Chapter 136: The Currency of Souls

Roland’s hand shackled Cedric’s throat, his grip a crushing vise that threatened to splinter the delicate vertebrae of his neck.

Yet, Cedric didn’t struggle; he merely wore that signature, maddening smirk—a mask of infuriating confidence that remained undisturbed even as his oxygen ran thin. His eyes, cold and analytical, watched Roland’s descent into madness with a detached, clinical boredom.

“You gave me your word you would find her!” Roland roared, the sound vibrating with a raw, guttural agony.

“Where is she? I know that look, Alistair… that flickering shadow in your gaze. You’ve known her location from the very beginning, haven’t you?”

“And if I have?” Cedric managed, his voice strained and raspy from the constriction, yet dripping with a lethal, unbothered sarcasm.

In a blur of kinetic fury, Roland slammed Cedric against the stone wall, the impact shuddering through the foundations of the room. Roland’s amber eyes ignited with a predatory, lethal glow—the look of a beast who had finally run out of patience.

“Cedric Alistair… do not mistake my history for mercy,” Roland hissed, his face inches from the other man’s.

“You know this is her final night. The moon is a scythe, and time has run out. Are you truly intent on testing whether I will carve the truth out of your throat right here?”

“Peace, man… remove your claws.” Cedric slowly pried Roland’s fingers away, straightening his silk lapels as he dragged a jagged breath back into his lungs.

“You know I would never jeopardize our ends—especially not yours. Have you forgotten the blood we spilled to forge this alliance?”

“I don’t give a damn about treaties! To hell with the alliance!” Roland’s voice cracked, a frantic, jagged edge of hysteria bleeding through his rage.

“I need her tonight! Now! Tell me where he has hidden her, or I will burn this entire province to find the ashes!”

Cedric adjusted his silk collar with a chilling, clinical detachment. “Patience, Roland,” he murmured, his voice a low, rhythmic tether.

“Someone is already tasked with waking her, just as they were the ones to put her to sleep in the first place. There is no need for this frantic display of nerves… I am certain she will succeed.”

“She?”

The realization struck Roland like a physical blow, snapping his fury into a jagged, distorted grin of pure malice. The name bled from his lips with a bitter, toxic familiarity.

“Olivia… I should have known from the very beginning. The catalyst and the cure.”

He began to pace the room, his fingers raking through his hair with a manic energy. “The mother and the daughter… a reunion in the dark. How poetic! It seems I am obligated to pay my eldest daughter a visit tonight. I must show her the full extent of my… paternal affection.”

“Control your impulses!” Cedric called out, watching Roland turn toward the threshold. “I told you, she will handle the ritual. Why the haste?”

Roland spun back, his face a canvas of mocking derision. “I am going to see my wife, Alistair. And if she has not yet deigned to open her eyes… then wouldn’t it be a mercy to let her daughter join her? Since she has found it so impossible to let go of her until this very moment.”

Roland surged toward the courtyard, the thundering of his boots and the frantic neighing of his horse shattering the midnight silence of the estate.

Cedric struck his own forehead in a rare display of agitation; he had underestimated the sheer, unbridled lunacy that fueled Roland’s grief. A cold wave of regret washed over him. He knew Mathias would burn the world before letting a single hair on Olivia’s head be harmed, but Roland’s madness was a wildcard that defied logic. He truly feared for her now.

Elvira emerged from the shadows, her lips curled in a vitriolic sneer.

“It seems you’ve finally pushed your little lizard off the edge of the abyss,” she drawled, her voice dripping with lethal amusement. “Quite the fool, aren’t you, Cedric?”

**********

“Damn it! Damn it! DAMN IT!” Olivia shrieked, spinning toward Kira with eyes that blazed with a manic mixture of fury and hysteria. “Why did you not claw me back to consciousness? Why did you let me rot in that fog?”

Kira recoiled, her posture a jagged line of fear. “You banished me, My Lady… you commanded that you be left to your shadows, and so…”

“Enough!” Olivia cut her off, her chest heaving as the weight of the betrayal settled into her bones. “Where is Mathias?”

“The Duke departed the estate at dawn, My Lady… but he left a missive for your eyes only.”

“A letter?” Olivia snatched the parchment from Kira’s trembling hand, her fingers nearly tearing the vellum.

Mathias’s script was brief, surgically sharp, and devoid of a single heartbeat of warmth—it felt like a cold blade pressed against her throat:

“I have installed my mother in her former chambers, should you feel the inclination to pay her a visit.”

“Her former chambers?”

