Chapter 125: Chapter 125: Home

The champagne glass slipped from Delphine’s fingers, shattering on the balcony floor like a thousand tiny stars. The sound was swallowed by the unnatural silence Gregoris had created around them. “Please,” she whispered, her voice cracking as she finally dropped all pretense. “I’m Rafael’s mother. Think of Layle too, his children need their grandmother.”

Gregoris didn’t even blink at the mention of her other son. He had wasted enough time listening to her manipulations. “Rafael doesn’t need a mother,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. “Not one like you.”

Before Delphine could form another desperate plea, Gregoris moved. With a flick of his wrist, a blade of pure ether materialized in his hand, shimmering with a cold blue light that seemed to drink in the moonlight. One moment he was leaning against the rail; the next he was before her. The ethereal edge kissed her throat.

Delphine froze so hard it looked like the night had turned her to porcelain. Her breath hitched shallow, and the fear in her eyes finally became honest. She couldn’t charm a blade. She couldn’t negotiate with certainty.

Gregoris watched the shift in her eyes, the genuine terror that was so much more satisfying than her skilled theatrics.

He leaned in slightly, his voice a low, cold murmur that was for her alone. “You see,” he said, his gaze dropping to the blade pressed against her skin, “this is what you never understood. You can’t poison a blade. You can’t shame it. You can’t twist its purpose with pretty words.”

He paused, letting the weight of his words settle in the air between them, heavier than the silence. “All the years you spent making Rafael feel small, all the poison you dripped into his ear… it was just noise. This,” he pressed the ether-light edge a fraction deeper, a shimmering line of impossible cold, “this is consequence.”

Delphine made a sound – barely a breath, barely a whimper – like her body had tried to remember how to plead and forgot the steps.

The blade sat there, cold enough that her skin prickled where it hovered, cold enough that her instincts screamed at her to step back even though there was nowhere to go.

Gregoris watched her eyes flick to the railing, to the open night, to the locked line of his shoulders.

She was measuring distance. She was still attempting to bargain with physics.

“Gregoris,” she whispered again, and the sweetness was gone now. In its place there was something ugly and real. “You can’t do this. Not here. Not to me.”

He didn’t blink.

“That is the mistake,” he said quietly. Delphine’s throat bobbed around the edge. She didn’t dare swallow again.

“I’m…” Her voice cracked. “I’m his mother.”

“You were,” Gregoris corrected, calm as winter. “Then you turned motherhood into a leash.”

Her eyes glistened, not with tears yet, but with the violence of holding them back. “He will regret this.”

Gregoris’s gaze didn’t shift from her face. “He won’t.”

“How do you know?” Delphine hissed, a flash of pride trying to climb back onto her spine. “You think you know him better than I do?”

Gregoris’s expression didn’t change, but something in the air did. A subtle tightening. A pressure that said the world itself had agreed to stop entertaining her.

“I asked him,” Gregoris said. “I asked him if he was okay with what you would face.”

Delphine went very still.

“He said yes,” Gregoris added, voice flat.

“You made him say that,” she whispered, because she needed it to be true. “You manipulated him.”

Gregoris’s mouth twitched in disbelief.

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “You did that yourself.”

Delphine’s lips trembled, a final, pathetic attempt at forming a plea. It was the look she had given Rafael a thousand times when she realized her manipulation had failed and only cruelty was left.

Gregoris felt nothing. He had seen her break Rafael’s spirit with that same expression. He was simply returning the favor.

He didn’t give her the satisfaction of a dramatic struggle. He simply drew the blade across her throat in a single, fluid motion. The cut was incredibly clean.

A spray of crimson erupted, stark against the shimmering blue of the ether, but it arced back to stain only the front of Delphine’s expensive, modern gown.

The dark red bloomed across the pale fabric like a grotesque flower, ruining her perfect facade.

Gregoris remained immaculate, his black suit, white shirt, and sapphire cufflinks untouched.

Her body crumpled to the floor beside the broken glass, her expensive gown now a canvas of her final moments.

Gregoris looked down at her without a flicker of emotion. The problem was solved. He straightened his already immaculate cuffs, already thinking of home, of Rafael waiting for him, of the peace that would now settle in their shared space. With a subtle shift of his will, the balcony dissolved around him, and the muffled sounds of the gala returned as if nothing had happened.

Gregoris stepped back into the ballroom, another shadow in the crowd, already forgotten by the revelers continuing their dance.

Light, music, perfume, laughter – the entire room breathing in glitter and pretending it was civilization. The ether whale still drifted overhead, obscene and adored, breathing water into a mirrored basin while people clapped like they weren’t applauding waste.

Because Gregoris walked like the room belonged to him and he was simply moving through his own property.

The silence he had wrapped around the balcony stayed behind it, sealed and private, folded neatly back into the mansion’s ether lattice like a letter placed into an envelope and burned.

He crossed the edge of the crowd, letting the press of bodies mask him. A noblewoman laughed too loudly at nothing. A duke somewhere boasted about hunting rights. Two debutantes whispered about someone’s neckline like it was a national security concern.

Gregoris didn’t care.

His phone vibrated once in his pocket.

A short, sharp message from a number he didn’t need to save.

’Done?’

He didn’t reply with words. He sent a single symbol. ’✔’

Then he moved—through the ballroom, through a corridor, through the manor with the same swiftness that had always made people step out of his way before they understood why.

House Crystal’s guards looked at him and looked away as every instinct in their bodies recognized a predator who didn’t need a reason.

Outside, the night air hit him clean and cold.

’I want home.’ Was his only thought.

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