Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1658 Beast in the Garden

Alastair Thalion Greenvale had buried soldiers, vassals, and enemies. He had watched men die on campaign trails and in the halls of castles that changed hands at swordpoint, and the part of him that processed death had long since calloused over.

That callous did not cover this.

His wife's body lay crooked on the mattress beside him with her neck folded at the angle his daughter had left it.

The sheets beneath her were dark with what she had voided in her final seconds, and the face he had kissed goodnight not an hour ago stared at the ceiling, unseeing, lids half-parted in the permanent way of the dead.

He had failed to protect her. He had failed to see the threat, failed to fight through the enchantment in his chest, failed to do anything beyond wheeze her killer's name while the life was wrung out of her. The Duke of Greenvale, Level 74, had lain on his own pillow and watched his wife die at the hands of a ghost.

His Vitality was a fraction of what it should have been and his Strength was halved and falling, but the body he had forged through centuries of war did not know how to stop fighting.

He surged upright.

The brunette at his chest had not expected it. The dagger in his sternum was still pinning his recovery flat, but his hand closed around her wrist with a grip that should have been impossible for a man being drained alive, and the surprise on her face was genuine for the first time since she had crossed the room.

She braced, twisted, and drove the blade deeper. Alastair's vision whited for a half-second before he forced his torso off the mattress by sheer will, shoving her arm sideways hard enough to slide the blade an inch through his own flesh.

The brunette's stare widened. Then she caught his momentum, redirected his wrist with a turn of her hip, and slammed him back into the pillow with a strength that should not have fit inside a frame that small.

Her free hand found the dagger and wrenched it once, and the enchantment surged through the wound in a fresh wave that took everything he had just reclaimed.

His arms dropped. His chest heaved.

"Damn it..." the brunette said, looking down at him with genuine interest. "A level 74 seeing his life come apart before his very eyes is no joke."

Eveliana had already turned away from Ophira's body, one hand brushing the other as if cleaning dust from her palms. She stepped around the foot of the bed and stopped at her father's side, and the green gaze that found him carried none of the killing weight it had held for the Duchess.

They carried disgust.

"Let me guess: she told you I was dead."

Alastair's mouth moved. Nothing coherent left it.

"And my mother?" Eveliana tilted her head. "An accident, I assume? Something tragic and unavoidable that conveniently left no witnesses?"

"You... you were..." Alastair's voice cracked and reformed and cracked again, because the machinery of his mind was trying to reconcile twenty years of grief with a living woman standing at his bedside, and the gears were stripping. "The garden... there was a high level wolfkin assassin... it broke through the outer wall, past the guards... your mother tried to fight it off..."

His vision blurred.

"Mirabelle died protecting you." The words came out reverent and broken. "She threw herself between you and the beast, and it... it killed you both... Mauled her and ate you alive..."

He could not finish. The memory of the small bloodstain in the grass beside his first wife's mauled corpse had lived behind his ribs for two decades, and it rose now like bile.

Eveliana broke into giggles.

The sound was bright and cruel and utterly inappropriate for the content of the sentence that had preceded it, and Alastair flinched as if she had struck him.

"What a smart explanation!" She clapped her hands once, delighted. "The perpetrator and the victim both conveniently cease to exist. No killer to question, no daughter to contradict the story. You just have the single corpse to examine, and isn't that tidy?"

"It isn't..." Alastair shook his head against the soaked pillow. "I investigated. I found blood. I found wolfkin hair at the scene. Your mother's body... the wounds were consistent... claw marks across her chest and throat, deep enough to..."

He swallowed.

"I took my army into the Beastkin Confederation lands and slaughtered every wolfkin settlement within a week's march..."

The laughter left his daughter's face.

What replaced it was a sadness so raw and so sudden that Alastair almost did not recognize it on features that had spent the last ten minutes wearing cruelty like cosmetics. Her gaze dropped to the body on the mattress, then lifted back to her father, and for a moment the woman who had just snapped a neck without flinching looked like the girl who used to sit in his study and watch him read.

"All your dumb little story tells me," Eveliana said, her voice quieter now, stripped of its mockery, "is that Ophira's men were thorough enough to desecrate my mother's body with animal claws before you arrived."

"No..." Alastair whispered.

"Well, I'm standing in front of you." Her chin dipped toward him. "Whatever happened in that garden, the 'eaten alive' part is definitely not real."

Alastair stared at his daughter, his expression cracking, each new sentence another fracture in the bedrock of the story he had built his grief upon, and the denial on his face was not stubbornness. It was terror.

Because if she was right, then Ophira had not merely betrayed him. Ophira had murdered Mirabelle, staged the scene, fabricated the evidence, and let him spend twenty years mourning a lie while she slept in his bed and acted all innocent.

And he had believed every word of it.

He was living a lie.

"No... No, this can't be true...!" he rasped.

Then, from the reading chair, two words were spoken.

"[Eternal Damnation]."

The voice was low and flat and carried no more weight than a man ordering a drink, but the air in the chamber split open on the third syllable. Eveliana's breath caught in her chest with an audible hitch, her green gaze snapping toward the armored man in the chair, and the recognition on her face was immediate.

Ophira's corpse convulsed once on the mattress.

From the broken neck and the cooling flesh, something tore free. It rose in a thin column of pale blue light that twisted and writhed as it climbed, pulling against the body it had lived in.

It screamed without sound as it was dragged upward and sideways toward the saber that had hovered behind the armored man's shoulder.

The pale column struck the flat of the blade, compressed, and was swallowed in a rush of cold light that left the chamber dimmer than it had been a second before.

Alastair could not comprehend what he had just witnessed. The part of his brain that had read the reports of the anomaly had an inkling, but the part of his brain that was still a father and a husband refused to accept it.

The Duchess of Greenvale did not meet the conventional requirements for an Elite Soul. She was low level, uncombative, and possessed no class of military value. Under normal circumstances, her soul would have joined the Primordial Villain's lesser reserves as one among many, indistinguishable and expendable.

But the selection had always operated on principles its wielder was still learning. Eve, the low-level bodyguard who had served the Greenvale twins, had been the first to demonstrate the exception: station mattered just as much as personal might.

Eve had been a nobody by the numbers, but her role as the personal guard of two noble daughters had carried enough weight in the world's ledger to elevate her beyond the threshold. And if a bodyguard of the daughters qualified, then their mother most certainly did as well.

The armored man's gauntleted hands rose from the armrests, palms up, and the [Necromantic Codex] materialized between them as an open tome of dark binding and pale script, pages turning on their own. He found the entry he wanted, and his hands came together.

"[Soul Fusion]."

Lesser souls left [Soul Reaper] in a stream of cold fire that converged between his palms, feeding into the freshly harvested elite with a sound like wind through a cathedral. The pale flames folded and compressed, the dark script on the codex's pages burning as reserves he had gathered were spent.

"[Awaken]."