Chapter 84: Chapter-84

Heena hadn’t even finished her sentence when—

’SLAM.’

The door burst open so hard it hit the wall.

Every last thread of patience she had left snapped clean through.

She shot to her feet, her chair scraping back loud enough to echo. “’What the fuck are you doing right now?!’”

Guards rushed in from the corridor outside, hands already moving toward their weapons, faces arranged in the specific alertness of people who have been trained to respond to exactly this kind of sound—

But then Heena saw who it was.

Estov stood in the doorway, chest heaving, hair falling half out of whatever he’d done with it earlier, eyes wide and wild in a way she had never seen on him before. He looked like a man who had run the entire length of the palace and was still running in his head.

“You damn woman, I want to talk—” he started, voice ragged, then caught himself mid-shout, his tone shifting so abruptly it made even the guards blink. “I mean, ’Your Majesty’, I ’really’ need to talk to you!”

Heena stared at the sudden shift — the way his expression had rearranged itself from fury into something almost pleading, almost gentle, the kind of desperate politeness that people deploy when they are very aware they have just done something incredibly stupid and are trying to recover before consequences arrive.

She thought, with a kind of tired resignation, ’Oh no. Now what?’

She waved a hand at the guards without looking at them. “Get out. Close the door.”

They hesitated — glanced at each other, glanced at Estov, glanced at her — but she was the Empress and they were guards and the hierarchy of those two facts was not ambiguous. They bowed, stepped back into the corridor, and pulled the door shut behind them with a solid click.

The moment the door closed, Heena turned on him.

“Do you not,” she said, voice low and dangerously even, “have even a ’slight’ sense of manners? What is this behavior — kicking doors open like some kind of barbarian who’s never seen the inside of a palace before? I am genuinely confused how you have survived this long without someone stabbing you.”

Estov, instead of apologizing, instead of backtracking, instead of doing any of the sensible things a person might do when confronted by an angry empress in the middle of the night, looked her directly in the eye and said:

“You damn fucking ’bitch’.”

Heena went very still.

Her head tilted, just slightly. Her expression shifted into something that was, technically, calm. Smooth. Pleasant, even.

There was a smile on her face.

A very gentle smile.

The kind of smile that made the air in the room feel thinner.

Even System 427, who had been observing from his usual position in the back of her mind, quietly floated five steps backward and tucked himself behind the mental equivalent of a curtain.

Estov saw the warning. He ’saw’ it — the shift in her posture, the particular quality of the silence she was generating, the way her eyes had gone flat and bright at the same time. He registered all of it.

But panic had overridden every instinct for self-preservation he possessed.

“Are you ’crazy’?!” he shouted, stepping forward, hands gesturing wildly. “Why did you send me to that old witch?! Do you have any idea what she ’is’?! Do you know what the ’fuck’ just happened?!”

Heena raised one hand. The motion was small, precise, the kind of gesture that says ’stop’ without requiring any additional words.

“First,” she said, her voice still carrying that dangerous, crystalline calm, “stop using abusive language in my presence. Second, speak ’normally’. Use your words like a person who has attended more than three days of schooling. What. Is. It.”

Estov stared at her for half a second, breathing hard, then jabbed a finger in her direction.

“She’s a fucking ’magician’!” he said, the words coming out jagged and loud. “And she ’knows’ who I am!”

Heena blinked once. “Well, of course she knows who you are. She practically raised Aston alongside the imperial family. As for being a magician—” she shrugged, one shoulder, unbothered, “—I’ve heard the rumors. It’s not exactly a secret.”

Estov looked at her like she had just told him the sky was green and expected him to agree.

“Are you ’hearing’ yourself right now?!” His voice climbed higher, desperation threading through every syllable. “Are you even ’listening’ to what I’m saying?!”

He stepped closer, close enough that a guard would have intervened if there had been any guards in the room.

“That woman ’knows’,” he said, slower this time, enunciating each word like he was trying to get through to someone who didn’t speak the language. “She knows that I — the person inside Aston’s body — am ’someone else’. Not Aston. Not the original. ’Me.’ A completely different person. She ’knows’.”

Heena’s pen, which had been resting against the edge of her desk, stopped moving.

She looked up at him.

“What,” she said quietly, “did you just say?”

He met her gaze, still breathing hard, sweat visible at his temples. “That’s what I’m ’saying’! That woman knows who I am — the ’real’ me. She cornered me, she looked me in the eye, and she ’knew’. She didn’t guess. She didn’t suspect. She ’knew’.”

Heena was silent for a moment.

Then she said, very calmly, “Oh. Is that so?”

Estov stared at her.

She was looking at him with mild interest, the way someone might look at a weather report that confirmed it was going to rain.

“Did you not ’hear’ what I just said?!” He threw his hands up, voice breaking slightly at the edges. “I just told you that one of the most powerful people in this empire knows I’m a transmigrator! She threatened me with a ’knife’! She—”

Heena raised her hand again. “Enough. Stop repeating yourself. I heard you the first time. Clear and loud.”

Estov froze mid-gesture, mouth still open.

“Then why,” he said, slowly, like he was trying very hard to be patient and failing, “are you not ’saying’ anything? Do you understand what this ’means’?! She could expose us! She could—”

“Enough,” Heena interrupted, her tone flat and final. “How many times are you going to say the same line? Of course I know. It’s not shocking news.”

Estov’s brain visibly stalled.

“…What?”

Heena set her pen down, leaned back in her chair, and looked at him the way a teacher looks at a student who has just asked why two plus two equals four.

“Do you know,” she said, “why the previous Emperor wanted an ’unrelated’ woman as his sworn sister? Why he cared about her so much, valued her opinion above almost anyone else’s, gave her a title and land and influence when she had no blood claim to any of it?”

Estov opened his mouth. Closed it. Said nothing.

“Do you think,” Heena continued, voice even and unbothered, “that anyone who enters the royal family — even as a trusted companion, even as an adoptive sibling — isn’t a seasoned fox? Do you honestly believe that the woman who ’became the Emperor’s sister’ is some kind of fool who stumbled into the position by accident?”

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