Chapter 155: Generations of Rot
He collapsed into the velvet chair, his body moving with the stiff, graceless jerk of a marionette with cut strings. He didn’t bother looking at her—Talia didn’t deserve to be seen. He looked through her, as if she were nothing more than a stain on the wall.
As the cold metal slid past his knuckle, the last spark of human warmth in his eyes was snuffed out. Those emerald irises didn’t just darken; they were swallowed whole, dissolving into two lightless, obsidian pits—empty, hungry, and ancient.
A thick, greasy black mist seeped from the floorboards, coiling around the legs of the furniture like a nest of starving vipers. The temperature didn’t just drop; it died. The air turned into a jagged thing, thin and bitter, reeking of wet ash and the sour stench of a tomb that had been pried open.
Talia’s mask of mockery shattered. Her breath hitched in a sharp, pathetic wheeze, and her fingers buried themselves into the silk sheets, clawing at them as if they could save her. Matthias’s presence was no longer a man’s; it was a gravitational collapse, a suffocating weight that pressed against her lungs, screaming of a void that didn’t just want her dead—it wanted her erased.
" god are fair after all. The curse has finally crawled back home."
"I’m going to be perfectly clear with you, Talia," he said. His voice wasn’t human anymore; it was a hollow vibration echoing from the gut of the shadows. "I want an answer."
"How do I stop it?" Matthias leaned in, the darkness clinging to his frame like a heavy shroud. "How do I kill this curse before it guts everything I have?"
She leaned in, her eyes narrowing into slits that dripped with a fresh, sharp malice. "Oh... wait. Don’t tell me. You tried to kill her, didn’t you?"
"I knew it," she hissed, her voice a foul blend of revulsion and pure, dark ecstasy. "So it’s true. You actually tried to slaughter that little silver-haired fox."
She shrugged, the indifference on her face chillingly absolute. She sank back into the pillows, unmoved.
"You..."
"What do you want in return?" he rasped, his voice dropping to a low, lethal edge.
"A trade, then?" Talia mused, her voice humming with a rhythmic, sickening glee. "Well, actually—"
She charged at Matthias, her boots hammering a violent rhythm onto the floorboards. "Get out! What the hell are you doing in here?"
"Watch your mouth, Emilia. This is my palace. I’ll walk wherever I well please."
"I told you to get out!" she shrieked, her voice splintering. "How dare you crawl in here after what that... that ’viper’ did?"
"If you ever use that word for her again," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that felt like a razor against her throat, "my patience ends. You want to talk about vipers? The only real snake in this room is the woman who was ready to butcher her own daughter to feed a grudge."
"Remember that, Emilia. Enjoy her company. You two deserve each other."
"Think about the offer, Talia."
"What offer?" Emilia demanded, her voice vibrating with a frantic, ugly suspicion.
"Don’t worry, darling," Talia whispered, that thin, oily smile sliding back onto her face. "Just a little secret between a mother and her son."
He didn’t knock. He shoved the doors open.
"No! Absolutely not!" Kyle roared, his fist slamming onto the heavy desk with a dull thud. "I am not going back to that filthy, godforsaken hellhole!"
"So," Matthias said, his voice a flat, dead thing. "You’re here."
"She wants me to go back to the Imperial Palace!" Kyle erupted, lunging toward Matthias as if looking for a lifeline. "They literally tried to butcher my daughter, and she expects me to just walk back into their cage?"
"Your childish tantrums are pathetic. You aren’t ’protecting’ a soul; you’re just a coward running away from his own name."
Matthias watched them—the same pathetic cycle, the same jagged edges of a family that didn’t know whether to bleed for duty or for fear. He crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe, letting the silence stretch until it became a physical weight in the room. Then, he let out a dry, sharp throat-clear.
"Shut up, Kyle," Olivia cut in, her eyes never leaving Matthias’s face. "Let him speak. Tell me, Matthias, do you have a solution for this idiot, or are you just here to watch the show?"
Kyle’s mouth flew open to protest, but Matthias raised a hand, his cold, obsidian gaze pinning him to the spot like a specimen.
The room went deathly still. The air seemed to leave Kyle’s lungs, even Olivia’s mask of icy indifference cracked, revealing a raw, stunned disbelief beneath.