Investing in My Crippled Wife: My Duchess Makes me Overpowered

Then he told her.

Not all of it and definitely not the words the system used.

That the night the rift tore open the house, in the moment he’d been certain the wall was going to kill him, something in him had finally woken up. That whatever had been broken or missing in him for seven years wasn’t missing anymore.

He had awakened just like he should have all those years ago.

Isolde listened without a word. She didn’t interrupt once. She just watched him with an intensity that made him feel, more than once, like she waiting for her moment.

She surely had a lot of questions.

”And tonight,” he went on, ”I wanted to know what I could actually do with it. So I went in. Found something like a rift, cleared it. That’s where I was.”

”You went into a rift.” Her voice was flat, controlled in the specific way he now recognized meant she was holding something back by force. ”Alone. With an ability you’d had for four days. That you don’t understand. That no one has trained you to use.”

”I didn’t have a lot of other options for figuring it out.”

”You had the option of waiting!” The control slipped, just slightly, enough that the word came out sharper than the rest. ”You had the option of telling me first, so that if you didn’t come back, I would at least know where to start looking instead of finding you bleeding on the floor at five in the morning talking about sand that wasn’t there.”

He didn’t have a defense for that one. He didn’t try to build one.

”I’m sorry,” he said instead, and meant it. ”That part, I should have done differently.”

Some of the tension went out of her shoulders, not all of it, but enough that she sat back slightly in the chair. When she spoke again her voice had dropped, lower, more deliberate. But there was nothing easier about her.

”A mana core isn’t a muscle you can just decide to test,” she said. ”It’s not strength, where the worst outcome of pushing too hard is that you’re sore for a few days. A core that’s stressed past what it can handle doesn’t just refuse to cooperate. It can fracture. Bleed capacity it never gets back. Or worse.” She gestured, once, sharp and economical, at the chair beneath her, at the legs that hadn’t answered to her in years. ”This is what happens when a core gets pushed past its limit. I didn’t lose my legs in that incident, Emeric. I lost the connection between what I will and what my body is able to do. My legs are still there. They simply don’t listen to me anymore, because the part of me that used to tell them what to do broke, and no amount of training since has convinced it to heal the way the rest of me can.”

The room went very quiet.

”So don’t tell me you had no other options,” she said, quieter now, no less firm. ”You have a core no one has taught you to handle, and you took it into a live rift on your first night with it. Even trained mages test their limits carefully, gradually, under supervision, because the alternative is sitting exactly where I’m sitting. You want to get stronger. I understand that better than almost anyone alive could. But you will not do it by finding out the hard way what mine already taught me.”

He opened his mouth to answer her; an apology maybe, an argument. Nothing came out when the system chose that exact moment to surface, unprompted, a soft pulse of awareness settling behind his eyes that had nothing to do with anything he’d asked for.

[RESONANCE DETECTED — LEDGER TARGET IN PROXIMITY]

[SCANNING: ISOLDE ROWAN]

He went still.

The window unfolded in front of him with a pop sound that he had missed all this while, laid out the way the status screen had been that first night in the study — except this time it wasn’t his own name at the top.

[TARGET: ISOLDE ROWAN]

[AGE: 21]

[RANK: 3rd TIER]

[STATUS: CRITICAL]

MANA CORE: SEALED

CORE CONDITION: CRITICAL (95% DAMAGED)

PHYSICAL STATUS:

MUSCLE ATROPHY — ADVANCED STAGE

CORE INSTABILITY — LIFE-THREATENING

CURSE DETECTED: █████████████████

EFFECT: SUPPRESSING NATURAL RECOVERY

PROJECTED LIFE EXPECTANCY IF UNTREATED: 19-20 MONTHS

CURE: █████████████████ █████████████████ █████████████████

[DIRECTIVE: EASE HER SUFFERING. IMPROVE HER QUALITY OF LIFE. WORK TOWARD HER CURE.] [EVERY ACT OF GENUINE DEVOTION TOWARD THESE ENDS WILL BE REWARDED. THE LEDGER GROWS FASTEST WHERE THE NEED IS GREATEST.]

His eyes moved down the window slowly, once, then a second time, as though reading it again might change what it said. Critical. He’d known she was hurt — anyone with eyes could see that much — but he hadn’t understood, not really, that her body was still actively counting down something. Ninety-five percent. He didn’t know what that meant against a full core but he was sure of one thing. That did not look so good.

Then he reached curse, and something in his chest went cold in a completely different way.

Cursed. Something had been done to her, deliberately, on top of whatever the collapse itself had already taken.

He thought of the word sitting there, flat and factual, and wondered whether she even knew. Whether anyone had told her, in all the months since, that the reason she wasn’t healing wasn’t only the damage — it was something actively working to keep her from healing at all.

Something that would take her life in twenty months if it was left untreated. But he couldn’t see what the curse was, just the effects. The system blurred that information from him.

Why show him at all if he could not do something about.

He was pissed.

Then eyes dropped to the last line. Cure. He almost sat up where he was lying, some instinct in him lurching toward the words before his mind had caught up to why. Blacked out. All of it, blacked out, three lines he couldn’t read no matter how hard he tried to focus on them, like ink smudged deliberately across a page. Just like the curse.

So it would not show him the curse, or the cure.