Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1656 Ghost from the Past

Neither parent moved.

The chamber held its silence the way a held breath holds before the lungs give out, and in the stillness, Amaraʼs tongue dragged another slow line up her motherʼs throat. Ophira flinched beneath the wet pass but her eyes were no longer on her daughter. They were locked on the reading chair, on the ghost sitting in the crook of a strangerʼs arm, and the flinch was reflexive because the Duchessʼs mind had left the bed entirely.

Alastairʼs mouth hung open around the name he had just spoken. Blood pooled at his lower lip and dripped from his chin onto the pillow, and his gaze would not leave the caramel-haired woman perched on the armored thigh across the room. Twenty years since Ophira wept into his arms and told him a beast had come through the garden, and... The grief that followed had been so complete he buried it beneath a decade of war and never looked back.

She was alive. She was sitting in his bedroom on the leg of a man in dark armor, watching him bleed.

Vivienne giggled from atop his chest, oblivious to the shift. ”Papa is shook!” she sang, and twisted the dagger a quarter turn in his shoulder for emphasis. ”Hyup!”

He did not feel it.

”Isnʼt it time you stop licking your mother?”

The caramel-haired woman asked it lightly, aimed at Amara the way one corrects a dog at the dinner table.

Amara did not stop. Her tongue found the hollow of Ophiraʼs throat and her lips pressed wet against the Duchessʼs skin, the savoring too sweet to release on a word.

”Amara. I am no longer asking. Stop.”

The warmth left the name between one syllable and the next. Amaraʼs tongue stopped mid-stroke, her fingers froze on her motherʼs cheek, and the giddy cruelty in her eyes went flat and empty in a way that had nothing voluntary about it. She pulled off Ophiraʼs body and sat upright on her motherʼs stomach with her hands folded in her lap, spine rigid, obedient as a hound brought to heel by a voice it could not disobey.

Eveliana uncrossed her legs, set one hand on the armored pauldron for balance, and stood off the manʼs thigh. She walked toward the bed in no hurry, and when the moonlight caught her face in full, the Dukeʼs breath gave out.

Mirabelleʼs cheekbones. Mirabelleʼs green eyes. The same mouth his first wife had left behind in her only daughter before the garden took them both.

”You... died...” he managed, and the blood at his lips made the word bubble.

Eveliana looked down at him. The half-smile that had been playing at her mouth since the reading chair fell away, and what replaced it was a contempt so quiet and so settled it could only have been carried for decades.

”Thatʼs not...” Alastair shook his head against the soaked pillow. ”The garden... Ophira said...”

His daughter did not answer him. Her green eyes swept his bleeding frame once, head to boots, and the contempt on her face did not waver.

”You had only two wives,” she said, her voice calm and conversational, as if she were reading from an old ledger. ”Just two women. That was all you had to take care of, you pathetic man. You couldnʼt even manage that much.”

Alastairʼs mouth opened. Nothing came out.

”Have you no shame?” Eveliana murmured. ”There are men out there who hold a dozen women in their hearts and love every single one of them equally. You couldnʼt handle two.”

Her gaze left her father and found the armored man in the reading chair, and the contempt fell away. The smile that replaced it was small and private and genuine, carrying a warmth that neither parent in that bed had ever seen on the girl who once lived in their palace. She was looking at the stranger with a tenderness she reserved for him alone, and it made the cruelty she had just delivered all the more precise.

She turned toward Ophira, and the warmth was gone. Her gaze brushed past the daughter still sitting obediently on the Duchessʼs stomach.

”Youʼre in the way, Amara.”

Amara climbed off her mother and stood at the edge of the bed with her bare feet on cold stone, her bloodied nightgown clinging to her thighs. She stood there with her arms at her sides and her fingers curling and uncurling against the fabric, not moving, not speaking, cast off one perch and waiting without permission to seek another.

Her gaze slid toward the reading chair.

The armored man had not looked at her. He sat with one gauntlet resting on the armrest beside the brunette and his visor aimed past the bed, and the disinterest was so total it should have killed whatever was building behind Amaraʼs ribs.

It did not.

Her lips parted. Her eyes went wide and bright with a hope so naked it stripped every layer of cruelty she had worn on the bed, and what was left underneath was a woman who wanted something so badly her body moved before her pride could stop it. She sank to her hands and knees on the stone and crawled to him, slow and measured, the hem of her nightgown dragging through the blood she had spilled on the way, her hips rolling with each motion, involuntary and impossible to suppress. She reached his legs and pressed her cheek to the inside of his knee, her fingers curling around his greave, her lashes wet from the work she had done on the bed.

”Did I do well...?” she whispered up at him, small and hopeful. ”Was it enough...? My sentence... will it be...?”

Her fingers tightened against the metal.

Vivienne, still straddling Alastairʼs hips, watched her twin kneel and felt the unfairness of it hit her stomach before the thought reached her head.

”Not fair!” she gasped, yanking the dagger free with a wet sound that jerked Alastairʼs body sideways. She scrambled off the bed and crossed the chamber at a sprint, dropping to her knees at the manʼs other side, both bloodied palms flat on his thigh, craning up at him with begging eyes and a lip that shook with everything she wanted to ask.

The brunette on the armrest let out a low, dry chuckle.

”You dumb girl,” she said, her blue eyes bright with amusement as she looked down at Vivienne. ”You were meant to keep your father weakened.”

”Ah!” Vivienneʼs mouth fell open and her head whipped toward the bed where her fatherʼs body was fighting back against the draining effect.

”Haaah... Itʼs fine, you can keep groveling and begging,” the brunette chirped her. ”Iʼll handle it.”

She plucked the dagger from Vivienneʼs slack fingers and rose from the armrest in a single unhurried motion, rolling her shoulders once before pulling the sleeve of her blouse back to the elbow on one arm, then the other, slow and precise, because she knew exactly how long the next part would take and did not want the fabric in the way. She found the Duke on the bed, and the smile that crossed her face carried no warmth.

”Itʼs been some time...”

She walked to him, drove the blade into his chest in a single clean thrust that pinned his recovery flat.

Alastairʼs back arched off the mattress and a ragged grunt tore out of his throat.

”Grh!”

The brunette held the hilt and looked down at him. The violence in her gaze was old and personal and had nothing to do with this Duke. She had learned what fathers could do to their children a long time ago, and the calm on her face while he writhed beneath the enchantment came from that knowledge. Neither the Duke nor the Duchess could have known what they were seeing, only that the beautiful woman standing over Alastairʼs chest wore her cruelty like a second skin.

She gave the blade a slow twist. Her ponytail swayed.

The armored man looked down at the twins kneeling at his feet.

He spoke for the first time. His voice was low and flat.

”Youʼve done well.”

Amaraʼs face crumpled and a sob of pure shuddering relief broke out of her chest. Vivienne let out a squeal that climbed into a whimper, and both women pressed their faces against his thighs with desperate nuzzling motions, foreheads bumping dark plate, wet cheeks rubbing against crimson-threaded armor, their tears and grateful little sniffles mixing freely against the metal.

”Thank you,” Amara sobbed against his leg, ”thank you, thank you, thank you...”