Olivia whispered the words, the syllables catching like dry thorns in her throat. She felt her heart battering against her ribs, a frantic, trapped animal. It wasn’t Mathias’s mother he was referring to; those abandoned rooms were a tomb, a place surrendered to dust and silence. He was speaking in a lethal, gilded code.

He had done it. He had installed Serene there—the corpse that refused to stay buried.

“This is well…” she murmured, a manic glint surfacing in her hollowed eyes. “This is better than any nightmare I could have fashioned.”

Olivia didn’t pause to scrub the black tracks of kohl from her cheeks or to change her linen, which remained scorched by the wine and filth of the previous night. She gripped the silver chalice containing Kyle’s blood with a white-knuckled intensity, as if it were the only anchor left in a world turned to glass.

“My Lady! Where are you going in such a state?” Kira’s voice trailed after her, a thin, useless plea, but Olivia was already a blur of silver and shadow in the vaulted corridor.

She moved like a wraith recently escaped from the abyss. Her platinum hair was a tangled shroud, her eyes two dark, predatory pits, and in her hand, she bore the crimson offering.

The guards in the hallways stood paralyzed, their breath hitching as the Duchess swept past—a woman who looked as though she had finally, irrevocably, lost her mind to the shadows.

When she reached the heavy doors of the ancient wing, she faltered. Her lungs burned with a ragged, uneven rhythm. She placed a trembling hand on the cold iron handle and pushed.

The room was bathed in the sickly, amber glow of low-burning candles. The scent of ancient incense hung heavy in the air, a cloying veil attempting to mask the copper tang of death that haunted Olivia’s senses.

With leaden steps, she approached the bed, her gaze anchoring to that pale, waxen face. She raised the chalice, the blood shimmering like liquid rubies in the candlelight, and whispered in a voice that was barely a tremor:

“I am sorry… I am so deeply sorry for dragging you back into this hideous world. Back into this labyrinth of unending hell… but I have no other path. The darkness demands its due.”

With a fractured, weeping strength, Olivia raised Serene’s small, lifeless frame, bracing the hollowed head against her trembling forearm. The silence in the room was suffocating, a heavy velvet shroud ready to be torn.

She began to pour Kyle’s blood—the lifeline—into the stagnant mouth.

Then came the impossible.

Though Serene remained a waxen, immobile specter, her body accepted the offering. It didn’t drain; it gulped, a phantom throat working with a sudden, predatory hunger that belonged only to the living.

A sickening, visceral rasp broke the silence. Beneath the skin, limbs long surrendered to rigor mortis began to move in subtle, spasmodic twitches, as if a rogue soul were being violently dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the withered pathways of her veins.

But the silver chalice was emptying. The divine current was running dry before the miracle could truly root.

“This is not enough! Never enough!” Olivia shrieked, her voice a jagged, fractured piece of despair as Serene’s body began to settle, the spasmodic life-force receding like a weak tide before the inexorable pull of the grave.

At that threshold of failure, her profound grief twisted, congealing into a singular, crystallized madness. She stared at the empty, mocking chalice.

With a force born of absolute, terrified desperation, she smashed the silver against the black bedpost. The impact was deafening. The vessel shattered, leaving a fractured shard that was as sharp and lethal as any master’s razor.

She fixed her gaze on the jagged edge, a chilling stillness consuming her. “Perhaps…” she whispered to the shadows, her voice a low, terrifying hum. “It is not entirely without merit to discover my ancestry in this manner.”

She stared at the jagged edge of the shattered silver for several long, airless minutes. Her gaze then drifted to her own palm, lifting it slowly as if it belonged to a stranger. With a sudden, violent lunge, she drove the shard deep into the center of her hand.

The impact was sharp—a white-hot, agonizing puncture. The visceral, wet sound of tearing flesh echoed in the silent room, a noise that should have made her skin crawl, yet it felt like nothing compared to the hollow ruin within her.

She performed the act with a chilling, routine coldness, as if she were merely mending a torn garment rather than her own anatomy.

A torrent of blood erupted, cascading from her palm like a dark, heavy waterfall. For a few suspended heartbeats, she simply watched it, mesmerized by the way the crimson stained her ivory silk gown—a beautiful, macabre ruin.

Then, snapping out of her trance, she thrust her hemorrhaging hand toward Serene’s waiting mouth. She allowed the torrent to cascade into the void, a living stream meant to break the seal of death.

As the liquid heat left her body, joining with Kyle’s, Olivia leaned close to Serene’s ear, her breath a cold, unholy caress.

“If you awaken now,” she murmured, a jagged smirk playing on her lips, “This… this will be absolute, perfect madness.”

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