His words tore through her.
Gaius?
For a moment, the world did not make sense. The air was gone.
The dusty room tilted on its axis, and she was falling through the floor of her own life. Her body moved of its own volition, stumbling back a step as if his name were a physical blow—a fist to the sternum that left a hollow, ringing ache where her heart used to beat.
He'd told her Gaius was dead.
The memory rose, crisp and cruel. He had stood and said Tenebrarum killed her brother.
Why would he lie?
The question wasn't just a thought in her mind. It was a fracture, a splintering crack that started in her mind and raced down her spine. It was the sound of every truth she'd built her life upon shattering.
She couldn't speak. Her mouth parted on a silent, ragged breath, disbelief locking her throat like a hand.
Memories collided, brutal and bright, not as thoughts but as sensations—the possessive, lingering press of his finger on hers lips in poyens courtyard, the secret, dizzying heat of it, the shameful flutter of promise she had felt low in her belly.
And now this man—his hands on hers, his breath on her cheek, his body a cage of familiar leather and unfamiliar threat—claimed to be the ghost of her childhood.
The one she'd lit candles for. The one whose absence had shaped the hollows of her heart.
He was alive.
"What did you say?" The words were a paper-thin whisper, torn from a place already bleeding.
Aurelia's eyes, opening wide and swimming with a gathering storm, searched his face as if seeing it for the first time.
A slow, chilling smile touched his lips. It held no joy, only a dark, triumphant ache, as if he had won a long and lonely war fought entirely in the dark.
"Gaius is the wall truly made of blood," he whispered.
And the wound, held together by shock, finally ruptured.
That was the exact words she said to him before they got separated.
"You were Gaius all along," she breathed, the words tasting of ash. The realization settled into her bones, cold and final. "What was the reason for all of this? All these lies?"
"Yes."
The single syllable was a stone dropped into the silence between them. He stopped holding her, his hands falling away as if she had suddenly burned him.
He turned and began to pace, a restless predator in the small cage of the room. His steps were heavy, each one echoing the pounding in her skull.
"There shouldn't have been this," he bit out, gesturing vaguely at the dusty space, at the tangled mess of their reunion. His voice was no longer a whisper, but a frayed wire of frustration.
"If Marcus would have just done his job—if he had just brought you to me when he was supposed to—none of this would have occurred. No baskets. No perfumed hearses. No... Tenebrarum."
He said the name like a curse, a name he despised.
He dragged a hand through his perfectly tied hair, dislodging strands, and for a moment, she saw not the composed strategist nor the furious captor, but a man haunted by a plan gone irreparably, personally wrong. He paced like a wanderer who had lost his way in his own design.
The question was a reflex, born of a child's hope that had survived years of silence. It slipped from her lips before she could think: "If you're alive… then where is my mother?"
She hadn't meant to ask. It felt foolish, a sudden crack in her armor, but she needed to know—needed some anchor in the shipwreck of her world.
He had stopped pacing. He was utterly still. The restless energy in the room condensed into something dense and silent. His profile was sharp against the lamplight.
"She's dead."
The words were flat. Final. A stone slab dropped over an open grave.
Aurelia stared, waiting for the story—sickness, an accident, the war she'd fled. But he offered nothing.
"How did she die?" The whisper grew into a demand, thin and fraying. "How did she die?"
His eyes met her violet oceans—already shimmering, tears gathering like a river held back by a dam of sheer disbelief. He held her gaze with a terrifying, unblinking calm.
"I killed her."
He didn't look away. He didn't flinch. He didn't lower his voice. The confession was not a shameful whisper, but a cold, simple statement of fact. The words hung between them, their edges clean and sharp as a guillotine's blade.
It was the way he said it that truly destroyed her—effortlessly, with a chilling, detached precision. Not in anger, not in regret, but with the quiet certainty of a man reporting the weather. As if he were saying, The sun had set. The fire had gone out. I killed our mother.
A wave of heat flashed across her skin, followed by an icy numbness that stole the strength from her limbs. Her vision blurred, not just from tears, but from a profound, soul-deep fracturing. She could no longer see the man before her—only a monster wearing her brother's face.
Her knees buckled. It was not a faint, but a deliberate, total surrender.
Her body folded, crumbling to the rough wooden floor as if the truth had physical weight.
"Ahhhh," A raw, guttural sound was torn from her throat—less a cry than the death rattle of her old world. She curled into herself, her whole frame shaking with the force of a sob that had no end, her forehead pressing into the cold, unforgiving grit.
Gaius.
Killed.
Our mother.
The three facts collided in her mind, over and over, incapable of forming a whole.
They were jagged pieces of a reality that could not be, yet was. The foundation of every memory, every loss, every quiet prayer she'd ever whispered in the dark… had just been poisoned at the source.
And he simply stood there, watching her break, his silence the loudest sound in the world.
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To be continued...