Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 670: A Mother’s Regret

Vespera regarded him through the projection. The silence between them carried more than two decades of marriage, five children, a guild built from nothing, and the slow, steady erosion of everything that had once held those things together.

"Because I felt like it," she said.

Magnus’s jaw locked.

"You felt like it."

"Yes."

"Our daughter is operating as a strange something above that bastard’s head on a live broadcast. The secret you said would be kept is hanging by a thread, and your explanation is that you felt like it. Did it not occur to you," Magnus demanded, and the control in his voice was a physical thing now, a cage built syllable by syllable, "to ask my opinion before making this decision?"

"No."

"No," Magnus repeated.

"I already know your opinion."

The silence that followed was intense. Magnus sat in his dark room with crystal fragments on his desk and blood on his knuckles and stared at the face of the woman he’d married, and he understood with perfect, horrible clarity that she had not consulted him because his opinion was irrelevant to her.

"This can’t go on," he said. "You understand that. Our family is fracturing. Our children are acting against the interests of the household. Alice has sided with the boy you removed for the good of this family, and now you just.... Changed your mind? You signed off on it. You watched it happen and said nothing to me."

He leaned forward.

"The Ashborn name means something. It meant something before the apocalypse arrived and it will mean something long after we’re gone. What you’ve done is a disgrace to everything we’ve built. We can’t let our children keep failing us like this without repercussions."

"I disagree."

"What?"

"It was us who failed them." Vespera’s voice remained exactly where it had been since the call began, flat and cold and utterly beyond his reach. "They are innocent. We are the ones who broke this family. We are the ones who broke our children and made them act against the family’s interests."

"Not this crap again!" Magnus’s composure finally cracked. The cage he’d built syllable by syllable splintered, and what came through was raw. "Not this sentimental nonsense! I made the hard decisions that kept this family relevant. Everything I did was to protect what we built, and you want to sit there and tell me our children are innocent? Alice defied her guild. Kaiden became a pornstar while wearing the family name. These are not the actions of innocent kids."

"They are the actions of children who were not loved correctly."

"Loved." Magnus spat the word. "You want to talk about love. You, Vespera. The woman who didn’t hold her own children until they were three months. You want to lecture me about love."

"I have been riddled with guilt about the way I acted as a mother toward my children for a very long time."

"When did this happen?" Magnus demanded. "When did you decide that being their mother mattered more than being their leader? You were the one who acted before I had. You were the one who expelled Kaiden from the family."

"I haven’t forgotten."

"Then what changed?"

"I did."

Two words. No elaboration. No defense. No apology.

Magnus stared at her.

"You can’t tell me that you’re okay with his behavior!"

Vespera was quiet for a moment.

Then something happened that Magnus had not seen ever since he married the woman.

She smiled.

It was small. Barely there. A softening at the corners of her mouth that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent far too many years studying her face. But Magnus had, and what he saw made him go still, because Vespera Ashborn did not smile. Vespera Ashborn maintained composure. Vespera Ashborn’s face was a weapon she kept sheathed.

This was not composure.

This was warmth.

"I am the proudest mother on Earth," she decreed.

Magnus’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"My son," Vespera continued, and her voice had changed. The flat coldness that had carried every word of this conversation was gone, replaced by something Magnus could not remember hearing from her before. "The boy I neglected. The boy I disowned. The boy whose father stopped seeing him and whose siblings bullied him while I did nothing."

The smile held.

"That boy grew up to become a man who protects innocents. An icon to the young generation of awakened. A leader whose team follows him not because of contracts, threats, or leverage, but because they love him." She paused. "I’ve read the contracts between Kaiden and his lovers, Magnus. Do you know what they contain? A few lines. Formalities. The bare minimum the Association requires to process a group registration. No non-compete clauses. No twelve-page loyalty provisions. No transfer restrictions."

Her eyes, those red eyes that had watched battlefields without blinking, were shining bright.

"He doesn’t need them. His family stays because they want to."

Magnus said nothing.

"And despite everything I did to him," Vespera whispered, and now the smile turned into something that could break a person who was paying attention, "despite the years of coldness, the abandonment, the silence I let swallow him whole, my son hugs me when he sees me. He kisses my cheek. He tells me he’s grateful. He calls me a wonderful mother."

Her voice wavered. For the first time in the conversation. For the first time in longer than Magnus could remember.

"He has every right to refuse to look at me. Every right to hate me for what I allowed to happen to him. Instead, he treats me as though I am the best mother in the world, when I know, with absolute certainty, that I am the worst."

The smile remained. Tender and devastating.

"So yes, Magnus. I am okay with his behavior. I am more than okay. I am proud of every single thing that boy has become, and I will not let you take his sister from him because your ego cannot survive the fact that your children chose each other over you."

A long silence sat between the two.

"...This is not right," he spoke up finally. "None of this is right. Our family is in pieces, our daughter is in the field with a man we removed from this household, and my wife is telling me she enabled it because she changed her mind. This is not how the Ashborn family operates."

"You’re right," Vespera agreed.

She disconnected.

The projection died. The artifact went dark. Magnus sat in the silence, the absence of her voice louder than any argument, and waited for the anger to tell him what to do next.

It never got the chance.

A knock came at the door. Quiet. Professional. The kind of knock that came from staff who had been trained to deliver sensitive materials without asking questions.

Magnus called them in.

A young woman in New Dawn administrative attire stood in the corridor. She did not make eye contact. She held a sealed envelope in both hands, the kind used for legal documents, thick parchment with the Ashborn family crest pressed into dark wax.

"From Lady Ashborn, delivered to our office forty minutes ago with instructions to present it to you."

Forty minutes ago.

Before the call.

Magnus took the envelope. The woman bowed and left. He closed the door, returned to his desk, and broke the seal.

The document inside was three pages long. Clean typeset. Legal language. Every clause precise, every term defined, every line carrying the weight of a decision that had been made long before today.

Terms of dissolution of marriage between Vespera Ashborn and Magnus Ashborn.