Matthias froze, his hand remaining suspended in the heavy air, a paralyzed gesture of comfort.
"Olivia..." he breathed, his voice barely a whisper.
"No! No, don’t call my na!" she shrieked, backing away until there was nowhere left to retreat. "You are not real... you are a phantom. An illusion!"
Desperate to anchor her to reality, Matthias reached out, his fingers seeking her hand to let her feel his warmth. But the mont his touch neared, Olivia violently slapped his hand away. Her eyes widened, staring at him with a horrifying, frantic gaze—an expression he had never seen on her face before. It was a volatile, shattering mix of pure terror, deep-seated brokenness, and absolute disbelief.
"You are not real," she whispered, her voice fracturing into a jagged whimper as she shook her head frantically. "I won’t live in these delusions anymore. Vanish... please, I beg of you, just disappear!"
Pulling her knees tightly against her chest right there on the bed, she curled into a ball of raw panic, her eyes never leaving his form. She looked completely unhinged, a stark, terrifying contrast to the calculative princess she once was.
"Please leave alone... please... you are..."
A single tear slipped from Matthias’s eye, tracing a path down his scarred cheek.
The sight of her completely destroyed him. It ripped him apart, shredding his conscience into bloody pieces. They had lied to him. His informants, his allies—they had all assured him that she was fine, that she had moved past his death and remained unbroken. But the girl sitting before him now wasn’t fine. She looked like a mangled, hollow doll, stripped of her very soul by the weight of a grief he had inflicted upon her.
Slowly, heavily, Matthias dropped to both knees before her, lowering his head until he was beneath her line of sight, stripping himself of every ounce of his fearso pride.
"Olivia..." his voice cracked, his tongue catching in his throat as the words turned to pure lead. "It’s . It’s Matthias... I didn’t..." He swallowed hard, his unyielding composure completely failing him. "I didn’t die."
Slowly, hesitantly, she finally extended her trembling hand. Her fingertips brushed against his cheek, and the sudden, grounding warmth of his skin felt so agonizingly real it made her chest heave. The terrifying illusion in her mind dissolved. Her tense, defensive posture finally gave way, her body relaxing slightly as she shifted into a normal sitting position on the edge of the bed.
"You... you didn’t die?" she whispered, her voice a fragile glass ready to shatter. "You are truly here..."
The dam broke, and tears finally spilled over her cheeks, hot and unbidden. "You really didn’t leave ... You are actually—"
Matthias caught her hand, pressing her palm firmly against his face, holding onto her as if she were his only anchor to the earth. "Yes. I am back, just as I promised you," he murmured, his voice thick with an emotion he rarely showed. "I did."
For a fleeting, breathless second, the raw impulse to fling herself into his arms and kiss him nearly consud her. She wanted to drown in his presence, to let the world burn around them as long as he was breathing.
But then, a suffocating stillness dropped between them. Barely a heartbeat passed before the heavy, rusted gears of her mind sparked back to life. The fleeting warmth evaporated, ruthlessly wrapping her sudden vulnerability in a cold, unyielding iron sheath. Her tears stopped mid-fall, drying like ice on her pale skin. In his grasp, her hand went entirely rigid.
Before he could even process the sudden change in her temperature, she violently wrenched her hand back from his grip, severing the contact as if his skin had burned her. In the blink of an eye, her broken gaze hardened, transforming into a roaring storm of unadulterated, lethal fury.
"You..." she spat, the softness in her voice entirely replaced by a venomous chill. "You never told you were alive."
Matthias flinched as if struck.
"I wept for days," she hissed, her chest heaving as she glared down at him with a gaze that could kill. "I was shattered into a thousand jagged pieces, grieving a ghost, while you... you stood in the dark and watched in absolute silence. Tell , Matthias—was my agony that insignificant to you? Was my grief nothing but an entertaining amusent for your grand plans?"
"No, no... Olivia, listen to —" Matthias stamred, his hands reaching out in a desperate, pleading gesture.
"Don’t say my na, please!" she cut him off, her voice cracking under a crushing weight.
She stood up abruptly, pushing herself away from the bed. A harsh, ruthless wave of realization struck her, and she began to pace through the dim room like a phantom that had lost its way in the dark.
