I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 817: Blood Wedding [2]

[When you find this letter, you will probably be angry with me. Angry enough perhaps to even burn it down before reading it.

Mother. Father. Alicia. Victor.

Father, I imagine you are the first one reading this. In truth, I hope you are. I hope this reaches your hands before you pass it to Mother, to Alicia, or to Victor. If you are reading these words, then I am already dead, and by now it is also very likely that I have killed Cyril before doing things I can only describe as questionable at best, and unforgivable at worst.

Whether you witnessed it yourselves or only heard of it afterward, I cannot know. And if I am being honest, I pray you did not have to see it with your own eyes.

The first thing I must say is that I am sorry.

I am sorry that I took Cyril’s life. He was your first son, the firstborn of your love, the child who should have had a future far different from the one he was given. I know there is no pain I could inflict upon you greater than that. I know that no explanation I offer will ever truly soften it.

And yet, though he was not entirely of my blood, he was still my kin. He was my brother too. And because of that, if someone had to kill him in the end, then I wanted it to be me.

No, that is not true.

Not merely wanted.

I made sure it would be me.

Because whatever Cyril had become by that point, it was no longer truly him. Or perhaps it was some ruined fragment of him, twisted beyond recognition, dragged too far into darkness to be reached again. When I am writing this, none of it has happened yet, and still I already know what he is planning. I know what is coming. I know where this road ends.

And there is nothing that can stop it.

It had to happen.

You may hate me for writing those words, especially you, Mother. You more than anyone have the right to despise me. After all, I will be the one who took the life of your first son, your only true son, if that is how your grief will force you to see it in the aftermath.

If so, I will not blame you.

But it was necessary.

As for what happened afterward, whatever you saw, whatever you heard, whatever rumor or horror reached you in the wake of it all, I know you must be confused. Perhaps you are reading this now hoping for answers before you throw this letter into the fire, hoping at least to understand why the wretched bastardwho killed your son did what he did.

But the truth is that I cannot truly explain it to you.

Even if I tried, you would not understand, not fully. And if I forced the truth into words, it would only leave you with even more confusion, more bitterness, more questions than before.

So all I can say is this:

I did what I did because it had to be done.

Cyril had already gone too far. He had already crossed the line from which there was no return. He had already committed the unforgivable. Someone had to bring it to an end. And I know both of you, Father and Mother. I know that if there had been even the slightest chance to save him, you would have thrown yourselves toward it without hesitation. You would have tried until your very last breath.

But he was already beyond saving.

And I think, deep down, both of you know that too but as parents you wouldn’t just abandon him so I took matters at hands because keeping him alive would endanger you, Alicia and Victor.

As for my own death, that too was something I accepted long before the end. It had to happen as well. I was meant to die there, and if I had to die, then I wanted at least to choose the manner of it, if not the moment, then the hand that would deliver the final blow. The hand of a kin or an old friend if possible.

That is all I will say of it.

The truth is, I made many mistakes in my long life.

More than I can count. More than I can excuse.

For most of my life, I never had what anyone could call a real family. I never had true siblings to claim openly as mine. And the few people I loved before were taken from me one by one, until I had almost convinced myself such things were never meant for someone like me.

So after all those years, I never expected to be given another chance.

I never thought I would be welcomed into a family at all.

And yet you did.

Father, I will remain grateful to you for the rest of whatever remains of me, because you accepted me as your son. Perhaps not easily. Perhaps not perfectly. But you did. You gave me a place in your home and in your name, and whether either of us always knew how to bear that properly does not change what it meant to me.

And Mother, though I know your acceptance came with hesitation and pain of its own, you accepted me too. In your own way, and in your own time, you allowed me to stand within the family rather than outside it. That is not something I ever took lightly, even if I did not always know how to show it.

And Alicia… Victor…

I want to thank both of you as well.

Truly.

Because through you, I learned what it meant to have real siblings. A real brother I could trust and rely on. A real sister I could love and want to protect more than myself. You gave me something I had once believed I would never have, and I do not think either of you fully understood how much that mattered to me.

I am not writing this letter to justify what I did. I know better than that. Some actions do not deserve justification, no matter how necessary they may have been.

But I do want all of you to know one thing clearly:

My love for you was real.

Whatever anger you feel toward me, whatever grief, disgust, or hatred you may come to carry after this, I will accept all of it. You have every right. But even so, I wanted to leave behind these words at least once, honestly and without disguise.

Especially for you, Father and Mother.

Do not regret yourselves for what happened to Cyril.

Do not blame yourselves for what happened to me.

Never do that.

If blame must be placed anywhere, then let it be laid where it truly belongs: at the feet of Lazarus Raven.

It began with him.

It was his fault.

Not yours.

You tried. Both of you tried in the ways you could. You were not perfect, but you loved us, and you did what you could to protect us from the poison that had already seeped too deeply into this family. Sometimes, though, love alone is not enough. Sometimes love comes too late, or reaches too softly, or is simply crushed beneath the weight of things far older and uglier than itself.

That was not your failure.

So what I want now, selfishly perhaps, is for you to live as a real family at last.

The kind you should have been from the beginning.

Together.

Alicia,

I am truly sorry.

I never wanted to abandon you. I need you to believe that, even if nothing else I say deserves belief. If I could have chosen another path, one where I remained by your side as a proper elder brother, I would have taken it. I would have wanted more time with you, time to protect you, guide you, and be the brother you deserved rather than the one you were given.

