Chapter 319: Platonic
"Unless you break off your engagement with him... And marry me instead."
Ivy saw it, a flicker in this man’s eyes despite saying everything with all seriousness. Seeing that, her own blue eyes hardened, becoming the surface beneath which depths remained unreadable.
"You can’t prove anything. You know if it was me, I would not leave a single trace," she said. Then, she looked away. "If this is how you respond to someone genuinely worried about you—"
"Pfft."
Ivy’s eyes flicked back to Damon, who was holding his laugh.
She immediately—
"DAMON IONDORA!"
"WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE—"
Damon immediately turned into a whistling kettle, the sound escaping him high and uncontrolled. He needed that laugh after spending the day performing competence and grief and imperial authority.
Seeing this woman fall for his little act gave him just a bit of light on this dark day.
Ivy huffed, her cheeks puffed and red, her eyes wet with tears. "You—"
SMACK!
"List—OW—OW—"
SMACK! SMACK!
Collecting smacks from a beautiful lady was a wonderful bonus too, the stinging of his arm measuring the distance between her fear and her anger.
"Listen to me," Damon caught her wrists, grinning the same evil grin now. "We should stop flirting."
"We’re not flirting!" Ivy roared.
"Fine, what’s wrong with flirting? None of us have any romantic feelings for each other, after all," he rolled his eyes.
"WE’RE NOT FLIRTING!" Ivy, even more, demonically roared.
"We are, and it’s fine," Damon said. "My sister and her female best friend do it all the time and I can’t do it with my female best friend too?"
"Best friend?" Ivy widened her eyes, the blue immediately gleamed.
Damon sneered. "Why? It’s not established already?"
"GASP!" Ivy gasped in shock. "Oh, wait, the experience immediately becomes delightful."
"WHEEEEEEEEEEEZE—"
Damon somehow understood. Perhaps, for a beautiful, talented princess like Ivy, meeting a man that wasn’t trying to get in her pants while still able to engage emotionally and sometimes flirt platonically was incredibly rare.
The Cassian court, the beastman fiancé, the trade negotiations that were also marriage markets, she had learned to expect that male attention always arrived with destination, with intention, with the assumption that her beauty was a promise that must eventually be collected.
And the moment Ivy saw that Damon never considered love... she might’ve started to wish that they could become good friends instead.
Though... the flicker in Damon’s eyes earlier made Ivy feel like he was starting to consider love, after all. Of course, it didn’t look like it would be her.
Now she knew he wouldn’t disappoint her like that.
"But how did you know? I don’t have a motive," Ivy said. "Cassia had no motive."
"A motive doesn’t always come from hatred or revenge. You... you just want me to be the Emperor sooner, right?" Damon knocked her forehead.
"Ow—" Ivy grimaced. "That wasn’t the reason."
"Then what is your motive?"
"I was annoyed," Ivy admitted. Then, she reminded him, "Your former Saintess. She died, right?"
Damon froze, his eyes shook a little bit.
"My intel had concluded that Arzhen Vasiliev still possessed the Meleth Flower, which means, with his severed bond, he had killed her," Ivy said.
She concluded, continuing her speculation, "For all we know, he could’ve already killed her and his father’s disapproval from it forced him to search for her while knowing she was already dead."
"And your father allowed that "true" Saintess to even take office, even when the former one had done her job perfectly until then," she said, the quotation marks around "true" audible.
Damon narrowed his eyes. "Annoyance was enough for you?"
"Do you know how much disaster an incompetent Saintess can bring to this world?" Ivy asked. "You didn’t do much about it because in your eyes, as long as there is a Saintess, Iondora will be fine, and you can offset the loss from her incompetence. But not so much for other nations, Damon."
Ivy’s words made him chuckle. "Well, this empire is all the load I can bear. I’m already quite overwhelmed by now."
"Which is why I killed your father," Ivy said, as if she had simply identified a bottleneck and removed it. "Now, your control will solidify and you’ll feel it firsthand."
"Feel what?"
"The annoyance," Ivy pursed her lips. "Especially after that wonderful Former Saintess was gone."
Damon smiled. "Hm. Fine. I get it, alright?"
"You are taking this too lightly!" Ivy snapped.
"I might," Damon sighed. "I was just relieved. It just means that whoever came to assassinate my father, they just came to assassinate my father, not hurting any of my siblings or the others."
Ivy blinked, her eyes faltered once more. "Then... who hurt your brother...?"
Damon shrugged.
"Well..." he shook his head. "...I do have some ideas."
***
"Ruby Vaiva’s prophecy caused Jove to get hurt?" Angela asked.
After Cecilia, as Lady Sees, was escorted to her guest room, she found Angela already waiting inside, ready for further discussion. The sleepover pajamas she wore was the first luxurious thing Angela had worn since her dungeon prisoner life.
"I don’t think she meant for it to happen. Just that her prophecy created the situation," Cecilia shrugged.
"Was it because of my Father’s changing schedule, tighter security and all? Was the extra variable caused by her warning disturbing it all?" Angela asked again.
"No, it wasn’t enough for Ivy Cassia’s plans to get disturbed," Cecilia stretched on the bed.
"Pause. Rewind. What did you just say? Ivy Cassia? Ivy Cassia was the one who sent assassins? She had no motives!" Angela rose from the bed beside her, her sleepover pajama bunched up.
"If someone like her had any motive, would we know?" Cecilia turned to her side to face Angela.
"Well... true. Fine. So it means it wasn’t her or her assassin who caused Jove’s incident. But it is still because of the prophecy...? How?" Angela asked.
"Well, it wasn’t just the Emperor’s schedule that had changed thanks to the prophecy, right?" Cecilia asked. "To accommodate the emperor’s changing schedule, your brother’s, your half-siblings’, and your step-mother’s schedule also changed."
Something clicked in Angela’s mind.
"And despite the assassin doing their job to kill my father perfectly, unseen and undisturbed... proximity still matters?" Angela muttered.
"Proximity matters a lot," Cecilia nodded, confirming the direction and pointing toward the conclusion that waited in the space between facts.
"Especially knowing Prince Jove’s wound was created with a very sharp dagger, a detail that wouldn’t matter if we don’t know who the assassin was sent by and their intention, while your Father’s wounds were created by claws."
Even a beast assassin could also carry a blade.
If the person was any less skilled. If the planner was any less smart. If their target was any less focused—but because it was Ivy Cassia, Jove’s incident was impossible to happen.
The precision of her planning, the cleanliness of her execution, would not have permitted a wounded child, a surviving witness, a complication that served no strategic purpose.
"Lady Vera, upon seeing the emperor laid on the floor, already dead, realized she and her children’s proximity were too close to him," Cecilia narrated.
"Panicking, not checking his wounds, not seeing any assassins, just seeing he was laying in the pool of his own blood, decided on a drastic measure."
After all, a palace lady like Vera might not be equipped to check a wound or think straight after seeing such a scene.
"To make sure herself and her children weren’t accused of murder themselves, she sliced one of her sons’ neck that was standing closest to the emperor’s position," Cecilia concluded.
Even with the perfect knowledge of everyone’s schedule, the unfamiliarity of the schedule itself created gaps that could be filled with spontaneous instances like what happened tonight.
The Emperor, wanting to show his family a brooch he had just acquired. The assassin, taking the small window as the perfect opportunity that it was. And the stupid panic of Lady Vera that would rather kill her own son to maintain their position.
Cecilia looked into Angela’s faltering eyes.
"You don’t need proof," Cecilia said. "Jove and your other half-siblings would start to avoid their mother if I was right."