Beast Gacha System: All Mine

Lady Vera stood rigid, one arm extended, one trembling finger leveled at the dais like an arrow drawn from its quiver where Damon had risen to deliver his eulogy.

"MURDERER! MURDERER!" Vera screamed. Her voice climbed, rising, shrill and righteous, filling every corner of the vaulted hall. "YOU KILLED YOUR OWN FATHER, YOU DEMON! YOU MURDEROUS, RUTHLESS DEMON!"

The mourners froze. Wives of ministers clutched their husbands’ sleeves. Foreign diplomats exchanged glances that spoke of memorandums being drafted in real time. Nobles who had spent decades perfecting the art of looking unmoved found their masks slipping.

Damon turned to face her.

There was no startle in him. No flinch. He looked like someone who had been waiting for a storm he knew would come. He regarded Vera the way one regards a letter whose contents were already known before the seal was broken.

"You." Vera’s voice dropped, but lost none of its venom. She spat, finding her rhythm now, the cadence she had practiced before her mirror all night, sacrificing all sleep. "You sent an assassin to your own father—YOUR ASSASSIN EVEN WOUNDED YOUR OWN BROTHER!"

She looked perfect. The trembling lip. The heaving chest. The tears that glistened but did not fall, catching the candlelight like dew on a spider’s web. The shadows beneath her eyes were real enough, though their cause was not grief but rehearsal.

"You wanted to bring YOUR BROTHER ALONG WITH YOUR FATHER, DIDN’T YOU?!"

Beside Ruby, Lady Sees loosened her grip. Her fingers remained curled around the woman’s arm, but the iron in them had softened to something closer to a warning than a restraint.

Ruby felt the change and she immediately went pale.

Vera was saying everything Ruby had meant to say. Every accusation. Every revelation. The words Ruby had been ready to hurl into the silence were now filling the hall from another woman’s lips, and the effect was not righteous.

Instead, it felt... strange.

Her eyes found Lady Sees’ obscured profile beneath the black veil.

Did she know this was going to happen?

The hall fell into a hush so complete that the sputter of a single candle sounded like a confession. Every eye swung between the two figures, demanding that someone speak.

And Damon obliged.

"I was originally going to forget everything," he said. His voice was even. Velvety even. "And let you off this one time, Lady Vera."

He let her understand what he was offering, and what she had just thrown away.

"But you just go out of your way to ruin it all."

Lady Vera scoffed with a wet and ugly sound.

"You dare." Her voice trembled. "You dare to stand there and act as though you did not cause all of this. You deliberately sent assassins when I and your siblings accompanied your father in his leisure time! You!"

She thrust her finger toward him again, expecting it could pierce the armor of his composure.

"While your father lay in his own pool of blood, you were basking in the evening moonlight with an engaged princess you used for an alibi—"

"Step-Mother."

Damon’s voice cut through hers.

"It is enough. This is your last chance to stop and leave everything you already possess the way it is." He let the words settle, one by one. "The honor of being my father’s only living companion. And the title of the Lady of this house."

His voice grew colder with each syllable.

Vera’s eyes flickered to the people in the hall. She had expected allies. She had expected nodding heads and murmurs of agreement, the court’s eternal appetite for scandal feeding her cause.

Instead, she found a sea of faces that refused to meet her gaze. Some looked confused, their brows furrowed as they tried to trace the shape of the accusation. Some looked at her with pity, and pity, to a woman like Vera, was worse than hatred. While some, a scattered few, looked afraid.

Why?

Because of Damon Iondora?

"Why?" Vera’s voice cracked on the word, and this time the break was real. "Why can’t anyone see it?! He’s the one who has always had his hands red! He kills people! On the daily!"

She screamed the last words, her composure finally shattering against the indifference of the hall.

Damon tilted his head.

"Even if I do kill people, Lady Vera," he said, "what is the proof that I sent anyone to do anything you claim I did?"

He paused.

"Sending people others’ ways has always been your thing, after all. Is that not also why my hands are always red?"

The insinuation settled. He only killed because she sent them. Every assassin. Every blade in the dark. Every body that had piled up at Damon’s feet over the years, they had all been delivered to him by the woman now accusing him of murder.

Ruby’s breath caught.

This—all of these... she never heard any of this in her previous life!

"Lady Vera," Damon continued, finally arrived at the question that mattered. "Why do I want to kill my father?"

"I can simply sit on my ass and wait for him to die himself, crassly speaking, and I will still be the emperor. Is that not why you sent people my way? Because I should be the one who died for your benefit, not him?"

Gasps rippled through the mourners. Not at the accusation since the court had heard accusations before, but at the manner of it. To speak so plainly, so crudely, standing not ten paces from his father’s dead body.

It was also, every person in that hall realized, true.

Damon had no reason to kill the emperor. He was the Crown Prince. The throne was his by right and by law. All he had to do was outlive the man in the casket. Vera, on the other hand, Vera had every reason to want Damon dead. If Damon fell, her own son Reginald could rise.

"Lady Vera," Damon said, and his voice had gone quiet now. Quiet and certain. "I initially thought that both of us had no reason to kill my father. I need only wait for my time, when it comes. And you need only kill me, not him."

"But now I understand."

He said and the hall held its breath.

"It was you, was it not? You sent people my father’s way. And then you slit my youngest brother’s neck to make it appear as though I sent them. And now you accuse me." Damon’s eyes, dark violet and depthless, fixed on Vera’s face. "To put Reginald, your oldest son, on the throne."

Cecilia and Angela had sent word to Damon. The three of them had spoken among themselves, piecing together what must have happened.

They knew it was not Vera who had sent the assassin that struck the emperor. That blade had come from elsewhere. But they also knew that Vera, finding herself perilously close to the murder, close enough to be accused herself, had made a choice.

She had cut her own youngest son’s throat.

To use him, perhaps even to use his death. To wound him grievously and point the finger at Damon, the brother who had everything to gain and nothing to lose.

A sacrifice.

"YOU BASTARD!" Vera’s voice shattered the silence. "YOU DARE ACCUSE ME OF SUCH VILE THINGS?!"