Mathias exhaled a laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping against a gravestone.
"Still scavenging for scraps of the past, Cedric? She is my wife now—bound by blood and law. Accept your obsolescence and find another shadow to haunt. You’re beginning to look pathetic."
In a blur of feral motion, Cedric lunged. He fisted his hands into Mathias’s collar, jerking him forward until their breaths mingled—hot, jagged, and thick with hatred.
"Accept it? I’d sooner accept a noose. I look pathetic because I mistook an adder for a brother. I bled my pride dry begging you to leave her be, and you repaid that vulnerability by gutting while I wasn’t looking."
He threw Mathias back with a jarring, bone-deep force. Cedric began to prowl the room, his fingers trailing with predatory indifference over the books on the desk.
"Regardless, I didn’t co here to exhu the dead." He stopped dead, locking his gaze onto Mathias’s with a cold, hollow stillness. "You’ve taken the Duchess. You’ve crossed a line that doesn’t lead back to salvation."
Mathias crossed his arms, his arrogance an impenetrable shroud. "And? Are you going to run to Roland and wag your tail? Spill every sordid, sickening detail of our ’betrayal’?"
"Oh, no," Cedric’s lips curled into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes—it was pure venom.
"In any other world, I would. But Roland has spiraled into a fractured madness. In the state he’s in, I won’t risk him laying a single, trembling finger on Olivia’s head."
"You speak as if she is your property," Mathias’s voice dropped to a lethal, guttural low. "Wake up from your delusions before they bury you, Cedric."
"I want to see her."
"Over my dead body. You won’t even catch a glimpse of her shadow in these halls."
A flicker of raw, unadulterated grief pierced Cedric’s eyes before he masked it behind a jagged, mocking grin.
"Poetic, isn’t it? Once, not even a blade could find space between us. Now we’re circling each other like starving dogs over the sa woman. But I’m not here for a brawl. I have a ssage for her."
Mathias averted his gaze, the silence between them thickening like cooling lead. "What ssage?"
"Sothing for her ears, not yours." Cedric tilted his head, his smile darkening with a provocative malice. "Unless that fragile confidence of yours is cracking. Tell , Mathias... are you terrified she’ll realize she chose the wrong ghost to sleep beside?"
Olivia surged into the room, the heavy oak door swinging wide without a knock. "Mathias, we need to t—"
The words withered in her throat. The air in the study was thick, tasting of ozone and old grudges. Cedric stood like a jagged monunt in the center of the room, while Mathias remained anchored in place, his posture vibrating with a volcanic, suppressed rage. For a heartbeat, the silence was a physical weight, crushing the breath from her lungs.
Mathias broke the stillness. He moved toward her with sharp, predatory strides that forced the air out of the path between them. He didn’t just approach; he invaded her space, leaning down until his lips grazed the shell of her ear. His voice was a piercing, lethal rasp.
"I will be waiting right behind this door," he hissed, the heat of his breath a stark contrast to the ice in his tone. "Conclude this farce quickly. Do not make co back inside."
Olivia recoiled, a flicker of genuine, uncharacteristic disorientation ghosting across her features. "W... What?"
Across the room, Cedric’s lips curled into a slow, triumphant stroke. He didn’t need to speak; the jagged edge of his provocation had carved right through Mathias’s legendary restraint. He had won the first blood of the evening.
Mathias wrenched himself away, the door slamming behind him with a violence that rattled the fras on the walls.
In the dim hallway, he slumped against the wood, exhaling a long, scorched breath that felt like it was burning its way out of his lungs. "Calm down, Mathias..." he muttered, his knuckles white as he fought the visceral urge to storm back in and shatter every bone in Cedric’s body. "You cannot cage her. You cannot silence the world. She is not the betrayal you fear. Breathe."
He was a man at war with his own shadows, drowning in a terror he couldn’t na. anwhile, inside the room, the temperature seed to drop as Cedric turned toward Olivia, his expression a mask of absolute, terrifying predatory stillness.
Olivia sank into the chair opposite him, her expression a sculpted mask of frost. "State your purpose, Cedric. I have no patience for theatrics."
"Is this the welco I’ve earned?" he asked, his voice dripping with a feigned, aching nostalgia. "After the history we’ve bled for?"
"Cedric Alistair," she cut him off, her tone like a guillotine. "I am not playing a part in your lodrama. Speak with the respect your station demands; your manners are rotting as quickly as your intentions."
