A hush settled over the room, thick and suffocating.
I could feel its weight pressing in from all sides.
“He becomes bolder with each passing day,” my father said, his fists clenching at his sides.“And now, it seems, he—or perhaps an accomplice—employs a poison so deadly it melts flesh from bone.”
A chorus of horror swept through the chamber, gasps and muttered curses breaking the charged silence.
Fear.
Outrage.
The perfect storm of emotions, coiling and twisting, ready to consume.
And yet…
From the corner of my eye, I watched Lord Hassan.
Still.Silent.
His expression did not change, yet something about him shifted, an imperceptible tightening in his posture, a flicker in his gaze that sent my mind reeling.
Was it calculation?Restraint?
Or something far more dangerous?
My pulse pounded in my ears as I tried to assemble the pieces of this sinister puzzle?—
To understand what game was truly being played?—
And what role Lord Hassan held in its unfolding design.
“The Black Wraith is a coward,” Lord Winston declared, his voice thick with contempt.
The air in the dining hall closed in, pressing against my chest with an unbearable weight.
My fingers gripped the edge of the table, knuckles whitening.
I could almost smell the putrid stench of his breath as he leaned forward, savoring his cruelty.
“He lurks in the shadows, a marauder waiting to strike from the darkness,” he said, his words dripping with a perverse pleasure.“But we will not let him escape.When we finally apprehend him, he will pay dearly for his heinous crimes.”
A slow, oily grin spread across his bloated face.
“We will make him reveal his powerful alchemy recipe through brute force and relentless torture—no matter the cost.”
Torture him?
A fierce, primal crack echoed through me, breaking past the corset’s tight laces and society’s strangling grip.
Was my father truly involved in the business of torture?
A fire roared to life within me, an indignation that no longer fit within the confines of my silence.
My chair scraped loudly against the floor as I rose.
The clinking of cutlery ceased.
A stunned silence fell.
