Chapter 886 - 885- The Pre-written Fates

Chapter 886: Chapter 885- The Pre-written Fates

The words hit Elena like a slap across the face.

Her jaw clamped shut. Her fingernails bit half-moons into her palms. Every muscle in her body pulled toward that window, toward his throat, toward murder in its pureest and most stupid form.

"You bastard!"

He ignored her. He said it the way a man ignores weather, and turned his attention back down to the girl swallowing him, and spoke as if Elena were already a hundred miles away.

"Mrs. Tanabe was really good with her poses and her tightness. But you lack that excitement."

On the bed, Yuki trembled. Her hand on his ass clenched. Her eyes went wide, and her body started to pull back, to shrink, to push herself away from him.

Viktor looked down at her. Only that. A look.

"You know what would happen if you would protest, my dear Yuki."

The protest died before it was born. Elena watched it die. She watched the girl’s stiff arms go slack, watched her hands fall to the mattress, watched the tears slide down her cheeks in two silent lines while her mouth kept its shape around his cock and her head kept its rhythm.

’She is cornered. Completely. He has something over her, or over her family, or over something she cannot abandon, and she is letting her own face be used as a toy because of it.’

He took her head in both hands and began to fuck her mouth in earnest. Yuki’s throat bulged with each stroke. Wet, obscene sounds filled the little room, gluck, gluck, gluck, the slap of his sack against her chin, the breathless little hm, hm, hm noises she made when he let her breathe.

Sophia watched from the bedside with her chin in her hand, patient as a nurse.

He finished without ceremony. He drove in to the root, held her nose against his body, and emptied himself straight down her throat. Yuki’s eyes rolled back. Her heels drummed once against the mattress. He pulled out and she coughed around the overflow, seed and spit dripping from her chin, a thin line leaking from her nose.

He stroked himself three more times, milking the last of it across her tongue, and smirked.

"Congratulations. You would soon have a brother."

Yuki stared at the floor. Her voice came out flat and small.

"Thank you."

Elena walked away from the window on legs she could not feel.

’He has become a devil.’

## Part II: The Hallway

She half ran, half strode through the halls, uncaring of the stares now, her mind sprinting ahead of her feet.

’Dammit. I need to move my plans forward. Tonight. Tomorrow at the latest. I need to report to Prince Leo. He still commands the faction guard, he can open an investigation, he can send riders to the estate, maybe I should just declare Ktorian outright. An accusation. Treason. Something that sticks before he decides to swallow my family whole and move on to the next one.’

She was so deep in the planning that she did not register the woman standing in the middle of the corridor until she nearly collided with her.

"My, my. Walking well, are we, Miss Elena?"

Lyssa.

The noblewoman stood framed in the tall window at the corridor’s end, golden light pouring over her, dressed in a way that said she had come from somewhere she wanted people to guess about. Which Elena did not have to guess at all. The whole east wing had heard her last night, muffled through the walls of the prince’s guest quarters, moaning Leo’s name like a paid performer.

’A leg-spreading bitch in an expensive dress,’ Elena thought, straightening her collar. ’That is all this woman is. A sofa for the prince to rest on.’

"I could walk straight," Elena said, "if not for someone having their legs stiff in the middle of every hallway."

Lyssa smiled the smile of a cat watching a bird fly into glass. "Oh, by the way. I forgot to tell you. Your brother Aldric. Isn’t Yuki his girlfriend or something?"

Elena stopped.

So that was the game. Gossip as a blade. Fine. She had been cutting with duller knives since she was twelve.

She arranged her face into pity. "She is getting fucked by Professor Ktorian nowadays. Don’t you think that counts as cheating on him? Someone should tell poor Aldric what his sweetheart does after her evening training."

She had expected a scandalized gasp. A rumor to redirect. What she got was a shrug.

"It doesn’t matter to me."

Lyssa turned to leave, and the flatness of it, the total absence of a wound, made Elena’s ears burn. She was being dismissed. By a sofa.

"I know about your brother’s impotency," Elena said, lash of the last resort.

Lyssa stopped mid-turn. For one heartbeat Elena thought she had landed a real cut.

Then the woman laughed, low and warm, and looked back over her shoulder with genuine amusement in her eyes.

"Elena. Sweet girl. I already know everything."

She let the silence stretch, savoring it, twisting the knife with theatrical patience.

"The moment Aldric stopped being important, Yuki spread her legs toward someone else. Doesn’t it look funny?" Her head tilted. "It looks like Yuki is just like you."

"A bitch," Lyssa said pleasantly. "I believe that was the word you were searching for. You did not have to say it. Everyone thinks it anyway."

Elena’s hand closed into a fist at her side. The old lesson rose in her, the one her mother taught her at thirteen, never let them see the crack. But Lyssa was already walking, done with her, and the crack opened all on its own.

"Miss Elena," Lyssa called back, without turning, her voice sing-song.

"I heard you were engaged to Viktor Ktorian once. But you broke it off, blaming him for this and that." A pause, precisely measured. "I bet he left you because you could not satisfy him in bed. You were simply not his type."

"I was not his type?" The words tore out of Elena before she could cage them. "How dare you. I was the one who chose to break the engagement. He was a rural nobody, a border count’s relic, he was beneath..."

"You were a viscount," Lyssa said, and her voice dropped all its music at last, going cold and clean as a blade across silk. "And he was a count and now a duke. He is above you now. Above your family. Above you. Perhaps one day might be above your prince. Do not make it sound funny, Miss Elena."

She walked away and did not look back again.

Elena stood alone in the golden corridor, shaking, her nails dug into her palm hard enough to draw blood.

Every road was closing. Leo was cooling. Her family was silent. Her brother was a joke, and the joke was public. The academy she had come to own had become a house of Ktorian’s windows and Ktorian’s portals, and now even the corridor gossip had turned and started feeding on her instead of for her.

The pride said wait. The animal underneath the pride said otherwise.

’I cannot reach Leo in time. I cannot reach my family at all. I cannot even reach a rumor without it turning in my hands.’

There was exactly one person in this academy who had all the answers. Who her father was. Why the roads were sealed. What had been done to her mother. What had been done to Yuki. What, exactly, was closing around her life like a fist.

And hating him changed nothing about the arithmetic.

Elena unclenched her jaw, smoothed her ruined hair with one shaking hand, and set off down the corridor toward the one place she had sworn never to go looking for him.

’I need to meet Ktorian.’