Chapter 981. Even After Saying All Of That... The Mother Didn’t Give Single Shits!

Chapter 981: 981. Even After Saying All Of That... The Mother Didn’t Give Single Shits!

"There is more," Theo gasped, and the desperation in his eyes had curdled into something far more dangerous: a feverish, glassy-eyed mania.

His pupils were pinpricks of terror, his skin slick with a cold, sickly sweat that made him look like a corpse already beginning to decay. "I saw Iris... God help me, I saw what happened in her room yesterday."

Aurelia flinched as if he had struck her. "Theo, cease this at once--"

"I know I have no right!" he shrieked, the sound tearing from his throat like broken glass. "I know it isn’t my business; I know I should have been blind to it, but the vision didn’t ask permission!"

"It didn’t give me a choice before it tore open my mind and forced me to watch! And I saw enough to know... I saw enough to know that she is carrying his child now!"

The silence that followed was deafening, a physical pressure that seemed to suck the oxygen from the corridor.

"Rex has gotten Iris pregnant, Mother," Theo continued, his words coming faster now, spilling out in a torrent of horrified revelation. "He has infected this entire household like a plague!"

"He has everyone wrapped around his finger, twisted around his will without any of us understanding what he actually is beneath that practiced charm, those perfect training corrections, and that false, steady gaze that makes everyone believe he genuinely cares." His voice dropped to a horrified whisper. "And it was worse than that."

"He didn’t even hide it... He fucked her right there, right in front of her own boyfriend... Veylor! Yes! Veylor was there... watching as a ghost, powerless to stop it while Rex claimed her!"

The dam broke. Aurelia’s hand moved before her conscious mind could intervene: a sharp, vicious, open-palmed strike that cracked across Theo’s cheek with the sound of breaking bone.

The force of the blow sent him stumbling backward, his skull connecting painfully with the wooden doorframe of his own room.

"You would say anything," Aurelia hissed, her voice shaking with a fury that had transcended rage and become something raw, wounded, and utterly primal. "Anything at all, would you not?"

"Anything to poison this house, to make us doubt the one person who has done more for this family in two weeks than our own blood has managed in generations!" Her eyes burned with unshed tears of humiliation. "Do you hear the madness dripping from your tongue? Visions? Dreams?"

"You are describing the ravings of a broken boy who has already tried to murder two people in their sleep, and you expect me—you expect me to take a single word of this filth seriously?"

"I am not lying!" Theo roared back, the anguish in his voice so profound it felt like a physical wound in the air between them. "I know what it sounds like!"

"I know I sound like a monster, a liar, a madman!"

"But ask yourself honestly, Mother, look at the facts instead of your feelings! Has anything about Rex Rexilion ever truly added up?"

He took a step toward her despite the pain in his face, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. "The abilities that appeared out of thin air?!"

"The intimate, impossible knowledge of the Underlayer that no ordinary student should possess?!"

"The convenient timing of every single rescue, every intervention, every disaster where he happens to materialize exactly when he is needed most?!"

"I am not asking you to trust a dream, Mother!"

"I am asking you to trust the pattern! The pattern that has been staring us in the face for months while we all pretended not to see it because looking at it meant questioning someone we had already decided to love!"

"Enough," Aurelia commanded, her voice cold as a tombstone, though her hands trembled uncontrollably.

"It is NOT enough!" Theo screamed, and something inside him finally shattered; the last tether to his composure snapped completely, leaving behind only grief, terror, and a drowning conviction.

"I am trying to save this family! I am trying to save you, and Iris, and Diana, from a man who has already stripped me bare and taken everything I own, and he is not going to stop simply because he has run out of things of mine left to take!"

A single tear tracked through the blood blooming on his cheek where he had struck the doorframe. "I tried to stop him the wrong way... I know that."

"I know what I did was unforgivable, and I am not asking for your forgiveness!"

"I am not asking for anything but this: Hear me... Just hear this one truth before it is too late for the rest of you the way it has already been too late for me!"

Aurelia stood paralyzed in the dim, flickering light of the corridor, her chest heaving as if she had been running. Her breathing came in ragged, wet gasps, each one echoing off the cold stone walls.

She stared at Theo, really stared at him, and what she saw made her stomach twist with a nauseating cocktail of horror, grief, and a rage so profound it felt like molten lead coursing through her veins.

"You broke something in yourself," she whispered finally. The words weren’t loud, but they carried the terrible, hollow weight of a funeral dirge. "That night in the guest room... that violence... it broke something fundamental."

"I told myself... I lied to myself that discipline and time would be enough to mend the cracks."

"I believed that if I held you tight enough, if I policed your every breath, I could stitch you back together." Her eyes glistened with a cruel, bitter moisture. "I see now how foolish I was..."

"What is standing in front of me right now... this thing speaking with your voice, wearing your face, using your memories to weaponize lies against us... it is not my son anymore."

"Mother, please—" Theo’s voice was a broken whimper, reaching for a connection that was rapidly evaporating.

"I am done listening, Theo." The words landed with the guillotine’s sharp finality of a closing tomb.

Before he could react, Aurelia lunged. Her fingers curled like talons into the fabric of his shirt, twisting the material until it threatened to tear.

She didn’t just hold him; she claimed him in a grip born of pure, unadulterated fury. Theo didn’t fight back.

He didn’t raise his hands to protect himself. He stood there with a terrifying, hollow acceptance, his shoulders slumped as if he were already a corpse waiting for the earth to claim him.

He believed he deserved the pain. He believed he earned every ounce of the torment she was about to unleash.

CRACK.

Her fist collided with his jaw with a wet, splintering sound that reverberated through the narrow passage. Theo’s head snapped sideways, blood immediately blooming from where his teeth had punched through the inside of his cheek.

He didn’t cry out; he simply absorbed the impact, his body swaying like a blade of grass in a storm.

"You are going to stand there," Aurelia hissed, her face inches from his, her breath hot against his skin as she struck him again, a vicious, closed fist blow that sent a spray of crimson droplets across the grey stone floor.

"You are going to stand there and accuse the man who saved this household of being a monster."

"The man who saved your worthless life more than once, who showed you more patience and mercy than you have ever shown yourself."

She struck him a third time, a brutal hook that forced a pained, gurgling sound from his throat. "You stand there and accuse him of corrupting Iris, a grown woman, a woman capable of her own desires and her own choices, as though she were some helpless child who cannot be trusted to know her own heart."

Her voice rose to a crescendo of controlled madness, her eyes wide and unblinking. "And you expect me to believe you?"

"You expect me to believe that this torrent of filth is coming from a place of clarity? No."

Her grip tightened until her knuckles turned white, her nails digging into his chest through the fabric. "This is not truth, Theo."

"This is not revelation... This is the bitter, poisoned madness of a man who cannot accept that he lost."

"This is the pathetic, self-destructive tantrum of a boy who would rather burn his entire world to ash than admit he was defeated by a better man."