Chapter 153: Between Siblings
Lucius stumbled back, his hand still pressed against the cheek that burned from Serene’s strike. It wasn’t the physical sting that paralyzed him, but the hollow void in her eyes. This wasn’t the gaze of a resentful younger sister; it was the look of a judge reading a death sentence.
"Serene..." he choked out, his voice thin. "Why? After all these years..."
"Years?" Serene cut him off with a dry, jagged laugh that sounded like rusted metal grinding together. "You call them years, Lucius? I call them an eon of rot. More than two decades spent decaying behind the walls of that palace, and you didn’t even bother to send a shadow to ask if I was still breathing."
Lucius’s eyes widened in genuine disbelief. "What are you talking about? *I* didn’t ask? Serene, you were the one who sent dozens of letters telling me you didn’t want to see me. You literally said it would be a ’disgrace’ to be associated with me ever again!"
Serene’s entire body went rigid. "I did?" she whispered, her voice rising into a lethal hiss. "Are you mocking me? After you forced me into that marriage with Roland... after I sacrificed every shred of dignity I possessed for you and that piece of filth, Alisha, so you two could sit comfortably on your throne... was my reward to be discarded as if I weren’t even your own blood?"
Lucius froze, the words hitting him harder than the slap. "Wait... stop! Alisha? What does Alisha have to do with this? She was the one who told me you were head over heels for Roland. She was the one who ’helped’ you secure that marriage because she said you were begging her to convince me!"
"Helped me?" Serene screamed, taking a sharp step toward him. She raised the shard she’d been concealing, the dried blood on her palm stark under the office lights. "Really? That’s what she fed you? Did you think, even for a single moment in your life as a brother, to ask *me*? To look into my eyes and hear a ’yes’ or ’no’ from my own lips? No. All you did was believe every word from that whore!"
"Serene! Watch your mouth!" Lucius erupted, the Emperor’s pride flaring for a split second. "She is still my wife, and the Imperial Family deserves—"
"And I am an Imperial Princess!" She cut through his roar with a voice that shook the walls, lifting her head with a broken, unyielding majesty. "No matter how many titles she climbs, no matter how many crowns you place on her head, she will never be nobler than me! Do you understand?"
She moved in closer, her shallow, erratic breath hitting his face, her eyes blazing with unstable mana. "I didn’t come here to beg for your sympathy, Lucius. I came to put an end to this farce that I have spent my entire life paying for with my blood and my soul. I came to tell you that the game your wife started, and you finished with your silence, ends today under my heel."
A suffocating silence settled. Lucius looked at the dried crimson trailing down his sister’s neck, at the jagged shard in her hand, and began to realize for the first time that the "letters" and "promises" he had believed for twenty years were nothing but a spiderweb that had trapped his sister in hell.
"Serene... what do you mean by this?" Lucius asked, his voice trembling between denial and a rising rage.
"What do I mean?" Serene countered, prowling toward him with the slow, deliberate grace of a predator cornering its prey. "Has your brain been scrubbed so clean that you can’t see the truth? I am telling you she played you. She moved you like a pawn to reach that throne. For God’s sake, Lucius... are you really naive enough to think she actually loves you?"
"She does! She loves me!" Lucius shouted, clutching at the last shred of his dignity. "And you... you had all these years to come and speak. Why did you decide to return only now, after all this time?"
Serene let out a bitter, jagged laugh that scraped her throat before it ever reached his ears. "You speak as if I were living a fairy tale with Roland. Do you really still believe that theater? You believe I ’loved’ him?" She tilted her head, her eyes flashing with a terrifying light. "Answer me, Your Imperial Majesty... have you ever seen a prisoner who loves her executioner? Your excessive ’goodness’ made you nothing but a soft target for her lies. She is insane, and you were her greatest victim."
Lucius fell silent. He wanted to defend Alisha, he wanted to scream at Serene and throw her out, but his sister’s words were cold daggers, shredding every rosy illusion he had held about his wife for two decades. The sight of Serene, bleeding right in front of him, was a truth far louder than any of Alisha’s flowery letters.
Ignoring him, Serene walked toward a plush chair in the corner of the office and sank into it, her exhausted body finally yielding to the weight of years of torment. She wiped the blood from her hand with the hem of her tattered gown and said coldly, "Regardless, this futile argument leads nowhere. It won’t change the fact that my life is gone. Where is Kyle? I want to speak with him."
Lucius hesitated, his hands rubbing together nervously as he avoided her gaze. "He... hmmm... he left the palace."
Serene’s body went rigid against the chair. The mask of coldness vanished, replaced by a raw, primal dread. "Left the palace?" She stood up slowly, her eyes widening. "What are you talking about? Where is he? What happened?"
"How could he leave the palace? He’s the Crown Prince, for God’s sake!" Serene’s voice cracked through the office like a lightning strike. "I return after all these years only to find Kyle gone? What exactly happened?"
Lucius hung his head, rubbing his temples with exhaustion. "He chose this... what was I supposed to do?"
