Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 736: Served Cold

”But I want to say this clearly. Whatever I thought about the marriage, Vespera Ashborn is the victim here. I was the secret who knew and turned a blind eye to everything. Only me, the opportunistic bitch, and the man who kept that secret are the ones who should answer for what happened. That’s why I must apologize to you, Kaiden Grey, and especially you, Lady Ashborn.”

Natasha lowered her head. On camera, in front of millions, the woman with the cosmetics billboard face and the silk robe and the heavy-lidded blue eyes bent at the waist until her forehead nearly touched her knees. A full bow. The kind that left nothing to interpretation.

She held it.

Kaiden said nothing for a long moment. His arm was still around Vespera. His expression was hard to read. The anger from earlier hadn’t left, but something else sat beside it now. A woman who had wronged his mother was apologizing to her, and he couldn’t hate her for that even if he wanted to.

He didn’t feel justified in hating this woman. He simply didn’t know her well enough. For all he knew, this woman had her own circumstances and her own desperation that a silk robe said nothing about.

What she did wasn’t something he’d ever respect. But that didn’t mean he knew enough to condemn her.

After getting to know the stories of his three Valkyries, Kaiden was not the man who’d seethe blindly.

Not at her, at least.

Magnus had zero justification for what he did, and all the power to not make it happen.

Vespera’s chin dipped by a fraction. Then she was still again, and that was all Natasha Volkov would ever receive from the Shadow Monarch.

Magnus’s eyes narrowed.

That wasn’t how Natasha talked. Natasha Volkov was smart, sharp, and knew exactly what she wanted. She was not the guilt-ridden, trembling waif she was performing right now, and she certainly didn’t structure sentences like a press release drafted by a crisis communications team.

Every word coming out of Natasha’s mouth was optimized. Maximum damage to him. Zero collateral to Vespera. A real scorned mistress would be angry, messy, unpredictable. This one was surgical.

”I also want to share something,” Natasha continued. ”Because I know claims like this need proof.”

She tapped her phone. The stream overlay shifted as Natasha shared her screen, and a video file began playing in a second window beside her face.

Security footage. High angle, wide lens, the kind of shot produced by a camera mounted near a ceiling and forgotten. It showed the interior of an apartment. The living room he’d sat in dozens of times, the couch, the kitchen island, the hallway leading to the bedroom.

Magnus walked into frame. Unmistakable. His build, his face, his coat. He set a bag on the counter. Natasha entered from the hallway, kissed him, and his hands settled on her waist.

The footage cut to another clip. Different angle, different night. Magnus at the kitchen island, shirt untucked, pouring wine into two glasses while Natasha leaned against the counter and laughed at something he’d said.

Another clip. Another night. Him leaving through the front door at an hour the timestamp confirmed was past midnight.

The chat went ballistic.

At the same time, Magnus’s legs went numb.

”I checked,” he whispered. The words fell out of him before he could stop them. ”I swept that apartment myself!”

Grace glanced at him.

”Every corner, I checked!” His voice was climbing. ”I found nothing!”

But there had been. Artifacts so far above the grade of anything a civilian could acquire that his sweep hadn’t registered them. The kind of surveillance equipment that existed in the inventories of S-tier operatives, intelligence divisions, and people whose resources extended beyond anything money could buy.

The kind of equipment Vespera Ashborn could produce with a single conversation.

She’d bugged the apartment years ago. She’d watched him come and go, pour wine and untuck his shirt and kiss another woman in a living room wired without either of them knowing. She’d collected hundreds of hours of footage and stored it somewhere he would never find.

She never cared about the affair, that much was true. At least, not emotionally.

From the perspective of leverage, however...

Vespera Ashborn wouldn’t be who she is if she didn’t pounce on an opportunity to collect leverage, especially when it was handed to her on a silver platter like this. All she needed to do was spend some pocket change and put some cameras into the apartment, knowing that Magnus’s hubris would let her get away with it.

