Chapter 1032. What the Mountain Wind Sounded Like

Chapter 1032: 1032. What the Mountain Wind Sounded Like

The mountain path that led to the eastern cliff’s edge was not merely unmaintained; it was a wound in the earth, a jagged scar of loose shale and rotting vegetation that clawed at the ankles of anyone foolish enough to tread it.

Once, this route had served as a shepherds’ and surveyors’ ghost of an era before the island’s agricultural zones consolidated toward the northern and western faces.

Now, it was a graveyard of forgotten footsteps.

Theo walked it with a mechanical, hollow gait. He did not look down at his feet.

When he stumbled over a broken section of stone, his ankle twisting with a sickening pop that sent a lightning bolt of pain up his leg, he did not correct himself.

When he nearly plunged face first into a cluster of thorny brambles that tore bloody furrows across his cheek, he simply kept moving. Urgency required a purpose, and Theo no longer possessed any desire to survive.

He only possessed the momentum of his own trauma.

He had left the Nightwing household at the fourth hour.

It hadn’t been a clandestine escape. "Sneaking" implied a shred of hope—the hope that if he moved quietly enough, he might preserve some illusion of the life he once knew.

But hope had been slaughtered in that bedroom, replaced by the wet, rhythmic sounds of Rex’s conquest. He had simply vacated a space that no longer belonged to him.

His room, the heir’s sanctum, had been reassigned to Rex as the acting combat director. The very air in that house now tasted of Rex’s sweat and the copper tang of broken dignity.

As he passed through the corridors, Theo felt like a specter haunting his own home.

He walked through the rear gate without speaking to anyone. He passed the guards, whose eyes followed him with a terrifying, silent complicity.

The guard at the gate had looked at him and had not stopped him.

Theo had been receiving that particular look—the look of a man who watched the true power dynamic shift from legitimate lineage to raw, violent dominance—for approximately three weeks.

And the quality of that look had degraded with each passing day.

During the first week, it had been the complicated, wavering expression of household staff caught between old loyalties and new realities. They looked at him with pity, uncertain if the hierarchy was merely bending or breaking.

By the second week, the pity had calcified into something colder. It was the flat, dead-eyed stare of someone who had updated their understanding of the world.

They saw him not as the heir, but as a relic, a piece of furniture that had outlived its usefulness.

In this third week, the look had transformed into something primal and unrecognizable. It was a look of predatory recognition.

When their eyes met, Theo saw a mirror of Rex’s own cruelty: the unspoken acknowledgment that he was already dead, a walking corpse whose only remaining function was to witness his own erasure.

He had learned to walk past them without making eye contact, terrified that if he looked too closely, he would see the exact moment they decided he was worth nothing.

The wind began to howl as he climbed higher, the air growing thin and bitter. His mind, starved of any positive stimulus, began to cannibalize itself.

The silence of the mountain was too loud; it allowed the echoes of the previous night to reverberate against his skull with devastating clarity.

Slap. Squelch. Gush.

Every step he took on the loose gravel sounded like the wet impact of Rex’s cock against flesh. Every gust of wind sounded like Aurelia’s broken, high-pitched keening.

His inner monologue was not a stream of thought but a prison of memory.

’I should have died there,’ he thought, his fingers twitching at his sides. ’I should have let the telekinetic pressure crush my ribs until they splintered through my lungs. ’

’I should have felt my spine snap under the weight of his contempt.’

But he hadn’t. He had run.

And running felt like a betrayal of the horror he had witnessed.

As the path narrowed toward the precipice, the shadows of the trees stretched out like grasping fingers. His thoughts spiraled downward, drawn inexorably toward the center of his collapse.

He thought about the month of gradual decay.

He thought about the power Rex wielded like a scalpel, cutting away the soul of the household piece by piece.

And above all else, his mind returned to the image of the woman who had been his sun, his mother, and his anchor.

He thought about Aurelia.

The memory of Aurelia was not a warm one; it was a memory of steel and unyielding architecture. She had never been the soft comfort of a lullaby; she was the iron framework that held the Nightwing legacy upright.

