Chapter 128: A Spring Without Flowers

Olivia’s gaze remained anchored to Serene’s face—a death mask of waxy, bloodless pallor that turned her stomach. For a phantom heartbeat, a fractured part of her soul craved the impossible: to reach out, to cradle that familiar warmth, to pretend the world hadn’t gone dark. But the longing was instantly devoured by the jagged, shrieking memory of the steel. She could still feel it—the sickening shink of the dagger shearing through muscle, the hot, wet bloom of her own life spilling over her fingers, and the bone-deep chill of betrayal that had heralded her end.

Before she could retreat into the void of her mind, Mathias’s hand struck. His fingers clamped around her wrist like a jagged iron vice, his grip devoid of any shred of mercy. With a brutal, jarring yank, he forced her downward.

The contact was electric and foul. Her fingertips skidded across Serene’s skin—a surface as cold and unresponsive as a frozen slab of meat.

Olivia recoiled as if branded by a white-hot iron. A snarl ripped from her throat as she shoved him back, her strength fueled by a desperate, newfound savagery that nearly cracked his ribs. As she stood, the last vestiges of her humanity seemed to drain away; her eyes bled into twin pools of absolute obsidian—voids of cold, predatory fury that promised nothing but ruin.

“What is wrong with you? Is there a problem?” Mathias’s voice sliced through the silence, layered with a thin, oily veneer of concern that made her skin crawl. It wasn’t the worry of a lover; it was the scrutiny of a collector checking a prized specimen for cracks.

Olivia didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. Her lungs felt filled with ground glass, each breath a jagged, hitching struggle as she reached for the white linen shroud. With a touch that was both trembling and ferociously protective, she dragged the fabric back over the corpse. She wasn’t just covering a body; she was barricading the dead against the voyeuristic filth of the living.

“This woman…” Olivia began, her voice dropping into a low, venomous hiss that vibrated in the hollow of her throat. “She might have been bound to my father by law, but she was the only mother I ever truly knew. Do you even possess the capacity to grasp that, Mathias? Or is your soul too hollow?”

“I know, but—”

“You know? You know?” She cut him off with a laugh that sounded like a bone snapping—bitter, sharp, and utterly devoid of mirth. “You dragged her here like a piece of butchered livestock. You and my father… you’re both vultures. Neither of you has the right to desecrate her like this, turning the remains of a woman who died in agony into a wretched pawn for your political games.”

Mathias blinked, his golden eyes flickering like a dying candle in a gale. For a moment, his composure fractured. “I thought… I thought you wanted to see her.”

​”To see her?” Olivia lunged toward him, the space between them incinerated by the heat of her fury. “She isn’t a trinket you can fetch for my amusement! What kind of madness has hollowed out your head, man?”

​Mathias didn’t flinch. Instead, he exhaled a long, heavy sigh—the sound of a man bored by a repetitive play. He reached up, his fingers raking through his dark hair with a slow, clinical nonchalance that was more insulting than a slap. When his hand dropped, the mask of concern was gone, discarded like a useless rag. In its place was a gaze of such glacial, cutting precision that it felt like a blade pressed against her throat.

​”I didn’t expect a lecture on the sanctity of the soul from you, Olivia,” he drawled. The words didn’t fall; they dripped, heavy with a lethal, quiet sarcasm that poisoned the air between them. He tilted his head, his eyes tracking the frantic pulse in her neck. “Spare me the sanctimony, darling. It’s a tedious look on you, and frankly? It doesn’t suit the blood already on your hands.”

​The air left Olivia’s lungs. The retort she had prepared shattered, the “Huh?” catching in her throat like a shard of jagged glass, drawing blood before she could even speak.

Mathias let out a dry, rattling laugh—a sound like dead leaves scraping against a gravestone. He didn’t flinch at her touch; he stood like a monolith of cold marble, looking down at her through those hollow, predatory golden eyes. A jagged, mocking smirk played across his lips, sharp enough to draw blood.