"I was hallucinating your na for days," she whispered, her hands trembling as she pressed them against her temples, her steps erratic against the velvet carpet. "I was driven to the absolute brink of madness... and now you suddenly appear as if nothing ever happened. As if this entire nightmare was just a cruel joke. Was I nothing but a toy to you, Matthias?"
"Olivia, I swear to you, that was never my intention!" Matthias pleaded. His towering posture felt entirely hollow as he rose from his knees, trying to close the distance between them, his voice laced with a rare, frantic panic. "Everything happened so fast... there are things I cannot easily explain right now. Please... I beg of you, just try to understand ."
Olivia stopped dead in her tracks. The desperate urgency in his voice did nothing to pierce the armor she had just rebuilt. She slowly turned to face him, looking at him with a gaze so heavy with profound sorrow and bitter betrayal that it physicalized the imnse, unbridgeable distance between them. The remaining tears kept pouring down her pale cheeks, catching the weak, flickering candlelight as she spoke in a soft, devastating whisper.
"I thought... I thought you loved ," she murmured, each word dropping like shards of shattered glass into the suffocating silence of the room. "So why... why were you so cruel to , Matthias? You destroyed . You truly destroyed ."
Matthias stood entirely paralyzed. The words struck him with the force of a physical blow, leaving him completely speechless, unable to find a single excuse to counter the raw agony in her eyes. His unyielding authority, his lethal aura—none of it mattered anymore. He was just a man standing in the wreckage of the soul he had broken.
Keeping her hollow, accusing eyes pinned entirely on his frozen form, Olivia began to take slow, deliberate steps backward. She moved deliberately away from the bed, cutting through the heavy shadows of the imperial suite, creating a physical abyss between them to match the one in her chest. She retreated step by step, until the backs of her heels finally struck the cold, solid wood of the grand entrance doors.
Matthias took an instinctive, desperate step forward, his hand extending into the void. "Oliv—"
"Don’t follow ," she brokenly choked out, her voice a desperate, pleading whimper as her trembling hand reached behind her, blindly searching until her fingers wrapped around the heavy brass handle. "Please... just looking at you hurts too much. Please... just let go."
She stumbled out of the chamber, leaving him standing there in the frozen silence of his own wreckage. Olivia walked blindly down the dimly lit corridor, her feet moving without conscious thought, propelled only by a desperate instinct to escape. She moved like a ghost through the shadows until her fragile fra abruptly collided with sothing solid.
Olivia flinched, slowly lifting her vacant gaze only to find Kyle staring down at her, his face etched with deep anxiety.
"Olivia? Why did you leave the Emperor’s side? He is—"
"He is still alive... barely," she interrupted, her voice dropping into a hollow whisper that barely carried in the quiet hallway. Her head remained bowed, her eyes pinned strictly to the floorboards. "The imperial physician took him to buy him so ti, so I believe we have a mont. Though... I am beginning to doubt he was ever naturally ill to begin with. This entire palace... it is built on a labyrinth of lies."
Her words were trembling, devoid of her usual sharp composure.
Kyle’s brow furrowed in deep concern. Reaching out, he gently placed his fingers beneath her chin, tilting her face upward so he could look into her eyes. He gasped softly; her gaze was utterly hollow, completely stripped of its life and spirit.
"Olivia? What is wrong with you? What on earth happened in there?"
Instead of answering, she stepped closer, burying her face into his chest and resting her heavy, aching head against his armor. Her small hands clutched at him, her defenses completely shattered.
"Please... just take ho, Kyle," she brokenly whispered, her voice fracturing against his shoulder. "I am so incredibly tired. I don’t want to stay here anymore. Please... I just don’t want to look at his face."
"Whose face do you an, family?" Kyle asked, his voice softening into a protective, comforting murmur as he instinctively wrapped his arms around her.
But before she could answer, Kyle’s reassurance died in his throat. His entire body went rigid as steel, and the warmth left his fra. Slowly, his gaze lifted past Olivia’s shoulder, locking onto the heavy double doors of the imperial chamber.
Erging from the shadows of his father’s room was a towering silhouette—a dead man walking into the dim candlelight of the corridor.
Kyle’s breath hitched, his eyes widening in absolute, paralyzed disbelief as he stared at the impossible figure.
"You..." Kyle whispered, the word escaping his lips like a breath of cold air.
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