For twenty-two years, she had been the unseen engine of their power, running the training programs with a brutality that commanded respect and maintaining the household’s standards through two previous heads of the house before her husband.

She didn’t just manage competence; she embodied it, applying it like a weapon every single day, ensuring the family’s position in Aethelgard’s hierarchy remained unshakable.

But Rex had been a corrosive agent, a foreign body introduced into a perfect machine.

Theo remembered the exact moment the gears began to grind differently. Rex had been in the household for three weeks when Aurelia stopped correcting his training sessions.

It wasn’t that his techniques were flawed. On the contrary, they were devastatingly correct.

But it was a specific kind of correctness, a raw, primal mastery that exceeded the theoretical frameworks Aurelia had taught for two decades.

When a teacher recognizes that a student has not just learned the lesson but has transcended the teacher themselves, the fundamental nature of their bond shifts.

Theo had watched that shift with the horrified clarity of a child watching a dam crack.

He had watched his mother’s eyes change when she assessed Rex. It wasn’t the look of a mentor examining a subordinate; it was the look of a predator recognizing an equal.

The assessment had been completed, the data had been processed, and Aurelia had made the terrifying decision to reclassify Rex from ’asset to be evaluated’ to ’force to be engaged with.’

’She wasn’t just approving him,’ Theo’s inner voice whispered as he stumbled over another jagged rock, ’she was surrendering to him.’

And he had remained silent. He had watched the erosion of his world and said nothing, paralyzed by the realization that the foundation was voluntarily dismantling itself.

He hadn’t said anything about Iris, either.

Iris was a fortress of professional detachment, but Theo had grown up in her shadow. He knew the microexpressions she thought she had buried, such as how her pulse quickened at the edge of danger and how her pupils dilated when the air grew charged with violence.

By the end of the second week, Iris wasn’t just training with Rex; she was hunting with him. Those morning sessions weren’t obligations; they were rituals.

Theo had watched them in the training yard, two bodies moving in a lethal, synchronized dance that looked less like combat practice and more like a twisted form of foreplay.

The sweat, the heavy breathing, the way Iris would deliberately leave openings just to feel the force of Rex’s counterattack—it was intoxicating, and it was wrong.

Then came Elaris.

Elaris had always been the firebrand, the one who used mockery as a shield. But by the third week, the teasing had stopped. The sharp-tongued comments about Rex’s ’unearned authority’ had vanished, replaced by a charged, heavy silence.

That was the tell. Elaris had stopped playing at novelty and had begun to acknowledge the terrifying gravity Rex exerted on everyone around him.

She wasn’t mocking the storm anymore; she was standing in the center of it, waiting to be struck.

Then came the killing blow: the announcement.

It happened in the main gathering space, under the oppressive glow of the chandelier, before the full staff and the assembled unit. Theo had been there, standing in the shadows at the back of the hall, the place where the heir had been relegated.

He remembered the way the air seemed to thicken when Aurelia stepped forward.

"In light of the current operational needs," her voice had rang out, steady and devoid of hesitation, "the position of Acting Combat Director is hereby extended."

"Furthermore, Rex Rexilion is granted full advisory authority over all household operational planning until the Head of Household returns from his mission."

The room had gone silent. Theo remembered feeling the blood drain from his face. He remembered hearing his mother speak Rex’s name, Rex Rexilion, with a cadence that was almost reverent.

It wasn’t just a formal designation; it was a coronation. In that moment, the last vestige of the old Nightwing hierarchy died.

Rex hadn’t just taken over the training; he had taken over the soul of the house.

Theo had felt something inside him, something vital and precious, finally snap. It was a clean break, like bone snapping under a sledgehammer.

He had turned and walked out of the gathering before she could finish her speech. He had walked out while the staff began to murmur, while the power shifted visibly in the room.

And nobody had come after him. Not his mother, not Iris, not even the guards.

They had all known that the boy who walked out of that room was already a ghost.