​”First,” he began, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly rhythmic cadence that felt like a predator circling its prey, “keeping her within these walls is a mercy compared to letting her rot under that raving lunatic, Roland. And second…” He paused, the air between them thick with the scent of old blood and heavy ozone. “This is not merely the Duchess of Tharon; she is the Imperial Princess. The Emperor’s hounds will catch the scent sooner or later, and when the shadow of the throne falls upon us…”

​He leaned in, his shadow swallowing her whole. His breath ghosted against the sensitive shell of her ear—cold, sharp, and laced with the bitter tang of tobacco. “Do I truly need to remind you, Olivia, whose hands are stained with her lifeblood? It was your steel that ended her. Do you truly wish to watch my wife rot in the Imperial pits, or perhaps you’d prefer to see her head roll across the executioner’s platform?”

​Olivia didn’t scream; she didn’t have the air for it. Instead, she surged forward, closing the microscopic gap between them until her chest collided with his. Her fists curled into white-knuckled knots, bruising against his blood-clotted tunic with a frantic, desperate force that spoke of a mind breaking under the weight of his words.

​”I am doing everything!” she hissed, the words a jagged crescendo of raw fury and suffocating terror. “I am clawing at the filth, tearing my own soul apart to keep you from the hell that’s coming. And you?” She leaned into his space, her eyes burning voids. “You sprint toward the flames as if you crave the burn. Do you even realize the magnitude of the catastrophe you’ve invited through those doors?”

Mathias went still, a ghost of a sickeningly innocent smile playing on his lips. He tilted his head back, exhaling a long, silver plume of gray smoke that curled away from her face like a dying spirit.

​”Protect me?” he drawled. The words were laced with a lethal, quiet sarcasm that felt like a slow-acting poison. “Who granted you the burden of my safety, Olivia? Since when did my heartbeat become your charity project?”

​He didn’t move to shrug off her grip, but his presence was a cold, suffocating weight—a gravity that sought to crush her. “I’m not particularly fond of this existence, in case you’ve failed to notice. So spare me the martyr’s theatrics. I didn’t ask for a shield, and I certainly didn’t ask for you to scavenge for a soul that was charred to ash long before you arrived. Stop pinning your desperation on me; these trivialities aren’t worth the breath you’re wasting.”

​”Easy now,” Mathias murmured, his voice a low vibration that seemed to thrum against the cold steel of the blade she held. “It was merely in my pocket. I… misplaced it there, nothing more.”

​The lie was blatant, pulsing in his golden eyes like a dying candle flickering in a draft, but Olivia found she lacked the strength to gut the truth from him. The last two hours had been a visceral onslaught—her world had tilted on its axis, her sight had been restored only to witness a nightmare, and a fresh corpse lay cooling in the adjacent room. A sickening vertigo swirled in her skull, making the stone floor feel like shifting water.

​With a heavy, defeated motion, she lowered the knife, concealing the jagged metal behind her back. She watched him—silent and hollow—as he reached into his pocket. With a slow, deliberate grace, he produced the obsidian ring and slid it back onto his finger, the dark stone catching the light like a drop of congealed blood. She stared at him, her eyes searching for the man beneath the layers of masks, finding only a void that stared back.

​”Mathias?”

​”What? Are we back to the bloodletting, or shall we continue the verbal flaying?” he asked, his tone laced with that familiar, jagged mockery that felt like a serrated blade against her nerves.

​Olivia ignored the barb, her gaze dropping to the floor, tracking the patterns of dust and dried blood. “Have you ever… considered taking a mistress?”

​The air in the room seemed to vanish. Mathias froze, his hand arrested in mid-air, the obsidian ring catching a stray, sickly beam of light. A genuine flicker of bewilderment cracked his stony expression—a rare, unscripted moment of humanity. “Are you truly asking me this now? In the presence of the dead?”

​”You know the truth,” Olivia began, her voice small, brittle, and stripped of its former fire. “After Elias was dragged into this world, the healers were blunt. The trauma… the damage… the chances of me conceiving again are microscopic. I am a barren field, Mathias.” She forced herself to look up, her eyes wide and searching his for a truth she was terrified to uncover. “So tell me, Mathias,” she murmured, her gaze unwavering. “Will you go searching for a new, fertile soil to plant your legacy? Or will you wait for the desolate earth standing before you—the one whose spring might never, ever bloom?”

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