and the moment it did, the shield shattered."
"I burned every letter he sent. Every parchment that bore his seal went straight into the hearth, and I watched the flames consume his commands until they were nothing but blackened flakes. I refused every summons, every ’request’ for my presence. I thought that by burning the paper, I could burn the connection. I had to protect my child... at any cost. I thought I had succeeded."
Her voice faltered, a ghost of a bitter smile touching her lips. "Until that day arrived."
Mathias leaned in, the movement instinctive. His voice dropped to a dangerous, thrumming low that seemed to vibrate. "What do you mean? What happened that day? How did they get past the gates?"
"The day Elvira arrived," Olivia began, her voice dropping into a chilling, rhythmic monotone—the sound of someone reciting a death sentence.
"She didn’t come with a carriage or a fanfare. She came in secret, a shadow slipping through the cracks of the manor like a cold draft. I was in my solar, the doors locked, but somehow... she was just there.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t scream at me for hiding the pregnancy, though I could see the fury simmering beneath her skin—a dark, roiling heat that made the very air feel heavy."
Olivia’s fingers curled into the upholstery, her knuckles white.
"She didn’t use threats, not at first. Instead, she wore that filthy, serpentine smile—the one that never reaches her eyes. She walked toward me with a haunting, predatory grace, and before I could even draw breath to call for help, she pressed a small, strange vial into my hand."
Mathias’s breath hitched, a sharp, audible intake of air. His eyes were fixed on her lips, wide and fractured, as if the words themselves were a poison he was being forced to swallow.
"I don’t understand," he whispered, his voice trembling with a dawning, horrific realization. "What are you saying? A vial? What did she want you to do with it?"
"Listen," she snapped, the word cutting through his confusion like the sharp crack of a whip.
"She looked me in the eye—those pale, soulless eyes—and said, verbatim: ’Father is pleased with your pregnancy, Olivia. You are in your ninth month already; he will be so delighted to meet his grandson.’"
Olivia paused, a ghostly shiver tracing her spine, her shoulders hunching as if she could still feel the phantom touch of her sister’s shadow. She recalled her own silence that day—the cold, paralyzed stare she had fixed on Elvira, her heart hammering against her ribs like a bird hitting the bars of a cage.
"What is this vial?" she had asked, her voice a fragile thread.
"A gift," Elvira had replied, her voice smooth as oil on water.
"A gift?"
"She lunged then," Olivia whispered, her hand instinctively reaching up to touch her scalp, her fingers ghosting over the skin as if checking for old wounds.
"She grabbed me by the hair with a savage, practiced strength, yanking my head back until I felt the follicles tearing from the roots. My neck strained, my vision blurring with the sudden, sharp agony of it. She leaned in close, her breath cold against my skin, and hissed in my ear:
’Do you think that by carrying a brat and birthing an heir for this wretch, you’ve somehow become superior? Do you think a swollen belly buys you freedom? Be grateful our father still treats you with such mercy, little sister.’"
Olivia’s eyes narrowed, her pupils shrinking to pinpricks as the scene played out in the dark theater of her mind. She could almost taste the iron of her own fear.
"She pointed to the vial—that sickly, translucent liquid. ’Its name is the Lesser Death.’"
"What?" Mathias gasped. He looked as if he had been struck, his face draining of what little ashen color remained, leaving him looking like a man carved from salt.
"As you heard," Olivia continued, her voice dripping with a bitter, concentrated irony that burned.
"She smiled as she explained the trade. ’You want to keep your child? Fine. No problem. In fact, it’s perfect. A grandson for Roland, a pawn for the future. But in exchange, Olivia, you must dispose of the father.
We cannot allow this Duchy to grow stronger with a legitimate heir and a living Duke. But if Mathias dies... everything falls to your hand. And your hand? It belongs to our father. Is it not a brilliant plan?’"
She looked directly at Mathias, her eyes reflecting the raw, jagged edges of that old terror—a reflection of a woman who had been pushed to the very brink of her sanity.
"I recoiled," she whispered, her body leaning away from him now as if he were the shadow of her sister. "I was trembling so violently I thought the child would be shaken from me right then and there. I looked at her, at that monster wearing my sister’s skin, and I asked: ’You want me to murder my husband?’"
"’Your husband?’"
Olivia’s voice morphed, the pitch shifting into a jagged, mocking lilt that mimicked Elvira’s poisonous tone with terrifying accuracy. It was a sound of pure, biting condescension.
"’How strange, Olivia. Have you grown a heart for him all of a sudden? Or is it just that you’ve grown fond of the silk sheets he provides?’"
Olivia’s face returned to its hollow, porcelain mask as she looked back at Mathias, her expression devoid of life.
"I told her no. I told her he was the father of my child, and I asked her if she had gone mad—if she truly expected me to orphan my own son before he had even drawn his first breath. But she only laughed."
Olivia’s chest heaved as she imitated it—that dry, rattling sound of Elvira’s laughter, like dead leaves scraping against a gravestone.
"She told me I wouldn’t be ’killing’ you in the literal sense. She said the poison was subtle, elegant. You would merely fall into a slumber so deep, so profound, that it mimicked death in every clinical aspect. No pulse, no warmth, no breath. A magical toxin designed to fool even the most skilled physicians."
She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial, lethal hum.
"She said the one who would truly kill you wouldn’t be the one who gave the vial... it would be whoever buried you alive. She wanted the blood to be on the hands of your own people. Your own grieving family."