Chapter 113 Elena Heart- POV
Chapter 113 Elena Heart- POV
The heavy silence of the receiving room felt less like peace and more like the stagnant air before a landslide. My parents’ final words echoed off the cold marble walls, lingering in the shadows long after their silhouettes had melted into the capital's crowded streets.
They were gone. Officially, completely gone. The blood tie that had bound me to House Heart for twenty-four years hadn't just frayed—it had been cleanly severed by a clinical, devastating stroke of familial detachment.
I sank slowly into one of the velvet high-backed chairs, my knees suddenly feeling too weak to hold my weight.
I looked down at the sapphire ring on my left hand, then at the emerald ring on my right. Two forces, two entirely different destinies, pulling at my soul until I felt hollowed out.
Xavier was out. He had been locked in the high spire with the grand treasury councils since dawn, ensuring every single gold piece stolen by us was safely cataloged back into the royal vaults.
He was doing the brutal, exhausting work of a Sovereign—severely punishing the traitorous noble houses, signing decrees, and laying the bricks of a new, just Drakmor. He was fighting for our future.
So why did I feel so utterly, desperately alone?
I had destroyed Grace, Leo and the ancient mistress of the Council. I had stopped Livia from ripping open the abyssal rift and letting the primordial titans crush this kingdom into dust.
I had saved Xavier’s life. By all rights, the story should have ended there. The bards should be singing, the gardens should be blooming, and I should be learning how to breathe without a dagger clenched in my fist.
Instead, it felt like the darkness hadn't died with Livia; it had simply mutated. It had shed its monstrous, magical skin and crawled into the polite, whispering galleries of high society.
The ultimate villain was gone, but the secondary machinery of the world—the greed, the old blood debts, and the relentless gravity of political malice—was turning its heavy gears directly toward me.
My parents were planning a storm at our gates. The southern lords were whispering of mutiny.
And somewhere in the pristine, sunlit estates of the capital, a new breed of enemy was watching me, realizing that if they couldn't defeat the King’s lightning, they could simply poison the ground he stood on. T
hey couldn't kill me, so they would ruin me. They would make me a pariah, a traitor, a curse upon the crown until Xavier was forced to choose between his throne and his heart.
I leaned my head back against the cold leather, closing my eyes as the Celestial Tether hummed a faint, distant, exhausted rhythm from the council tower.
The battle in the mud was easy, I thought bitterly, a sharp, tired edge of my natural sass cutting through the gloom. It’s the peace that’s going to kill me.
A few hours later.
The wax from the heavy candelabra had pooled into a frozen, jagged wave on the desk, mimicking the cold stagnation in my chest.
It was three in the morning. The palace was silent, save for the distant, rhythmic footsteps of the Black-Iron Ravens patrolling the outer ramparts.
A mile away, in the High Council spire, a single window still glowed with a faint amber light.
Xavier was still there. Through the Celestial Tether, I could feel the low, exhausting thrum of his mind—cataloging grain supplies, tracking the frozen assets of executed traitors, and rewriting the tax laws to keep the commoners from starving.
He was drowning in the ink and ledger-lines of a newborn kingdom.
And I was drowning in the blood of my past.
On the desk before me lay a rough parchment, delivered not by a royal courier, but found pinned to my balcony railing by an obsidian throwing dart. The ink was a dark, rust-colored sepia—the signature tracking dye of House Heart’s elite Vanguard.
To the Betrayer of the Hearth,
You wear a sapphire where your honor should be. The Southern Houses have broken their alignment with the capital. Five thousand spears are currently amassed at the Whispering Ridge, waiting for the word to march and cleanse the throne from the siren who bewitched our King. Your parents have given their blessing. Return to the Hearth and face your judgment, or watch us march your precious storm god into a valley of cold-iron.
— Commander Jarek.
Jarek. Damn it!
The name alone sent a phantom ache through my collarbone, right where his heavy leather riding crop had broken the skin when I was fourteen.
He wasn’t just the former commander of our family's militant vanguard; he was the man my parents had entrusted with my practical conditioning.
He was the one who had taught me how to hold my breath for three minutes in freezing water, how to twist a dagger beneath a ribcage to ensure a silent death, and how to entirely suppress my humanity for the sake of the mission.
But Jarek’s loyalty to House Heart had long mutated into something far more clinical, suffocating, and dark.
He didn't just want me to be the perfect weapon for my parents—he viewed me as his masterpiece.
He had an obsessive, near-religious devotion to the idea of my absolute purity as an assassin. To him, my agency was a defect. My love for Xavier wasn't just a political betrayal; it was a personal defilement of the instrument he had spent fifteen years carving out of raw meat and bone.
The politics behind the Southern Threat were deep and jagged. The southern territory of Drakmor was an arid, mountainous landscape, entirely dependent on the ancient iron mines and the slave trade that Duke Hallway had heavily subsidized.
When Xavier and I seized the treasury and executed the Duke, we hadn't just liberated the capital; we had choked the southern lords' entire economy. They were furious, terrified, and bankrupt.
By aligning with the militant vanguard of House Heart, those southern lords had found the perfect ideological shield for their greed.
They weren't launching a rebellion for gold; they were launching a "holy crusade" to liberate the young, impressionable King from the clutches of a corrupting, magic-wielding assassin.
And my parents, in their absolute disappointment, had handed them the keys to our family's hidden armories.
If those five thousand spears marched, the fragile peace Xavier had just built would collapse into a bloody civil war before the ink on our marriage contract was even dry.
The council would panic, the noble houses would turn on him, and he would be forced to become the very tyrant he loathed just to keep the kingdom from tearing itself apart.
I couldn't let him fight this war. Not when the target painted on his chest was put there by my own bloodline.
Slowly, deliberately, I unlaced the formal velvet tunic I had worn to the council briefing. I threw it onto the floor, watching the fine silk crumple in the dark.
In its place, I pulled on my old, familiar attire: the form-fitting, dark-grained leathers that smelled faintly of pine and old iron. I strapped my twin obsidian daggers to my thighs, the leather buckles clicking with a heavy, final precision.
Finally, I looked down at my left hand. The sapphire ring caught the dim candlelight, a brilliant, painful reminder of the life I was turning my back on.
I couldn't wear it to the Ridge. Jarek would see it as a trophy of my taming.