Chapter 225: To Be The Judge

"Who killed my parents?"

The question struck Lucien like a physical blow.

He reeled back, his face shifting through guilt, regret, and something close to shame so quickly that Aveline saw it all before he could hide it. For one brief moment, he looked less like the eccentric old genius she had come to know and more like a man cornered by a truth he had spent years avoiding.

Then, just as quickly, he brightened.

His gaze flicked toward the machine beside them, and he let out a breath that sounded almost forced. "Since you solved the problem I couldn’t solve for years, I ought to give you the recognition you deserve." His hand moved vaguely toward the now silent machine.

"And since this stone seems to have no name of its own, you may name it as you wish. It will be called whatever you choose for as long as it exists."

Aveline pressed her lips together.

He was changing the subject, not with malice. But she could see it all the same, written in the shifting shadows across his face. Shame. Guilt. Fear.

He was trying to retreat into the safer shape of himself, the mad genius who could hide behind invention and oddity whenever a truth grew too close.

And in that instant, Aveline understood something she had not understood before.

He was afraid of her answer, not afraid in the way a guilty man feared exposure, but afraid in the way someone feared the past itself.

Aveline lifted her chin. "Willowgrave," she said. "I want the stone to be named after my father. Adelric Willowgrave."

Lucien’s smile vanished.

For a heartbeat, terror was plain on his face. His hand slipped from the machine.

"Anything but that," he murmured, almost to himself, as though backing instinctively toward the refuge of his own silence. "It’s dangerous..."

"Dangerous?" Aveline scoffed. "For who?"

He did not answer.

Her eyes narrowed. "Was my mother the target, old man?"

Still, he said nothing.

"Or... was it me?"

Aveline’s hands curled at her sides. The pieces were beginning to align now, cruelly and with terrible clarity. The jealousy she had heard of. The way Leone had been said to look at Leveret. The spite that could survive for decades in a noble house that valued pride more than decency. And the same spite she saw on Rosalyn Caelvaris, raised by Leone.

Was it possible that the hatred had been that deep?

That the woman had held onto it for thirty years, long enough to try and snuff out the last remaining light of Leveret’s blood?

Lucien bowed his head.

He would not meet her eyes.

And that silence, more than any answer, told Aveline everything she needed to know.

"Was it your visit to Aurelmont?" Aveline asked, her voice tighter than she intended. "Your search for Leveret... was that what sparked it?"

Lucien went still.

The change in him was immediate. The color drained from his face, and for one brief, devastating moment, he looked less like the eccentric old genius in front of her and more like a man struck senseless by a memory he had spent decades trying not to touch.

Aveline watched one of his hands tighten over his chest, as though the question itself had landed there. If Leone had truly loved him and seen him return from Aurelmont still carrying Leveret in his heart, then jealousy might have become rage, and rage might have become fire. The thought made Aveline’s own fingers tremble.

Even now, he was protecting his wife.

Even now, he was choosing her silence over her guilt.

It hurt more than she expected. For a little while, she had believed his kindness to her was simple, perhaps even genuine. She had thought there was something almost tender in the way he had opened his laboratory to her, in the way he had spoken to her when no one else had.

But standing before him now, with his grief and fear laid bare, she could see the shape of the truth she had been too desperate to ignore. Even his care for her had been tangled in fear. In guilt. In old regret that had never truly died.

Lucien looked at her as though he wanted to speak, but whatever he had been about to say fractured before it reached his lips.

"Leveret, I—"

"No." Her voice sharpened as she stepped back. The hurt in her chest had already turned to something harder, something that burned. "My name is Aveline Willowgrave. I am the child of the man your family destroyed. An orphan because of what your house did, Lucien Caelvaris."

His face twisted, and she saw the pain there at once. Not denial, not cruelty. Pain.

"That’s not the truth," he said, clutching his chest as if he could hold himself together by force alone.

Aveline’s jaw tightened.

That only made it worse. It would have been easier if he had shouted, if he had lied outright, if he had made himself monstrous enough that she could hate him without hesitation.

Instead he stood there shattered by her words, grieving in a way that made her want to scream.

Lucien trembled. "It’s not her."

Facing this child—wearing Leveret’s face and carrying a soul that shone with the same impossible warmth—Lucien felt the foundations of his convictions crack. For a decade, he had clung to his wife’s words, because believing them had been easier than questioning the woman he had shared his life with.

Yet every instinct, every forgotten doubt, every piece of evidence he had buried with his own hands now returned to haunt him.

Still... he could not condemn Leone.

He had loved her.

She was the woman who had stood beside him through the years, the mother of his children, the person with whom he had built a life from the ashes of another. How was he supposed to cast judgment upon her now? If he accepted Aveline’s accusation, then everything he had believed for years would collapse around him.

And so he stood trapped between love and truth, unable to abandon either.

His elder brother had destroyed Leveret.

But this child... This child was looking at him as though he had destroyed her family.

Somehow, that accusation weighed even heavier.

If he had truly failed both Leveret and Aveline... Death would have been the kinder sentence.

Aveline’s eyes clouded.

He had said never to mistake innocence for safety. Now she understood he had meant it.

All the pain she had endured, all the years she had spent being treated like less than nothing, all of it suddenly seemed to gather into one terrible shape. A woman who could not bear the thought of losing a husband. A family willing to protect their own legacy at any cost. A child who had never even been given a chance to exist in peace.

Aveline drew in a sharp breath, her hands curling into fists at her sides.

"Oh, I’ll decide that," she said, her voice trembling with fury. "Let me be her judge, Lucien."