Read Novel Full Chapter 1660 New Purpose
Chapter 1660 New Purpose
"Become the strongest being in existence," Lucille said, her green eyes alight, "alongside my husband."
A silence held the room for three heartbeats.
"How...?" Alastair's brow creased. "You... you want Greenvale? I'll give it to you. Take everything. The duchy, the title, the lands, all of it."
"Oh, no," Lucille giggled. "'Papa.' Greenvale is yours."
His mouth opened.
"Despite your incompetence and your corruption as a Duke, you know this land better than anyone alive," she continued, pacing a slow step along the side of his bed. "The vassals are loyal to you. The infrastructure runs through you. And the last thing I want is to be stuck here ruling a duchy when there's a world out there that needs conquering."
She stopped at the foot of the bed and turned back to face him.
"So why don't you rule in our absence? You can keep your bitch ghost wife as an advisor, and you can keep the twins too. You'll make a lovely family, it'll be almost like nothing has changed."
Her mouth curved.
"With the only difference being that you answer to my husband, not the King, of course." A glance toward the reading chair. "Well, and to the lovely brunette who currently has a dagger in your chest. She's the boss lady."
Alastair's head turned on the pillow. The brunette was still standing over him with one hand on the dagger's hilt, and when his eyes found her, she removed her free hand from the blade long enough to give him a small wave and a smile that was entirely too cheerful for a woman who had been twisting a knife in his chest for the last couple minutes.
"Hello! I'm the governor of the Primordial Villain's territories," she chirped. "I look forward to working with you!"
Alastair stared at her.
His gaze returned to Lucille, and the words that left him were thin and disbelieving.
"That's it...? You'll trust me to...?"
He could not finish the sentence, because he could not name what he was being trusted with. To rule his own duchy as a puppet. To serve the man who had just killed his wife and enslaved his children. To answer to a brunette girl young enough to be his daughter many times over, who was currently pinning him to his own bed with an enchanted dagger and smiling about it.
Lucille did not answer him. She turned toward the reading chair.
"Hubby, I'll leave the decision to you."
The armored man had not moved throughout the entire exchange. He sat with his visor aimed at the bed, and the flat dark eyes behind the helm had followed the conversation the way a man follows a transaction he has already approved. He spoke one word.
"Jasmine."
The brunette smiled, adjusted her grip, and drove the dagger into Alastair's chest harder than she had driven it all night. The enchantment screamed through his veins in a wave that took everything, his vision, his hearing, his sense of where his body ended and the bed began, and the Duke of Greenvale fell through the bottom of consciousness like a stone through dark water.
[Ding!]
[You have been subjugated by the Primordial Subjugator!]
The notification arrived in the dark behind his eyelids, delivered in the same system register he had heard since his first level-up at the age of fourteen, clinical and absolute. A collar he could not see and could not feel closed around something deeper than his neck, and the bond that locked into place was not physical. It was a compulsion written into the architecture of his soul, and his body recognized the new hierarchy before his mind surfaced to understand it.
Alastair's eyes opened to a blurred ceiling and the sound of his firstborn daughter giggling.
"Guess he didn't trust you one single bit, though who can blame him?" Lucille chirped.
Alastair's vision cleared. The dagger was still in his chest. The brunette was still at his side. The ghost of his wife still hovered beside the bed, blank and waiting. Nothing had changed except the weight at the center of his being, where a chain he could not describe had been threaded through something he could not name, and the other end of it led to the man in the reading chair.
Who was standing.
Alastair had not seen the armored man on his feet until this moment. In the chair, he had been a presence. Standing, he filled the room. His gaze was dark and vast. He towered over Alastair.
"Jasmine is your one and only god." He spoke low, leaving no room for negotiation. "Her safety is your biggest concern. You follow all her orders, and you work together with her."
The words settled beside the dagger and stayed.
The armored man turned toward the brunette. The flat authority left his voice, replaced by care.
"Sorry. You just got even more work."
The brunette's face broke into a smile so bright it should not have belonged in this room.
"Not at all!" She pulled the dagger from Alastair's chest and wiped the blade on the sheets in one practiced motion, then tucked it into her belt. "I'm happy to do it!"
A beat. Her cheeks colored, and her look dropped before lifting back to the armored man's visor with a shyness that did not match the woman who had spent the last few minutes torturing a Duke.
"But... if you wanted to thank my hard efforts," she said, her voice dropping to something only he could hear, "you should use [Master's Link] more often to talk to me. You're never a bother!"
She met his gaze through the visor.
"I miss hearing your voice when you're far away."
The armored man looked at her for a beat. Then he nodded once. "I will."
His right hand rose, and the air at the center of the chamber split along a vertical seam. [Warp Gate] bloomed wide, its edges churning with violet light that threw new shadows across the carnage of the room.
The armored man stepped through without a word.
Lucille moved quickly. She crossed the two steps to the brunette and wrapped both arms around her in a hug so sudden the other woman barely had time to catch it, and the embrace was warm and fierce and lasted exactly three seconds.
"You're playing the love game brilliantly~" Lucille whispered against the brunette's ear, pure and conspiratorial. "If you had asked him for something crude like sex, it would have been unladylike. But just asking him to talk to you more? How romantic. How elegant."
The brunette's face went scarlet.
"You're completely wrong," she managed, her composure cracking for the first time all evening, the blush climbing to the roots of her ponytail. "I just... that's not... I should really get to work. And you should get going."
Lucille giggled, released her, and turned toward the gate.
She paused for one breath at the seam's edge.
Her gaze swept the room once, past the ghost, past the twins still tangled on the floor, past the brunette already straightening her blouse and pulling the pen from behind her ear, and landed on her father.
Alastair met her gaze from the bed.
His firstborn daughter, the ghost he had mourned for twenty years, looked at him for one long moment with an expression that carried no hatred, no love, no forgiveness, and no farewell. It was the expression of a woman closing a book she had already finished reading.
She stepped through the gate, and it sealed behind her, and the chamber was quiet.
...
[Ding!]
It was time to see what the Bloodfather class had in store for Quinlan!