Chapter 1371: Stricken cowards(4)

Tiberius knew he had struck a raw, exposed nerve.

And soon enough he also saw how her whole demeanor shifted.Until now, she had treated the scattered secrets as a game, a cat cruelly batting at a mouse’s corpse, taking wicked pleasure in her absolute dominance over a lesser beast. She was playing with him, knowing she held the power to shatter his fragile world with a single word to Julian.

Agitating her had been the right move. "With the right emotion, even a stone can be swayed," Julian had once counseled him, back when they engineered the alliance that forced Eloir’s father into bed with the Old Ghost and his bastard.

"I have already had my revenge," she said, her words dropping with the slow, crushing weight of an avalanche. She sat up straight, no longer lounging amid the parchment like a queen upon her spoils. The playful tilt of her head was gone; the dark, teasing glint in her eyes had evaporated. Her gaze narrowed into two cold, razor-thin slits. The gaze of a mother who avenged her son.

"With my own two hands, I carved it out of his chest. That was my price for agreeing to marry you."

Tiberius fought with everything he had not to flinch. Memory unspooled in his mind, the broken, bloody corpse of his stepbrother, last seen in ten years. For a fleeting, horrifying beat, the dead man’s face transformed into Tiberius’s own, lying amidst sheets of white silk, drowning in his own blood, clutching fruitlessly at a torn throat to delay the inevitable.

Looking up at him as if saying: Did you really have to?

"Then you were cheated," Tiberius said softly. "You were paid in false coin."

He watched her eyes flicker. She was piecing it together.

"Mavius was not the only monster responsible for the crime," he pressed on, holding her gaze. "The father may have harbored the black heart for the deed, but he was not the sole architect of your misery."

Something rose in Tiberius’s throat, making him want to retch as her glare locked onto him, unblinking. Unconsciously, his fingers brushed against the skin of his own neck. He had intended to keep this card tucked firmly up his sleeve until he was certain of her loyalty, until he knew she wouldn’t do something catastrophic. But what plan ever survived first contact with the enemy?

He suddenly realized just how close he was standing to the bed. He wondered if she still carried the slim, needle-pointed pin-blade she had driven through her previous husband’s heart. He was in no hurry to find out, so he delivered the truth and prayed to whatever silent gods were listening that it wouldn’t be his last breath.

"Mavius was on his deathbed when the murder occurred," Tiberius revealed, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. "The man was barely in a condition to piss himself, let alone coordinate such a plan. To swap your infant son with a dead babe, to execute it without a whisper of treason escaping the nursery... he needed an accomplice. Someone with the power to command the inner guards, the cold gall not to flinch before the face of an innocent child, and a desperate interest in keeping Mavius’s puppet regime alive just a little longer."

He could practically see the gears grinding behind her dark eyes. She was arriving at the exact same conclusion, a horrifying suspicion she had likely buried deep down for years, for she was certainly no fool.

"Who...?" she whispered, the word barely tearing from her throat.

She knew it already, but Mavius gave the answer all the same.

"Your father."

Silence descended upon the bedchamber, thicker and colder than the winter frost clinging to the glass outside. Tiberius felt needles stabbing at his stomach.

She had her reason to join him now, certainly. But she was a double-edged blade, the one force capable of forging his salvation, or snapping his neck. If she lost her mind to rage and struck Lord Landoff down tomorrow, it wouldn’t take Julian a full day to figure out who had spilled the truth. Only three men in the entire realm knew of Landoff’s role in the babe’s death: Julian, Julian’s chief executioner, and Tiberius.

So he stood motionless, holding his breath, waiting to see whether she would become his savior or his executioner.

Then, at long last, a shudder ran through her frame. Her shoulders caved inward, and she buried her face i letting out a ragged, silent weep.

Watching her collapse into a heap of velvet and grief, Tiberius remembered what he had momentarily forgotten: beneath the deadly, cold-blooded creature before him was a mother who had just learned her own father had murdered her child.

And suddendly Tiberius felt like the foulest, most despicable piece of filth crawling across the earth.

Seeing her weep, he was utterly at a loss. He had precious little experience with such matters; it wasn’t often that he found himself in the company of sobbing women. Even on the night she had put a needle through her first husband’s heart, she had been shaken, certainly, but dry-eyed and iron-willed.

Doing something wrong here could prove fatal, but sitting back and doing nothing felt even worse. So, moving with all the hesitant terror of a man flipping a coin over a pit of spikes, he sank onto the velvet mattress beside her. He reached out and placed a trembling hand on her back, beginning a slow, awkward stroking motion to soothe her.

