"That your already disgraced son — your already scandal-ridden, already reputation-destroying son — tried to rape a girl."
The word dropped onto the table like a bloody knife.
Thud.
Anderson shivered.
Not so subtle little twitch and controlled flinch. But rather a full-body, bone-deep shudder that started in his shoulders, raced down his spine, and made the silverware beside his plate rattle against the porcelain like it was terrified too.
The scar — that long, ugly vertical line splitting his face from forehead to chin, still pink black, raw, and raised despite the best surgeons Legacy money could buy — seed to pulse with vicious mory.
He rembered.
How could he not?
The freezing cold. The blade that wasn’t tal. The dagger forged from sothing darker than darkness itself, edged in ice that burned worse than fire.
The way Phei had humd — that soft, patient, almost gentle lody — while he pressed the tip into Anderson’s forehead and drew it down. Slow. Steady. Like he was writing a love letter in their blood.
The first cut.
Then the healing — crystalline light knitting the wound shut, sealing the flesh, making him whole again.
Then the second cut. Sa line. Sa depth. Sa haunting lody.
Then the healing.
Then the third.
Fourth.
Fifth.
Over and over and over — cut, heal, cut, heal — until Anderson had stopped screaming because his throat was raw at, stopped begging because his mind had shattered, and stopped counting because the numbers had lost all aning.
Every ti he got healed, the blade returned. Every ti he thought the nightmare was over, the ice ca back. The sa line. The sa place. The sa soft, tender humming.
All for one girl.
One girl who had been drugged, torn apart, and nearly taken on silk sheets by three Legacy boys who thought their last nas made them untouchable.
Anderson’s hands trembled violently beneath the table. He slamd them flat against his thighs and squeezed until his knuckles turned bone-white.
The entire table had gone deathly silent.
Anderson’s mother turned desperately to her husband.
Fenris Price was still eating.
He had been eating the whole damn ti. The accusations, the family honor bullshit, the surgical scars — everything had washed over him like rain on glass.
He glanced up once in a brief, asured sweep of gaze across the table then his cold grey eyes touching his mother, then Abigail, then returning to his plate like none of this nonsense was worth interrupting his breakfast for.
They were eating unbothered too.
Both of them.
Grandmother and Abigail. Side by side, cutting their food with identical terrifying precision, chewing at the exact sa unhurried pace, completely and utterly unbothered by the drama exploding around them.
Like the argunt was happening in another room. Another house. Another universe entirely. Just so trashy television show playing in the background that neither of them had bothered to turn off.
Fenris sighed.
Ate another bite.
Said nothing.
Then the Grandmother set her fork down.
The soft, deliberate clink of silver against porcelain shouldn’t have carried that much weight.
But it did.
Every single person at the table felt it like a gunshot. The Imdiates at the far end who had been pretending to be invisible for the last fifteen minutes went completely rigid. Anderson’s mother snapped her mouth shut mid-breath.
Andreas’s hand froze over his water glass. Even Evan who had been openly enjoying the show with barely concealed glee—straightened up in his chair like soone had shoved a rod up his spine.
The Grandmother looked at Anderson.
Her grey eyes — the sa grey as Fenris’s, the sa grey that had been judging Price family mbers across this table for years now settled on the scar-faced boy with the calm, asuring attention of a woman who weighed souls the way jewelers weighed diamonds.
Anderson felt her gaze like a physical force. A crushing pressure on his chest. A hand tightening around his throat. He shivered again, small, involuntary and his posture changed instantly. Spine straightening. Shoulders squaring. Chin lifting. Not courage but pure conditioning.
The Pavlovian response of a young man who had learned, through years in this house, that when Grandmother looked at you, you sat up straight, answered clearly, and prayed you didn’t disappoint... or you’d regret both failures for a very, very long ti.
On this table, Anderson feared exactly two people.
This terrifying woman.
And Abigail — sitting right beside her, still calmly eating her eggs like the entire table didn’t exist.
Those two ice-cold, soul-crushing won.
The Grandmother tilted her head slightly, voice soft but carrying the weight of centuries.
"Anderson." Just his na and nothing more, yet it landed harder than any scream.
Anderson swallowed hard, the scar on his face burning like fresh ice all over again.
And the temperature in the room had just dropped ten degrees... and everyone knew the real conversation was only beginning.
"Yes, Mada."
Anderson’s voice ca out quiet and respectful, his trembling hands hidden beneath the table like guilty secrets while he set his fork down with perfect precision. Every syllable was asured because Grandmother heard the ones you didn’t say far louder than the ones you did.
"Do you think the family should step in?" she asked, voice even and almost pleasant, in casual tone like asking about the weather... or deciding whether soone deserved to keep breathing. "Seek justice for what was done to you? We are certainly capable of that."
Anderson’s chest seized so violently he thought his heart might detonate right there at the table.
He wanted to scream.
Oh gods, how he wanted to scream.
Yes, Grandmother. Yes. Make them pay. Make HIM pay. Send everything we have — the lawyers, the fixers, the n who make problems disappear — send it all and destroy that boy the way he destroyed my face. I want to watch him bleed. I want to hear him beg. I want him to know what it feels like when soone takes everything from you and hums while they do it.
The scream clawed against his teeth, pressed against the ugly scar that split his face in two, burned through every nerve ending that still rembered the freezing cold, the ice blade, and that soft, patient lody.
He swallowed it down like broken glass.
"No, Mada."
The two words cost him sothing deep and permanent — sothing that cracked behind his ribs and would probably never heal right again.
"I am not proud of my actions," he continued, each word dragged out like stitches from an open wound. "I don’t seek justice for the consequences of what I did. They were... nothing more than a lesson. One I’ll learn from. I’ll conduct myself accordingly from now on. Enlightened by the experience."
He breathed in. Out. The scar on his face pulsed like it was laughing at him.
"And I’ll accept whatever punishnt the family deems appropriate for the damage I’ve caused. To the family. For the family."
He pushed his chair back, stood, and lowered himself to his knees on the cold marble floor beside the breakfast table — head bowed, trembling hands flat on his thighs, the perfect posture of a son offering himself up to a judgnt he couldn’t appeal.
"I’m sorry, Mada. I accept whatever the family decides."
The Grandmother watched him kneel in perfect silence. "That’s what I thought," she said flatly.
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