Sylus slipped smoothly to the edge of the crowd and crossed his arms and leaned back against a wooden post with a deeply satisfied smirk on his face.
’Man. The only thing missing right now is a bucket of buttered popcorn and a front-row seat.’
Corvus lay shivering in the mud staring up into the absolute void of Valessia’s eyes and whatever brave face he’d been trying to hold together just completely crumbled.
He scraped up the most pathetic desperate smile.
"M-My Lady... please hear me out I—"
"Shut the fuck up."
Before the sentence could even finish leaving his mouth Valessia drove the sharp spike of her high heel straight down onto his open hand.
"AAAAAGGGHH!"
Corvus’s spine arched off the ground as bones cracked clean under her weight and the shriek he let out rattled every window in the nearby estate.
"Not another word," Valessia whispered, pressing one single delicate finger softly against her own blood-red lips like she was shushing a child during a bedtime story.
Violet mana surged wildly around her body and turned her eyes into glowing lethal embers and the temperature across the entire field dropped.
Corvus slapped his free hand over his own mouth and choked down his screaming and shook like a leaf under her gaze.
"I won’t even waste my own hands dirtying them on something like you," Valessia said and looked toward the heavily armored captain standing beside her. "Decapitate him. Right here right now."
Sylus’s smirk evaporated off his face in about half a second.
’Wait. What?!’
"As you command, Baroness." The knight bowed and pulled his heavy broadsword from its sheath with a sharp lethal SCHWING.
"Wait stop—!" Sylus was already moving, sprinting forward and planting himself directly between the kneeling muddy man and Valessia. "Lady Valessia don’t make permanent decisions when you’re this angry—"
"Do not dare tell me how to handle my own traitors, Sylu—"
"VALESSIA LISTEN TO ME!" Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The entire crowd sucked in a collective breath and held it.
Nobody raised their voice at the Baroness. Nobody ever yelled her bare name in public like that. The two knights looked like they’d briefly forgotten how to be people.
Valessia’s lethal gaze snapped onto Sylus in pure genuine surprise and the murderous aura flickering around her stuttered and died down all at once.
Sylus leaned in fast and spoke clearly. "When I cornered him in the field he was talking to himself and he specifically mentioned taking orders from someone he called ’Madame’."
The word hit Valessia somewhere deep and fast.
Her sharp mind immediately went to the forged letter and the subtle hints scattered through it pointing toward an external buyer referred to only as Madame and suddenly the whole picture shifted into something much larger and much worse than one rogue administrator acting alone.
"Madame..." she whispered and her hand moved to her chin. "You’re saying Corvus is just a pawn. That there’s a larger faction deliberately engineering the complete collapse of the Astria house from the outside."
"Exactly," Sylus nodded as the immediate danger cooled down around them. "You chop his head off now and you kill your only lead. Keep him alive and make him talk."
Valessia looked at Sylus for a moment with something unreadable sitting in her violet eyes then turned back to the guards with an expression completely empty of warmth.
"Drag him to the lower dungeons," she said, voice flat as a blade that had already been cleaned. "Break every bone in his hands if you must. Don’t stop until he gives up every single name connected to this Madame."
"NO! LADY VALESSIA PLEASE!" Corvus wailed as both giant knights grabbed him by the collar and started hauling his limp muddy body across the dirt toward the manor. "FORGIVE ME! PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME DOWN THERE!"
His screaming faded down the dark corridor and then the night went quiet again.
Sylus threw both arms up behind his head and stretched until his back popped loudly and let out the longest exhale of his entire borrowed life.
"Phew," he muttered with a loose grin. "Glad that’s over. Name officially cleared."
Valessia shifted her gaze from the dark corridor where the screaming had disappeared and settled her eyes on the young man standing beside her and a wave of something heavy moved through her chest all at once.
This was the boy her father brought home so she wouldn’t feel alone.
He had stood by her side since childhood and the moment a forged letter landed in her hands she had thrown chains on him without a second thought and chosen to believe a snake in a formal coat who’d been lurking around the estate for barely a few months over someone who had given ten years of his life to this house.
The cold in her expression just melted away and left something soft and completely unguarded in its place.
"Yes, my lad—?" He turned and then the rest of that sentence just died somewhere in his throat.
Valessia reached out and gently wrapped both her small delicate hands around his right hand and pulled it slightly toward her chest and looked up at him with the most genuinely remorseful expression he’d ever seen on that face.
"I am so deeply sorry," she said and her voice shook just slightly around the edges. "I should have believed in you from the very beginning. I shouldn’t have thrown those accusations at you or put you in chains. Please forgive me."
Sylus stood there feeling the velvety warmth of her soft hands wrapped around his and looked down at her and a quiet smile broke across his face as he shook his head slowly.
"You never need to bow your head and apologize to anyone, Lady Valessia," he said softly. He gently pulled his hand back and bowed with clean refined butler grace.
"If anything I’m the one who should be begging forgiveness. I yelled your bare name in front of the entire estate staff."
Valessia let out a small breathy giggle and the tension left her shoulders all at once.
"It shocked me for a second honestly," she murmured, a soft blush dusting her cheeks as her eyes dropped to her hands in her lap. "But hearing you yell my name like that brought back so many memories. It reminded me of when we were kids and you used to run through the halls calling me Valessia without a single care in the world."
"Ah... is that so?" Sylus chuckled and scratched the back of his neck.
"Yes," she nodded and her eyes lingered on him with something tender and nostalgic sitting in them. "I never actually liked it when you suddenly switched to calling me ’My Lady’ as we got older. I understood it was for duty and respect but every time you said it I felt this huge distance open up between us like I’d lost my best friend overnight." She paused. "To be completely honest if you went back to just calling me by my name when we’re together... I wouldn’t mind it at all."
Sylus looked into her glowing violet eyes and felt the corner of his mouth pull up slowly.
’Bingo.’
’Her trust is back completely. No need to rush anything or force a single thing right now. I’ll let the relationship build naturally.’
"Well then," he said with a playful smile. "I’ll take you up on that and just call you Valessia."
"Mmm, I prefer it that way," she smiled back and then her expression went soft and thoughtful. "Though when I saw that forged letter... I really did believe for a moment that you’d betrayed me."
Sylus shook his head and the playfulness faded from his face into something steady and serious.
"Let me make one thing crystal clear to you."
Instead of letting her hold his hand this time Sylus dropped smoothly down onto one knee right in front of her and reached up and gently took her soft noble hand into his.
Valessia’s breath caught in her throat and she looked down at him with her heart suddenly very loud against her ribs.
"Sylus...?"