Novel Full Chapter 1657 Relief
“Mmh! Mmhh!” Vivienne’s nose was running and her forehead pressed hard into his thigh, her body shaking with the kind of crying that only happens when a terror carried for months is lifted in three words.
The armor flared.
Every crimson thread along the dark plate lit at once in a pulse of red that filled the chamber, and both women flinched away from his legs as if the metal had gone white-hot. Their eyes blew wide, their hands snapped to their sides, and the message landed in their spines before it reached their brains: you’re too close to my master! Get away!
“Yes!” the twins shouted, Vivienne even saluting the armor, knowing her place in the hierarchy.
Then, they threw themselves into each other’s arms on the floor, hugging so hard their bodies shook, bloodied nightgowns tangling on cold stone.
“We did a good job!” Vivienne sobbed into her sister’s neck.
“We did! We did a good job!” Amara wailed back, fingers clawing into Vivienne’s shoulders. “He said we did!”
They rolled once on the stone, clutching each other, crying, pressing their faces together. The sound that filled the chamber was so bright and so wrong that Alastair could only stare at the ceiling above his bleeding chest and listen to his daughters celebrate the assault of their parents in each other’s arms on the floor of his bedroom.
Eveliana had watched none of it. Her attention had been on Ophira since the twins left the bed, and she stood now at the Duchess’s side, looking down at the woman who had stolen everything she was born to have.
“I’ll give you this,” Eveliana said, and her voice carried a lightness that was worse than venom. “You played the consort game well.”
She tilted her head.
“My mother was a carefree woman. She liked her tea parties and her paintings and her little shopping sprees. She was happy being a noblewoman of high privilege, and she had no interest in playing politics with a snake who slithered into her home.”
Her gaze traveled the length of Ophira’s body.
“But you plotted and plotted, cruelly and patiently, year after year. And look where it got you.” Her mouth curved. “Alone in the Duke’s bed as his only woman. The sole consort of a duchy. You truly are an exceptional snake, Ophira. Credit where it’s earned.”
Ophira’s lips moved. Blood sat at the corners of her mouth and her stomach burned with the wound that was killing her, but the accusation reached the part of her that still knew how to bite.
“You know… nothing…” she whispered, and her eyes narrowed above the ruin of her gut. “Your mother was a fool… who couldn’t hold her husband’s eye… I gave this family everything it has…”
Alastair turned his head on the pillow. The dagger in his chest kept his body pinned and his regeneration crushed, but the word ‘fool’ caught against his fading comprehension and held there. His gaze found his firstborn daughter, and the woman he found bore no resemblance to the girl who once lived in his palace.
That girl had been quiet, moving through the halls with her head tucked and her presence made small. Just a lovely kid, pure and innocent, wishing harm to no one, even treating the lowest of servants with utmost respect.
The woman standing over Ophira did not tuck her head and did not shrink. When the leash slipped, neither parent understood what hit them.
The student of the Primordial Dread, Dragnar, growled.
“Even now… You dare speak ill of my late mother?”
The aura rolled out of Eveliana’s body in a wave that crushed every breath Ophira tried to draw, and in the same motion her hand closed around the Duchess’s throat and lifted.
Ophira left the bed. Her body rose until her feet dangled above the mattress and her bloodied nightgown hung from her frame like a burial shroud, her hands clawing at the fingers around her neck, her legs kicking once, twice, then going still when the warmth spread between her thighs and ran down her calves in a thin stream that pattered onto the linen below.
Eveliana watched it happen with no expression at all.
“For twenty years,” she said, “I imagined what I would do when this moment came.”
Her chin dipped.
“For the first nineteen, it was just a dream. A wistful little fantasy I conjured on bad nights when the only thing left to keep me going was the part of me that still remembered what you did.” She held Ophira’s bulging gaze. “I would peel the skin from your arms in long strips and heal you before you bled out, just so I could start again. I would pull your teeth one at a time and feed them back to you with a spoon. I would carve my mother’s name into your stomach and let you live long enough to read it every morning in the mirror.”
The aura deepened. The crimson of a Bloodmonger’s intent bled through the killing pressure until the air in the chamber tasted like iron, and every living thing in the room felt their blood slow in their veins.
“But the last year…” The corner of her lip lifted, and the smile was the worst thing Ophira had ever seen. “The last year, I began amassing the power needed to actually do every single one of them. The fantasies became plans, with steps, with tools, with a timeline. I knew exactly how long each one would take and exactly how loud you would scream.”
Ophira’s mouth opened in a silent shape that could have been a plea.
Then Eveliana blinked.
The aura eased. Not all at once but in a slow withdrawal, the killing intent pulling back like a tide retreating from shore, and Eveliana looked at the woman dangling from her fist and saw a chore she no longer wanted to finish.
“But… I’m here.” She said it almost to herself, her brow creasing with what looked like genuine confusion. “And I don’t even care.”
Her grip did not loosen but her voice did, the edges going soft with something worse than mercy.
“I want to visit my mother’s grave and tell her it’s done, that she can rest now. I want to hug and kiss my husband. Then I want to go back to my friends and continue with my life.” Her eyes searched Ophira’s face as if looking for something worth staying for and finding nothing. “Torturing you just seems like… a waste of my time?”
The question landed in the silence of the chamber and sat there. Even Lucille seemed confused by it – and that was the name that fit, because whoever Eveliana had been, this was not her anymore.
Ophira’s eyes went wide.
“N-no-” The sound broke from her throat in a rasp that barely made it past the fingers. “No- wait- you can’t just-”
“No! Daughter! Don’t…!” Alastair wheezed.
Eveliana’s wrist turned.
The sound was small and satisfying, and the Duchess of Greenvale went limp in her stepdaughter’s hand. Eveliana held her there for one breath, then let go. The body dropped onto the mattress with the boneless weight of something that would never move again, settling into the stain of its own making, neck bent at an angle that nothing would ever fix.