I only hope that, in the end, I was at least better to you than Cyril had become.

And finally, Victor.

In some ways, I think we were closer than I ever was with the others, and yet even then we never fully crossed that final distance between us. We never truly bridged the gap. But that was not your fault. It was mine. The same is true with Alicia. I kept part of myself away on purpose. I chose not to get too close, because deep down I knew where my path would lead. I knew that if I let myself love too freely, if I let myself belong too much, then the end would only be more painful when it came.

So I held back.

That was my cowardice, not yours.

Even so, you have always done more than I ever did. More for Alicia, more for this family, more than perhaps anyone fully realizes. And because of that, I can entrust them to you. Alicia, yes, but also Father and Mother, if they ever need you. I know you will be there for them, because that is simply the kind of man you are.

You were always the better brother of the three of us.

Always.

Father. Mother.

Allow me to call you that one last time.

Because in these eighteen years of this life, that is what you truly were to me. More than any other family fate happened to give me. More, in many ways, than the one that had been mine by blood.

So from the bottom of my heart, with everything in me that remains honest.

Thank you.

]

Leora sat at her desk, motionless except for the slight tremor in her fingers, reading the letter Sirius had left behind for them.

It had been found in Alicia’s room, discovered later than it should have been, or perhaps at the cruelest possible moment, when none of them had any strength left to bear another wound.

At the doorway, James appeared, dressed in his white coat for the memorial.

“Leora,” he called softly.

She did not answer at once.

His gaze fell to the letter in her hands, and the moment he recognized it, something in his expression dimmed further. The sorrow on his face deepened into that familiar look she had come to hate these past days.

Leora lowered the letter slowly onto the desk.

“What have we even been doing all this time, James…?” She mumbled.

Her voice was quiet, but it carried a devastation that made him step into the room at once, though he still did not know what to say.

They had lost two sons that night.

Two.

And they still did not truly understand how everything had led to that end.

“W—What…” Her voice broke halfway through, catching painfully in her throat. “What have we even been doing as parents for them?”

She covered her mouth quickly, as if she could still hide the sob trying to escape. Her eyes shut at once, holding back tears that were already threatening to spill down her cheeks.

James crossed the distance between them and rested a hand on her shoulder.

Leora shook her head hard, as though rejecting even that small comfort.

“Leora… I’m sorry,” James said hoarsely. “It is my fault. I failed as a father…”

Again, she shook her head.

“No… we failed,” she whispered. “I gave up on Cyril… and Sirius… and I abandoned you to bear everything alone, and now…” Her hand tightened in the fabric of his coat. “Now all that remains…”

She could not finish.

The words would not come.

James said nothing. He only pulled her into his arms and held her there, forcing down the ache in his own chest as best he could.

For a brief moment, his eyes drifted toward the letter on the desk.

There were faint traces of dried tears on the page.

He, Leora, Alicia, and Victor had all read it now.

Sirius’s letter.

And despite the pain of it, despite the strange comfort of hearing his voice in those final words, it had given them no peace. They understood, at least, that it truly had been Sirius, the Sirius they knew, the one who had still loved them in his own quiet way until the very end. But that understanding only made everything else harder.

Why had it happened?

Why had it come to this?

Perhaps Sirius had killed Cyril to protect them. Perhaps it had been done to stop him from destroying Central Vedelia entirely, or from taking control of something too terrible to be allowed. Rage, desperation, duty, any of those might have explained that part.

But what came after?

What Sirius did afterward…

There was no explanation for it. None that they had. None that made sense.

And his death was no easier to understand.

Cyril’s fall. Sirius’s end. Two sons lost in one night, and neither James nor Leora could say with certainty why either of them had truly walked that path.

That ignorance felt like its own kind of verdict.

A failure as parents.

A terrible one.

They remained that way for several long minutes, wrapped in shared grief, until at last Leora’s sobs quieted. She drew in a trembling breath, steadied herself as much as she could, and slowly rose from the chair.

“Where is Alicia…?” She asked, unconscious reaching for her only remaining child, her youngest.

James caught her lightly by the arm before she could move away.

His expression turned more complicated still.

“Just give her some time, Leora.”

She looked up at him, confused.

“What?”

James exhaled slowly.

“Amael left her a letter,” he said.

Leora’s eyes widened.

“A letter? Like Sirius’s?”

He nodded.

That seemed to hollow her out even more.

For a moment, she just stared at him, unable to respond, before sinking back into her chair as though her strength had been taken from her all at once.

“Why…” She asked faintly, lifting her broken gaze toward him. “Why are we so ignorant, James?”

Both Sirius and Amael left a letter anticipating both their deaths and they had no ideas why.

It felt like they were missing something big but had no ideas what.

James said nothing.

“We let these children die,” she went on, her voice trembling again, “and we do not even know why. We could not understand it. We could not stop it. We were not even able to prevent any of it…”

James had no answer.

Because he was just as lost as she was.

And guilt was eating at him more deeply with every hour that passed.

Now more than ever, he saw with painful clarity how distant he had been from his children. How withdrawn. How often he had mistaken silence for strength, or assumed there would be more time to understand them later. Perhaps if he had paid closer attention, if he had insisted more, watched more, asked more, perhaps something might have changed.

Perhaps.

But it was too late now to build a life out of perhaps.

So James only bent down, wrapped his arms around Leora once more, and held her gently.

“All we can do now, Leora,” he said quietly, “is make sure we never repeat those mistakes.”