After all, Magnus was a fighter, not a detection specialist. If he had called upon actual professionals, they would’ve found the cameras. But Magnus, looking at Natasha as a commoner who wouldn’t dare, and living a life of indulgence where everything bent the way he wanted them to, was exactly the kind of arrogance that ensured he would believe his own sweep was enough.

On the feed, the footage stopped. Natasha’s face returned, and whatever composure she’d been holding began to fracture.

”There’s more...” she said. Her voice dropped. ”It wasn’t just the lying.”

Magnus’s hands hit the desk. A terrible premonition of what was coming rolled over him.

’No...’

”When I told him I wanted to go public...” Natasha’s chin trembled. Her eyes were filling. ”When I said I couldn’t do this anymore and that people deserved to know the truth...”

’That is a lie.’

”He hit me.”

Her voice broke on the second word.

”Over and over again.”

The composure shattered and the tears came, heavy and unrestrained, rolling down her cheeks as she pulled the shoulder of her silk robe aside. A bruise spread across her upper arm, dark and ugly, four distinct pressure points that mapped to fingers. She pulled the robe further. Her shoulder. The side of her ribcage.

”He grabbed me and told me what would happen if I ever said a word to anyone.” She was sobbing openly now. ”I was so scared of him... I thought no one would believe me over the great Magnus Ashborn, and that was if I even got to speak my piece. I was fearing for my life... I’m sorry...”

The feed went quiet. The chat stopped scrolling for three full seconds, which on a stream of this size was the equivalent of silence in a stadium.

Then it erupted.

Magnus’s hands were shaking, both of them now, and the veins in his forearms stood out like cables.

’I never touched her.’

He stared at the bruises on his screen. Four pressure points. Fingers. The kind of mark that looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like, because the person who’d placed them there knew exactly what a hand-shaped bruise needed to look like to be believed.

Natasha was crying. Genuine terror in her voice. And every word of it, every trembling syllable about being grabbed and silenced, was a lie that Vespera Ashborn had manufactured and placed in this woman’s mouth alongside footage that made everything she said unquestionable.

The surveillance clips, the affair, the proof, all of it undeniable. And the one fabrication sat on a foundation of truth so solid that no one on earth would ever doubt it.

And the timing. The timing was so cruel that Magnus knew only one person could be behind it.

Not even a full day ago, Magnus had been a guild leader. Powerful, respected, feared. A man who built an empire through discipline and vision, whose name carried weight in every boardroom and battlefield on the continent. A man the public had no reason to doubt.

That man could have denied the beating and been believed. That man had a pristine reputation, decades of public service, institutional credibility that would have made Natasha’s word meaningless against his.

Vespera hadn’t used the ammunition, fully aware of this fact. Instead, like a patient predator, she circled her prey over and over again.

She’d waited until his own children screamed his name on a mountain in front of millions. Until Alice called him a would-be murderer of his own son. Until the world watched footage of his veterans hunting a rookie team and heard, from the mouths of his own blood, that he’d ordered it.

Now Magnus Morvane was a man who’d tried to kill his firstborn son in cold blood. And against that backdrop, what was beating a mistress who wanted to speak out? What was one more act of violence from a man the world had already convicted of the worst crime a father could commit?

Before tonight, people would have questioned Natasha. After tonight, they’d pity her and call him an evil person.

Vespera hadn’t just fabricated the accusation. She’d built the world in which it would never be questioned.

On the feed, the chat was still burning. Natasha wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm and tried to steady her breathing.

”Miss Natasha, I’m sorry about my comment earlier... If I knew...” Alice now felt bad.

”I’m the only one who should be sorry,” the woman replied. ”You shouldn’t have to deal with this. No child should have to answer for what their parents did.”

While Kaiden and Alice spoke with Natasha, asking the questions that needed asking, Vespera opened her eyes.

She looked at the camera.

Red met red across a digital feed, across a city, across the wreckage of two decades, and Magnus felt the floor shift beneath him because he knew she was looking directly at him.

Beneath the warmth, at the very corner of her mouth, the curve deepened by a fraction so small that no one alive would have caught it except the man who had spent two decades failing to read her.

It was the face of a mother whose precious child had been hurt, and who had decided what that would cost.