Read Novel Full Chapter 509: Warm Embrace
Chapter 509: Warm Embrace
From head to toe, the heiress of Theosbane was drenched in blood. Some of it was her own; most of it belonged to her enemies.
Her eyes were bloodshot; the poison was acting fast, and it was taking real effort to delay its effect. One of her lungs was punctured, her right shoulder could barely move, her left knee was locked in place…
And yet, she stood there surrounded by corpses like all this was completely normal.
Spitting a mouthful of dark blood on the now-dead body of the Collector, she turned around, finally having the time to study this room she was in. “Now how do I get out— Huh…?”
What…?
Thalia blinked.
Her mind blanked out for a second.
As soon as she finished turning around, Thalia wasn’t standing in a cavernous room. There were no coarse gray stones, no corpses or rubble in sight.
Instead, she found herself standing in her old bedroom.
She was back at her family’s mansion.
And right in front of her eyes, an old memory was playing like a movie.
‘Wha… What is going on?’
Thalia and Samael were twins.
They shared the same womb long before they shared anything else.
Their nurseries were lined with gold.
They had more toys than they could ever play with, more maids catering to them than they could ever remember, and a mother who loved them more than any child could ask for.
But Samael always looked up to their father.
He followed him everywhere. He wanted to wear his clothes, hold his sword, and sit beside him at dinner.
Whenever something frightened him, he believed Father would come and make it right.
Thalia still remembered the day that belief was put to the test.
It was the day their head maid tried to kill them. They were children.
They didn’t understand why she had locked the living room’s main door behind her, or why there was a small knife in her hand.
They only knew that they had to run.
And they did.
Somehow, they got away. It was a day their parents were away. Their siblings were with the cousins. Alone, the twins hid inside a closet in Thalia’s room.
It was dark and cramped, and Thalia could hear Samael breathing beside her.
Through a narrow slit in the door, he was watching the hallway.
Thalia could tell that he was waiting…
Waiting for their father to come and rescue them.
He was trembling; he was scared, but he never took his eyes off the door. Not once.
Thalia knew this… because she never took her eyes off him.
Her brother looked to their father when he wanted someone to save him. She looked to her brother. But just like their father never came down that hallway for them, Samael never turned around for her.
Right now, she was watching that exact scene. A tall elderly woman in a maid uniform was creeping toward the closet at the far end of Thalia’s room.
Closer and closer she got toward the two kids.
Watching this again, Thalia’s breath hitched. But she knew they would be fine, so she didn’t worry.
Because right as the head maid was about to reach out for the closet’s door, something shifted. In the blink of an eye, another woman was standing right behind her.
This one was much younger and just as beautiful as Thalia remembered her. A woman of sharp features and graceful figure. She had long dark hair that cascaded down to her lower back and grayish-black eyes that usually seemed to hold enough kindness for the entire world.
Not right now, though.
Right now, those kind eyes were burning with a fierce predatory glint.
That woman was Freyja.
Freyja Theosbane. Their mother.
The elderly head maid didn’t even get to yelp as her head was brutally ripped off her shoulders. Her decapitated body collapsed to the ground, dead. Then it vanished from sight. The head was gone as well.
Freyja didn’t even bother wiping the blood off her palms. Instead, she gently opened the closet door, her dark, terrifying gaze instantly softening as she looked down at her two trembling children.
“It’s okay,” Freyja had whispered back then, pulling Samael into a tight embrace first. “Mommy’s here. Nobody is ever going to hurt you again.”
The golden-haired boy had buried his face in their mother’s neck, sobbing with quiet relief.
Then their mother had opened an arm for Thalia, inviting her into the warm embrace.
As soon as that scene came, something strange happened. The aching pain in Thalia’s body faded; so did the burning sensation of the poison spreading on her back.
Her breathing quickened. She looked down at her hands and found them to be… small. Her hands were suddenly so, so small, devoid of any scars and calluses.
She wasn’t donning her gauntlets or gorget. She wasn’t in her slacks. She was in a frilly frock that hung loosely around her tiny body.
Thalia stood frozen, her tiny feet sinking into the plush carpet of her old room.
The blood, the punctured lung, the exhaustion of the battle — it had all gone, replaced by a very familiar comforting scent.