It was what Claria had always done whenever she caught him weeping as a boy.Usually after one of his brother’s misdeeds. It had always made him feel a little less hollow inside...

Eloir didn’t flinch or pull away. She simply let him touch her, which was all the encouragement Tiberius needed, and likely all he was ever going to get.

She sat there crying for a long time, while Tiberius hovered beside her, cringing inwardly and wondering if there was some grand, poetic phrase he ought to utter.

"My father..." She choked on the word, a fresh sob strangling her voice before she could finish. "How could he? My own father..."

"For power," Tiberius said quietly, stating the plain, ugly truth. "Just for power. I am sorry."

Apologizing was almost certainly the wrong move, for Eloir let out a sudden, bitter splutter of laughter that sounded more like a bark.

"Just power?" Her chuckle died in a ragged, suffocated sob. She wiped her nose with the back of a silk sleeve, her red-rimmed eyes snapping up to his. "And isn’t that precisely what you are doing right now? Playing with fire just to seize power for yourself? To cast off the old bastard’s leash? That is what this entire little performance is about, isn’t it? You need me to hand you power!"

Tiberius looked at her strangely.

Power? Did he truly desire power? He looked down at his boots, letting the question hang in the quiet space between them for a quiet beat. The answer arrived almost instantly, cold and unmistakable.

No. He didn’t give a damn about power. He would gladly forfeit the crown, the velvet, and the grand marble halls this very night if it meant he could take a quiet cottage in the countryside and live out a long, boring, unremarkable life. That was his boyhood dream, to live peacefully with Claria beside her.

What use did he have for empire? For endless deceit? For blood-drenched armies and the steady trail of corpses that followed them? He possessed neither the stomach nor the heart for any of it.

Nor the abilities really.

"When the Empress seized power in court, I was merely a boy who had just watched his father’s cold corpse dragged through the gates," Tiberius said, his voice dropping into a flat, distant murmur. "Had he died in bed she would have acted before the old man’s flesh had even gone stiff. I was still just a child when her men came for me, bound my wrists, and threw me into the dark of the dungeon."

He stared at his own uncalloused hands resting on his knees. He was not that good of a fighter. "I stayed down in that hole for the better part of a year, I think. During those first few weeks, I thought she was simply building a gallows for me. But eventually, I realized the cruel truth: she wasn’t going to waste a rope.It would not be good look for the bastard to die as soon as her son took power.

She was just waiting for me to starve and rot on my own. Yet for every single day I spent in that dark, and for every day I’ve drawn breath since Julian dragged me out, and he had promised me he would search for her.

I have been eaten alive by fear over what became of her. Not a day passes where I don’t bleed over it."

Eloir fell silent, her sobs subsiding into small, ragged breaths. The sharp glare in her eyes softened, shifting into something entirely unfamiliar as she studied his profile.

"What was her name?" she asked softly.

Tiberius glanced up at her. "Does it matter?She’s gone. I am sure of that now."

"You think of her every time you drift away during court," Eloir pressed, her voice gravelly from crying. "You go absent three times a dinner, staring off into the dark. What was your dear ghost’s name?"

"Claria..."

It felt strangely heavy, almost dangerous, to speak her name aloud after so many years. Whenever he was forced to mention her to Julian, he took great care to refer to her simply as the maid.

"So that is her name," Eloir sniffed, dabbing at her swollen eyes with her sleeve. "What do you think happened to her?"

Tiberius bit his inner lip until he tasted copper. "The truth? She was probably raped by some minor officer’s foot-soldier when they threw me in the dangeon, some brute swearing his sword to the red bitch who probably gifted her as tribute for his service. And then she was likely murdered and thrown into a ditch, so nobody would have to worry about a bastard’s maid dropping a bastard’s brood into the world. She was just a servant, after all.And to a bastard at that.

What value could her life possibly have to them?"

Eloir stared at him, her dark brows knitting together in a complex tangle of realization and disbelief.

"And is that why you are doing all of this?" she whispered, her voice cutting through the quiet room like a blade. "To avenge her?"

"To find about her," Tiberius corrected plainly. "Dead or alive. She was the closest thing to a mother I ever had."

"You just said she was likely raped and dumped in a ditch," Eloir pointed out, watching him intently. "You just said she is almost certainly dead."

Did you really have to say it like that?

Tiberius offered a faint, hollow smirk, his shoulders rising and falling in a weary shrug.

"I believe I already told you, ... I am a hopeless fool .But if truly she is dead....I suppose ifI cannot bring her salvation, revenge will have to suffice"

’’Revenge.....’’ Her eyes were like the gaze of an asp.

Both knew that was the only coin they would hold.