"Chose?" She tilted her head, her mockery cutting like a blade. "Tell me the truth. What really happened?"
"There was... a disagreement with the Empress," Lucius muttered in a low voice. "After that, he decided to depart."
Serene let out a sharp, venomous laugh. "Let me guess—Alisha tried to weave her filthy schemes around Kyle? You know, I like your son; he’s not a fool like you or me, walking into her traps and becoming puppets for her to dance. The moment he realized the depth of her depravity, he pulled himself out and saved his own skin."
"Serene!" Lucius roared, his pride finally pushed to the brink of explosion.
Serene stood from her seat with a chilling composure, walking toward the door with steady, confident strides. She paused at the threshold, turning to look him in the eye with a gaze that made him feel small, insignificant. "Why do you scream when I hand you the truth? Actually, I came here today to tell you something you should have known a long time ago about Olivia... but you know what? After seeing the way you act, you don’t deserve to know."
"What? Speak!" Lucius demanded, anxiety beginning to gnaw at his features.
"Why don’t you ask your precious wife to tell you the truth?" she said, her hand gripping the door handle. "I’m sure she’ll weave a new fairy tale for you, and you’ll swallow it just like you always do."
She moved to leave, but his voice halted her: "Are you leaving? Just like that?"
"Leaving is better than staying with someone who calls every word I say a lie," she replied without looking back.
Lucius turned his gaze toward his aide, Carter, who had listened to the entire conversation in a heavy, hollow silence. Carter’s expression betrayed him; he wasn’t looking at Serene with the distant eyes of an official, but with a deep, aching sorrow for the Princess who had once been the light of this palace.
Serene looked at him, her voice quiet and fractured. "I’m sorry, Carter... that you had to witness this fall."
Carter bowed low, his voice trembling slightly. "It is alright, Ser—I mean, Your Grace."
Serene sighed and stepped out, the door clicking shut behind her while her mind boiled. *Fool... if he continues like this, he won’t even be fit to be an Emperor. It’s a good thing I didn’t tell him about Olivia; I won’t let her live through the same agony she endured with Roland, only to repeat it with my brother who worships his lying wife.*
Mathias opened his eyes slowly, but the light creeping into the room offered no warmth; it felt like a cold blade cutting through his vision. A heavy silence filled the space, broken only by Olivia’s rhythmic breathing beside him.
His body went rigid as the realization hit him: he was sharing a bed with her. There was no intimacy in the scene, only a creeping horror. They had collapsed in their full clothes, shoes and all, like two corpses tossed together in the aftermath of a massacre. Pain flared through him—not the ache from his body slamming against the wall last night, but a throbbing agony radiating from the depths of his skull, carrying the echoes of those suffocating confessions.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but the images wouldn’t vanish. The sound of their sobbing, his own guttural screams of guilt, and the cold, small body of their son being lowered into the dirt—it all came rushing back to wring the life from his heart. He looked at Olivia beside him; she was deathly pale, sunk into a sleep so deep it looked like a coma. It seemed the sedatives hadn’t brought her peace, only a temporary, hollow amnesia.
Nausea rose in his throat as he stared at his hand, stained with his own dried blood. *How did we end up here?* he thought bitterly. *Sleeping atop our lies, shrouded in regret.*
Suddenly, Mathias bolted upright as if the mattress had turned into glowing coals. He scrambled back, his breath coming in jagged, frantic hitches. His eyes locked onto his hand, and the blood in his veins turned to ice. The black ring—the iron dam holding back his surging, violent energy—was spiderwebbed with glowing white fractures, as if it were screaming under the pressure.
He looked at the sleeping Olivia, and a primal terror shook his very soul. His hand... it wasn’t under his control. It had reached toward her throat in an instinctive, predatory twitch. His fingers were hungry to sink into her skin, to choke out the very breath they had shared for years.
He grabbed his hand with a violent jerk, pulling it back. He scrambled off the bed, desperate not to wake her; he had to get out of that room, now.
He fled the chamber like a madman, dragging his heavy, leaden feet toward his private quarters. The moment he slammed the door shut behind him, the ring could no longer hold. He ripped it off his finger and hurled it across the room. It hit the floor with a sharp, metallic ring that was instantly swallowed by a freezing explosion.
In an instant, a thick, black mist flooded the room like smoke rising from the depths of hell. His eyes bled into a solid, abyssal black—every trace of human white vanished. His breathing turned into a terrifying, rapid rasp, his chest heaving like a wounded animal trying to shatter its cage. The black energy gnawed at the walls, shattering a nearby vase and making the very floor beneath his feet tremble.
He clenched his fists so hard his nails dug back into his old wounds, fighting the monster that was clawing to destroy everything in sight. Minutes felt like eons until the fog finally began to dissipate, and the color bled back into his eyes—now swimming with tears.
He slumped into the corner, sliding down to the floor, staring at his trembling hands with a regret that tore at his soul.
"Damn it... damn me!" he whispered in a shattered voice, wiping a face distorted by agony. "My God... I almost killed her. My God, I’m losing control of myself completely."