Chapter 103: Filial Love

And for the first time since they had met, Blanche had the feeling that he was truly seeing her.

Not as one of his oldest friends.

As though something between them had suddenly and irrevocably changed.

His mouth opened.

Speechless.

Searching for confirmation.

The silence that followed was almost absurd.

Asmodeus.

The arrogant demon.

The self-assured prince.

The man who seemed to have a sarcastic remark for every conceivable situation.

Had run out of words.

Blanche blinked.

Once.

Then twice.

Because she wasn't entirely sure she had ever seen someone put their brain on pause quite so thoroughly.

It was almost fascinating.

His gaze briefly dropped to her red hair.

Then rose to her eyes.

Before returning to her features.

As if comparing them.

As if suddenly searching for similarities.

Wonderful.

She had done exactly the same thing barely ten minutes earlier.

Her life had officially gone off the rails.

And yet...

Something in Asmodeus's expression prevented her from joking about it any longer.

Because behind the surprise...

Behind the shock...

There was something else.

Something she had never expected to see.

An emotion that was almost disarming.

Raw. Pure.

For a second, all of his arrogance seemed to vanish.

All of his carefully crafted charisma.

All of his composure.

As though the demonic prince had been replaced by a man who had suddenly realized he had missed something essential.

Something irreplaceable.

Even his aura seemed different.

The passionate red still burned within it.

The luxurious violet remained.

But the scarlet filaments that had been writhing through it moments earlier now seemed frozen.

Suspended.

As though he himself had forgotten how to breathe.

Then his eyes returned to her.

Red.

Impossible.

And suddenly far less frightening.

Because they looked strangely like the eyes of a man completely overwhelmed by the situation.

Which, honestly, was probably a first in his very long existence.

And somewhere deep inside herself, despite the absurdity of the moment, despite the confusion, despite the vertigo...

Blanche realized something.

He had absolutely no idea what to do.

And that reassured her far more than it should have.

So she put him out of his misery.

"My name is Elizabeth IV Blanche Drake. I'm Elsa's daughter... and yours. The day you met Nathaniel... you... you know... with my mother."

Asmodeus swallowed.

"My daughter?" he whispered, staring at Kiyan.

"She's your daughter," Kiyan confirmed.

The demon slowly turned his attention back to her, as though his mind still refused to accept what all the evidence had been screaming at him for the last several minutes.

His gaze lingered on her face with a new intensity.

More analytical.

More personal, too.

As though he no longer saw her as a stranger.

As though he was now searching each of her features for traces of a story he had long believed lost.

Blanche suddenly had the strange sensation of being studied like a puzzle whose reference image had finally been found.

The seconds passed in almost uncomfortable silence.

Then she understood.

Or rather, she understood what he was seeing.

Her eyes.

Not the ones she had today.

Not the ones he was looking at now.

Other eyes.

His own.

The eyes he had possessed when he was still human.

Before the centuries.

Before the power.

Before Hell.

Before Asmodeus became Asmodeus.

For an instant, something crossed his expression.

An emotion so fleeting that Blanche couldn't fully identify it.

Nostalgia, perhaps.

Or the peculiar shock of unexpectedly encountering a ghost from the past.

His gaze then drifted to her hair.

That impossible mass of red curls that remained impossible to ignore, even when she braided it carefully.

And once again, something seemed to click into place in his mind.

Her maternal grandmother's red hair.

Not her mother's.

Not his.

A woman long gone, of whom Elsa herself possessed only a handful of photographs.

Yet judging by the way Asmodeus stared at her, Blanche understood that he remembered her perfectly.

As though the decades had never existed.

As though a simple shade of copper was enough to bring memories buried for generations surging back to the surface.

Then his attention shifted to something else.

Something less visible.

But infinitely more revealing.

Her power.

Blanche didn't see it.

She felt it.

In the way his expression changed.

In the slight narrowing of his red eyes.

In that mixture of surprise, contemplation, and disbelief that continued to move across his face.

Because that power made no sense.

Or rather, it made far too much sense.

More powerful than that of a royal incubus.

Even Blanche was beginning to understand what that meant.

Since arriving in the Otherworld, she had met enough creatures to grasp the magnitude of such a statement.

Royal incubi were not supposed to be surpassed.

Least of all by a teenage girl who, only a few months earlier, had been more concerned with exams than demonic inheritance.

And yet.

Everything indicated that was exactly what had happened.

As though something unusual had been passed on.

As though the rules themselves had decided to take a holiday on the day she was born.

Asmodeus's gaze returned to her one last time.

This time, he was no longer searching.

He knew.

The eyes.

The hair.

The power.

The coincidences had stopped being coincidences a long time ago.

Everything fit.

And judging by the expression on the demonic prince's face, that certainty was affecting him far more deeply than he would ever admit to anyone.

"Who knows?" he asked quietly, shaken.

"Phoenix, you, Blanche, and me," Kiyan replied. "Elsa still believes it was only Nathaniel. She doesn't even know her daughter is half—"

There was no need to finish the sentence.

"That damned Phoenix! ...I need a drink," the demon growled as he stood.

"Me too," Blanche declared.

He nodded, silently prepared two glasses, then returned to his seat.

"I suppose I can't tell anyone you're my daughter? Otherwise the nephilim..."

"I have nothing to fear from the nephilim," Blanche assured him before downing her drink in one gulp.

"Yes, I suppose Winter will handle that..." he replied, imitating her.

His daughter!

"Especially since..." she continued.

"Blanche," Kiyan interrupted sternly.

She squeezed his hand.

"He won't say anything," she assured him, never taking her golden eyes off Asmodeus.

"I won't say anything," Asmodeus confirmed, intrigued.

"I have one last secret to tell you."

"That's not a good idea," Kiyan muttered.

"He was my friend before he was my father. I owe him that much."

Kiyan sighed.

He had expected many things.

Just not this.

"I'm a Diamond Drakion."

Asmodeus was left speechless.

A Diamond Drakion?!

That changed everything.

No one would dare lay a hand on her without provoking the wrath of the entire magical world.

She was a legend.

Respected.

Feared.

Kiyan blinked.

He had been certain she was about to reveal something entirely different.

"I'm not in any danger."

At last, Kiyan understood what Blanche was trying to do.

She was reassuring her father.

And when relief finally appeared on Asmodeus's face, he understood something else as well.

Asmodeus had genuinely been worried.

Asmodeus truly loved his daughter.

And in the end, Blanche really did have a father.