Cedric’s fist white-knuckled on the armrest. Her words didn’t just sting; they butchered him, carving through the armor of his arrogance. He forced a sickeningly warm smile to mask the surge of bile in his throat, staring at her with a predatory longing. Only one question clawed at his ribs, frantic and raw: Why him? Why the snake and not the shadow?
He exhaled a jagged sigh and poured a glass of wine, the liquid a dark, bruised crimson in the dim light. "Roland is hunting for his wife."
Olivia’s throat tightened, a microscopic tremor she hoped he didn’t catch, but her gaze remained an iron wall. "And?"
"And I know she is here," he continued, his eyes tracing the line of her neck. "Hiding in the lion’s den."
She leaned back, her confidence a forced, brittle shield. "You’ve traveled a long way to tell sothing I already live with. What is the point, Cedric?"
"The point," he whispered, leaning over the table until the scent of cedar and wine invaded her senses, "is that I am the only thing standing between you and his wrath. I won’t tell him. I won’t let him break you. You know that is the one truth I still hold."
She crossed her arms, her indifference a weapon of its own. "And? Am I expected to fall at your feet in gratitude? Should I thank you for doing the bare minimum of a human soul?"
He swallowed a bitter, tallic taste. Her dismissals were like commands to his heart, painful and absolute. "No... but you will thank for the truth I’m about to strip bare. Consider it a gift. A special one, just for us."
A sickening flash of Mathias’s "unique" offerings—the blood-stained letters, the hollowed promises—flickered behind her eyes. "A gift?" she spat. "I have had my fill of ’unique’ gifts lately. My nerves are frayed enough. If this is all you have, I’m done."
She surged to her feet, intent on escaping the suffocating air, but he was a blur of desperate motion. He lunged, his hand shackling her arm with a bruising grip that forced her back into the velvet seat. He leaned in, his face inches from hers, his voice a choked, shattered rasp against her ear.
"Do you truly believe Roland clings to a rotting corpse out of re grief?" Cedric’s voice was a low, jagged rasp. "Do you think he has simply succumbed to a common madness?"
Olivia narrowed her eyes, her pulse thrumming a frantic rhythm against her throat. "What are you implying, Cedric?"
He reached out, his fingers cold as marble as he captured a stray lock of her hair, twirling it with a detached, clinical cruelty. "What if I gifted you a secret so dark it would make your heart flutter with a sick, twisted joy?"
"And the price?" she spat, her voice trembling with restrained fury. "Nothing in this gods-forsaken life is a gift. Everything has a price, and yours is usually paid in blood."
He donned a mask of fragile, feigned innocence. "Have I ever asked you for currency, Olivia? You need only command, and I exist to obey. I am simply showing you your rightful place in my world. I pray you finally realize where you belong."
Olivia violently struck his hand away, the sound of the slap echoing in the oppressive silence. "You are loathso. Stop dancing around the edge of the abyss and speak clearly."
Cedric didn’t flinch. He glided behind her chair, leaning in until his breath grazed the sensitive skin of her neck—a predatory intimacy that made her skin crawl. Then, he began to whisper the Forbidden Blood Secret.
Olivia froze. The air in the room felt suddenly foul, thick with the stench of the Imperial family’s ancestral filth. He detailed the "Lifelines"—how the dynasty sustained its patriarchs by draining the very vitality of their own flesh and blood.
It was a cycle of parasitic survival. A wave of visceral nausea surged through her; she thought of the exploitation she had endured, only to realize other children were being used as literal vessels for their fathers’ immortality.
She spun on him, her eyes wide with a manic intensity. "Why tell this? I am not going to hunt the Emperor for his blood. What is the point of this depravity?"
Cedric’s grin widened, becoming sothing truly malicious. "But you don’t need the Emperor. You have a direct descendant wandering these very halls... I imagine his blood would be quite potent, wouldn’t it?"
Olivia surged to her feet, her chair screeching against the floor like a dying animal. "You bastard!" she scread, her voice cracking with rage. "Are you inciting to slaughter my own brother?"
Cedric crossed his arms, his smirk deepening into a jagged scar of satisfaction. "Well... you have a choice to make, my Queen. You can either bury the brother who offered you nothing but venom and enmity—have you forgotten the bruises he left? Or, you can bury the woman who was a mother to you when your own biological mother was nothing but a snake in silk."
He turned and strode toward the door, his silhouette dark against the flickering candlelight. He paused at the threshold, looking back with a gaze as cold as a winter grave.
"I almost forgot... you have two nights. The moon will be full, and the blood will be at its peak. Think carefully, Olivia. So ghosts are worth more than living shadows."
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