Mathias flinched as if a physical blade had been driven into his gut.
"She wanted you to stand by..." he rasped, his eyes wild with a primal, claustrophobic fear. "She wanted you to watch them lower into the ground... and say nothing while they shoveled the dirt over my face?"
"Well...yes, So I told her it was impossible," Olivia whispered, her voice trembling with the ghost of that ancient defiance. "I looked into those cold, calculating eyes and told her I would never do it. I can’t, I would not be the architect of your grave."
The mory of what followed made her flinch. "And for that... for the audacity of saying no... she delivered a blow so hard, so sudden, that it split my lip against my teeth. I can still taste the copper of that blood, Mathias. It was the taste of my own rebellion."
Olivia’s fingers brushed her lower lip, as if feeling for a phantom scar.
"She didn’t scream. She didn’t lash out again. Instead, she just looked at with such a sickening, profound pity—the way one looks at a wounded animal that doesn’t know it’s already dying. She said,
’Pregnant won are always so sentintal. It’s a weakness of the womb, I suppose. Fine. I shall go, but you would do well to reflect on your choices, Olivia. Choices have a way of making themselves when you are too weak to act.’"
Olivia let out a long breath "I was baffled. I stood there, clutching my stomach, waiting for the guards to co, waiting for her to kill . But she simply turned and walked away. I couldn’t understand why she gave up so easily. I thought I had won. I thought I had protected you."
Mathias reached out, his hand hovering in the stagnant air between them. It trembled, inches away from hers, wanting to touch but held back by a thousand layers of guilt and hesitation.
"Wait a second, You....You actually protected ?" he rasped, his voice a broken, hollow sound. "After everything I said to you... after how I treated you like a spy in my own bed... you actually chose ?"
The weight of his own cruelty seed to crush his lungs. Every insult he had hurled at her, every cold night he had spent doubting her loyalty, now returned as a choir of accusing ghosts.
He looked at her small, trembling fra and saw not a spy, but a fortress that had held firm while he was busy trying to tear its walls down.
Olivia turned her deadened gaze toward him—a stare so vacant it felt like looking into a winter sky.
"Well, I was a spy, Sothing I will regret I to last of my life, But, I am not a monster too, Mathias," she said, her voice devoid of its usual sting, replaced by a weary truth. "Whatever we were, whatever hatred simred between us, I would not let my child grow up fatherless. I would not let my son be born into a world where his mother was his father’s murderer. That was the first ti I ever dared to defy my father’s shadow. It was my only act of courage."
She looked down at the crumpled parchnt, her knuckles turning white, the bones threatening to break through the skin.
"But as the ti passed... as I watched you, and I watched the shadows in this house...I began to understand why that woman—though calling her a ’woman’ insults the very nature of the word—retreated without a fight, retreated without a fight. She didn’t need my help, Mathias. She wasn’t giving up. She was simply choosing a more... efficient path."
"efficient?" Mathias breathed, his heart hamring against his ribs "What do you an she didn’t need your help?"
The parchnt groaned, the sound of dry fibers tearing as it was crushed further into her palm—a silent outlet for the violence of her thoughts. Just as the truth was about to spill from her lips, a sharp, rhythmic tapping echoed through the door, shattering the fragile, agonized bubble that had ford between them.
"Enter," Olivia commanded.
Her voice shifted instantly, the hollow grief of a second ago hardening into a sheath of icy, regal authority. She was no longer a victim; she was a Duchess reclaiming her throne of shadows.
The door creaked open, a reluctant sound that seed to protest the darkness it was exposing. Jeremy stepped in, his presence like a flickering candle in a storm. He looked at the Duchess, then at the Duke, and the sheer gravity of their silence made him feel like he was walking onto a battlefield where the cannons had only just ceased fire.
"Your Graces," he murmured, his voice thin. "You summoned ?"
Both Olivia and Mathias turned their gazes toward him simultaneously. He stood there, a small man caught in the crossfire of two titans.
"I have a question for you," Olivia said, her words cutting through the stagnant silence.
"Look at , Jeremy. Answer it clearly, and answer it quickly. I have no patience for diplomatic stutters tonight."
"Yes, Your Grace!" Jeremy stamred, his hands twisting instinctively behind his back. He could sll the volatile atmosphere.
"What do you know," she began, "of the toxin known as ’The Lesser Death’?"
The physician’s eyes widened, the pupils shrinking as his face drained of every drop of color, leaving him as pale as the parchnt Olivia clutched. His tongue seed to tangle in his mouth, thick and useless, as he struggled to find his voice.
"The Lesser Death?" he repeated, the na sounding like a prayer for rcy. "It is... in truth, Your Grace... it is a highly classified assassination tool. A brew of the darkest alchemies and forbidden magics. It is not a common poison; it is a sentence. If a person were to ingest even a drop of it—"
"Quiet," Olivia snapped, the command cutting off his explanation before it could even begin. Her eyes flashed with a dangerous light. "I already know what it does. "
"One more question, Jeremy, and then you are to vanish from this room at once," Olivia commanded.
"Yes, of course, Your Grace," Jeremy whispered, his hand shaking as he reached up to wipe a heavy bead of sweat from his brow. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a precipice.
The room grew unnervingly still, as if the very shadows were leaning in to hear her next words. Olivia’s voice dropped, becoming a haunting, velvet whisper that held the chill of an open grave. ’Tell , Jeremy... what would happen if that poison—The Lesser Death—were ingested by a pregnant woman? A woman in her final weeks?
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