Chapter 183: Chapter-183

Duke Ashford leaned forward, his voice dangerous. “Your Majesty, we came here in good faith—”

“You came here,” Heena interrupted, “because my aunt summoned you. And you came running like obedient dogs at five in the morning, which tells me exactly how much power she has over you.”

The Duchess smiled slightly but said nothing.

“And now that you’re here,” Heena continued, “let’s discuss why you’re ’really’ here. Let’s talk about the fact that one of your precious sons got a woman pregnant. Let’s talk about the assassination attempts. Let’s talk about the corruption, the embezzlement, the complete and utter ’failure’ of your sons to fulfill their duties as imperial consorts.”

She gestured at her ridiculous golden dress.

“This dress? This is a ’statement’. It says: I am the Empress, and I can wear whatever I want, no matter how absurd, and you still have to respect me. Just like your sons can apparently do whatever they want—commit treason, father illegitimate children, attempt murder—and still expect to keep their positions.”

She leaned forward, and despite the ridiculous dress, her presence was absolutely commanding.

“But that ends today,” she said coldly. “Today, we’re going to have a very honest conversation about your sons’ behavior. And about what consequences are coming for all of you.”

The patriarchs stared at her, finally understanding that this wasn’t just a bizarre fashion choice.

This was a power move.

And they’d walked right into it.

The Duchess, still in her pajamas, smiled and said cheerfully, “So gentlemen, shall we begin? I believe we have a lot to discuss.”

The four patriarchs looked at each other, then at the Empress in her golden monstrosity of a dress, then at the Duchess in her pajamas.

And they realized they’d severely underestimated both women.

Heena looked around at the four men sitting in front of her.

’Seasoned foxes’, she thought. ’Old, careful, powerful.’

And yet right now they looked exactly like what they were — fathers who had just realized their sons had handed someone a loaded weapon and aimed it directly at their family names.

She almost felt something for them.

Almost.

She turned her gaze to Duke Remington.

Damien’s father.

Bald, broad, expensive rings on every finger. The kind of man who collected things — land, titles, wives, children — with the same casual acquisitiveness of someone who never had to think about the cost. He had married four times. Maybe five. Heena had stopped counting because frankly it wasn’t interesting, it was just ’exhausting’ on behalf of everyone involved.

Damien’s mother had been a commoner. A beautiful one, apparently, because Remington had wanted her the way he wanted things — suddenly and completely and without much consideration for what happened after. He’d gotten her, gotten a son, and then moved on to the next acquisition, leaving behind a boy who had grown up in a ducal house being raised by servants and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from being simultaneously acknowledged and ignored.

Heena looked at the old man’s face and thought: ’there it is. That’s where Damien learned that people are things.’

She felt no sympathy for Duke Remington.

She felt a distant, cold something for Damien that she immediately filed away and didn’t examine.

She looked away from him and addressed all four of them at once.

“I don’t care,” she said simply, “what you do with your sons when you get home. Beat them, lecture them, disown them, throw them a celebration — frankly, not my problem. I am not here to discuss discipline.”

She leaned forward slightly.

“I want to ask you one thing.”

The room was absolutely silent.

Heena smiled — slow, deliberate, the smile she reserved for moments like this.

“What would happen,” she said, “if I declared that the child belonged to all five of them?”

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence.

She watched the color drain from four faces in real time.

Not just pale — ’white’. The white of men who had just seen the ground open under their feet and had exactly one second to register the drop before the fall.

Because they understood immediately. All four of them, seasoned foxes that they were, understood exactly what that declaration would mean.

It wouldn’t matter if it was true.

It wouldn’t matter if it was provable.

The ’Empress’ saying it, with all the weight of imperial authority behind it, with five consorts who could not cleanly prove otherwise — that alone was enough to drag all five houses into a scandal that would take decades to recover from. Illegitimate children were manageable. ’This’ — collective moral failure, imperial betrayal, a circus of competing paternity claims in the most politically visible marriage in the empire — was not manageable.

It was ruin.

Clean, total, generational ruin.

“Your Majesty.” Duke Ashford’s voice was very careful. “You cannot—”

“My son is ’not—’” Duke Remington started.

“Your Majesty, this is—” Duke Hart began.

Heena raised one hand.

They stopped.

All four of them, mid-sentence, stopped.

“Your son,” she said, looking at each of them in turn. “’Your son.’ That’s what you want to say, isn’t it? Your son isn’t like that. Your son wouldn’t do that. Your son is above this.”

She let that sit for exactly two seconds.

“You run intelligence networks that receive foreign news faster than my own palace reports,” she said, her voice dropping to something quieter and considerably more dangerous. “You have ears in every major household in this empire. You knew about ’everything’ that happened in the eastern trade routes before I’d finished my morning tea.” She tilted her head. “And you’re telling me you had no idea what your sons were doing inside my own palace walls?”

Their jaws tightened.

Fists, she noticed, clenched against thighs.

“Don’t embarrass yourselves further by saying it,” she said pleasantly. “We all know the truth. You knew. You calculated that it was fine — that I was distracted, that the consorts were too useful to touch, that the empire’s stability was a shield around your sons’ behavior.” She paused. “You weren’t wrong. For a while.”

She looked at Duke Remington specifically.

“Even leaving the child aside,” she said, “the fact that no one can clearly identify the father — the fact that there is ’genuine confusion’ about who is responsible — that alone tells me what your sons have been doing. What kind of marriage they were maintaining. What kind of men they were choosing to be.”

Duke Remington’s face had gone from white to red.

“And you think I—” he started.

“I think,” Heena said quietly, “that you should choose your next sentence very carefully.”

He closed his mouth.

“Do you think,” she continued, looking around at all of them, “that I’m afraid of them? That I’ve been protecting them out of sentiment? That I have—” she paused, and something flickered in her expression that was almost amusement, “—fallen in love with them? Is that what your sons told you?”

Silence.

A very telling silence.

Heena looked at them and felt the shape of it.

’That’s exactly what they told you.’

They’d gone home to their fathers, these five men, and painted a picture of an Empress who was entangled. Emotionally compromised. Too invested to act. They’d constructed a version of Heena that was soft in the right places, and their fathers had believed it because it was useful to believe it.

“Interesting,” she said softly.

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