Chapter 228: Chapter 228: Delusions
Christian Velloran stood in the center of his study, the once-pristine room now thick with the stench of his rage. His pheromones, sharp as iron and heavy as smoke, rolled across the marble floor in waves, curling into the velvet drapes and suffocating even the guards outside the door. One of the maids had fainted. A steward had vomited. Still, no one dared interrupt.
His hands were braced against the edge of his desk, head bowed, dark hair a mess over his brow, silver eyes blazing with something far too violent to name. The air shimmered around him.
The documents scattered across the desk weren’t just bad, they were insulting.
Two foreign firms had pulled out of multi-year investments. A shipping line, once loyal to House Velloran, had switched allegiance to the Fitzgeralts overnight. Even a minor energy contract, nothing more than a signature and a nod, had been revoked with a single letter from Trevor’s office.
Not his name. Not a threat.
Just his seal.
Christian’s lips curled in a silent snarl. He could almost see Trevor’s face. That smug bastard hadn’t even lifted a sword.
He was bleeding Christian out with paper cuts.
"Do you know," he said aloud, though no one had spoken, "how many years it took to build those connections?"
The aide closest to him, a beta barely out of his twenties, didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He was shaking too hard to speak, one hand pressed to the wall to stay upright under the weight of the alpha’s aura.
Christian didn’t care. His gaze dropped to the open folder before him. Photographs. Transcripts. The latest courier had been thorough.
Lucas.
In Trevor’s lap, wearing Fitzgeralt colors, crowned in afternoon light like he belonged there.
Christian tore the photo in half. Then again. And again. Until only shredded paper remained.
"It should have been me."
The words were barely a whisper.
The aide tried to step back, but Christian’s pheromones surged again, bitter and choking.
"You will find me a way in," Christian said coldly, still not looking up. "To Saha. To Palatine. I don’t care. I want leverage, and I want it yesterday."
He straightened, the room tilting slightly with the intensity of his scent. "He’s made me look like a madman."
Then, quieter and darker, "So I’ll become one."
A pause.
Then: "Bring me the files on Project Agatha."
The aide froze, color draining from his face. "But sir... Faceless Agatha was..."
"I know what it was," Christian hissed. "I funded half of it. And I still know people who want their salvation bound in their bed."
He turned slowly, silver eyes gleaming. "And if Trevor wants a war of ghosts and paper, I’ll give him something that burns."
—
Across the capital, the sun filtered through arched stone windows in a far colder place.
The academy was polished and pale in the afternoon light, all glass halls and ivy-draped colonnades, serene in the way that only expensive institutions could afford to be. The statues in the courtyard hadn’t changed in a century. But the gazes that used to linger on Ophelia Kilmer certainly had.
Her footsteps echoed as she walked the corridor, too loud, too clear. No one turned. Not the girls with pearl barrettes and curated smiles. Not the professors who once laughed too easily in her presence, murmuring her last name like it was a door they had every right to knock on.
They ignored her.
That was new.
Ophelia didn’t slow. She didn’t flinch. Her posture remained perfect, spine straight, books clasped against her chest in a neat stack. But her eyes, sharp, pale, and impossible to read, caught every movement.
A professor who used to praise her essays didn’t hold the door.
A younger student who once offered her sweets in exchange for a good word now looked through her like fog.
She passed a bulletin board. Lucas’s name was there.
The Grand Duchess of Fitzgeralt—announced in script over an invitation to a historical ethics seminar hosted by none other than Serathine D’Argente.
There was a photo, too. A still from the wedding, carefully chosen. Lucas, ash-blond hair gleaming like pale fire, Trevor’s hand at his back, expression unreadable and proud. And Lucas, Lucas was himself, looking better than ever.
Ophelia’s grip on her books tightened slightly. Her nails dug into the spine of the top one until the pressure bit through.
She sat in the back row of the lecture hall without waiting for acknowledgment. The seats on either side remained conspicuously empty. Even the girl she’d once let borrow her mother’s jewelry for a gala, she didn’t sit near her. No one did.
The professor entered and began to speak. A soft drone about dynastic reforms and imperial law. Once, he would’ve made eye contact with her first. Now he didn’t glance her way.
Ophelia didn’t take notes.
She didn’t even bother pretending anymore.
The lecturer’s voice hummed at the edge of her hearing, some dull drone about diplomatic precedent and the historical relevance of royal alliances. Words that once felt sharp, necessary tools for survival in a family like hers now floated past like paper boats in a storm drain.
Everyone thought she was finished.
That the cold little girl who recited etiquette by age five and learned to smile without blinking under scrutiny had finally cracked. That after the trials, the sentencing, and the public shame, Ophelia Kilmer had been decommissioned.
She bit the edge of her thumbnail.
Her teeth pressed hard into the skin, not enough to draw blood, but enough to feel it, sharp and familiar. It was her oldest habit. One she’d tried to kill with polish, gloves, and even therapy sessions that smelled like lavender and lies. But when her nerves built past the rim of her ribcage and started scraping her throat, there was nothing like the sting of nail and skin to tether her down.
She tucked her hand into her sleeve and arranged her books in front of her with a meticulous care she hadn’t felt in weeks. A shield of old routine. Thick spine. Thin margin. The illusion of diligence.
Then, beneath the fold of a binder’s flap, her fingers slipped around the shape she hadn’t told anyone about.
Not the phone Serathine gave her. That one sat in her schoolbag like a chaperone, boring, tracked, and sanitized down to its search history.
This one was sleek. Cold. Unregistered. And it hadn’t been there that morning.
It was waiting for her after lunch, tucked neatly into her locker between a worn notebook and an empty thermos.
Her heart had jumped then.
It hadn’t stopped racing since.
She turned the screen on under the desk, the faint glow lighting the soft curve of her chin and the restless press of her bitten nail to her lip.
Just one message sat on the screen. No app. No timestamp.
’You were right not to believe the courts.
She’s alive. With me. She says you wanted the truth. Do you still want it?
— O’
She stared.
For a moment, the world narrowed down to the line of her breath and the humming, anxious tremble of her leg under the desk. The classroom dissolved, noise muffled behind the static in her ears, the harsh white lights above dimmed to a blur. Her nails dug into her palm now, crescent-shaped marks anchoring her to something solid, something real, against the sudden, cold rush of recognition.
Odin.
She didn’t remember his face. Misty had never let her. But it was him, she knew it the way you know a shadow belongs to something bigger than what it touches.
And for the first time since her world had collapsed, since Lucas stood up and walked away, since Serathine’s cold judgment, since the academy turned its back on her, Ophelia felt something she didn’t expect to feel.
Relief.
Odin. Her father.
He wanted her back.
Not as a rumor. Not as a failed daughter or a project left behind, but as something worth sending for. And he had saved Misty. That had to mean something.
He hadn’t abandoned them.
He hadn’t abandoned her.
The breath she hadn’t realized she was holding slipped out, shaky, sharp, and warm against her lips.
Maybe this wasn’t the end. Maybe it had only just begun.
And for once after the disaster had struck her, she felt relieved. Odin... her father wanted her back and he saved Misty.