She remembered that scent, saffron laced with the sweet comfort of jasmine. Her mother’s scent.
Thalia felt a wet lump in her throat. Tears stung the ends of her eyes as she looked ahead.
There she was, right as rain.
Freyja was kneeling on the carpet, her arms open, her smile wide and full of motherly love that Thalia hadn’t felt in years.
Every logical instinct in Thalia’s adult mind screamed that this was an illusion. This couldn’t be real. This was a memory that had already happened.
But her tiny, uncalloused hands were trembling.
Her five-year-old self wanted nothing more than to step forward and bury her face in her mother’s neck, just like Samael had done.
“Come here, baby,” Freyja whispered, her voice as melodiously soothing as Thalia remembered it to be. “You’re safe now. You’ve done well. I’m so proud of you. Come, let’s rest now.”
Thalia took a tentative step forward.
The plush carpet felt real beneath her small toes. Her mother felt real. And if this was really an illusion, then she wanted it to be real too.
She looked at Samael, who was still clinging to Freyja’s shoulder. He was safe. Their father hadn’t come, but their mother had.
She took another step. Then another.
And before she knew it, little Thalia had joined her brother in the hug. She wrapped her small arms around Freyja’s neck, pressing her face into the soft fabric of her dress.
Then she started crying.
Years of bitterness, years of anger and frustration and insecurity, years of loneliness and angst came bursting out of her.
She sobbed into her mother’s shoulder like the little girl she was, clinging as if the rest of the world would disappear if she dared to let go.
No pain would touch her here. Nothing could hurt her here.
She was safe here.
•••
Back in the middle of the Spatial Room, Thalia was on her knees. Her golden eyes were unfocused and glassy, flickering with the last bit of fading consciousness.
A thin trail of blood was trickling down her lips, her arms hanging limply at her sides. A curved black blade was sticking out of her chest.
A masked figure was standing behind her, holding the hilt of the curved blade buried deep into her back.
Unlike the Collector’s strike team, this person wore a bone-white mask. The mask was plain and featureless save for a red smiley face drawn on it.
The smiley was drawn with sloppy, uneven brush strokes as if made by a child.
“Get up, men,” the masked figure murmured. Their voice was muffled, neither distinctly male nor female, sounding like a distorted whisper echoing from underwater.
As if on command, the corpses scattered around the cavern began to twitch.
The Collector’s skull, which had been reduced to a gruesome paste by Thalia’s relentless assault, slowly knitted itself back together. The shattered bone pieces aligned, the gray matter slithered back into place, and within seconds, his pale eyes snapped open once more.
One by one, all the other dead assassins stood up as well, dusting off their blood-stained robes as if they had merely taken a short nap on the cold stone floor.
The boy whose neck Thalia had crushed, the imposing guy whose head she had snapped, the distant archers she had killed, the young man who had his throat slit by her…
Everyone got up, their wounds repairing themselves until all the men were unscathed once again.
The masked figure let go of the curved blade and turned to the Collector. “I came three minutes late and found you all dead.”
The Collector cracked his neck as if getting used to being alive once again. Then he lowered his gaze, deferential. “Sir, she… was very strong.”
The masked figure stayed silent. Somehow, that felt more threatening than anything else in that moment.
The Collector gulped, silently preparing himself to die again. But, thankfully, the masked figure turned away.
“Chain her up,” they said. “I have to be somewhere right now. I’ll come back soon and kill her myself.”
The Collector frowned, just as confused as everyone else in the room. “Sir, why not kill her now? If she snaps out of the illusion, even in her state—”
“Are you seriously scared of a half-dead girl, Rynn?”
The Collector — Rynn — flinched. “I— no, sir, that’s not what I—”
“First I want to know what she knows about the Cup,” said the masked figure, already walking toward the shadows. “We also have to ensure she didn’t follow that paper trail back to our Handler. If she spoke to anyone before coming here, we need names. We can’t afford a single loose end. Death is too simple until we drain her mind of every single detail.”
With that, they were gone.
The Collector watched their figure recede into the darkness, then sighed with a shrug. When he turned to look at Thalia, still dazedly kneeling in the middle of the room, he grinned menacingly. “Your death won’t be easy either, I guess.”