Chapter : 949
He picked up the book, its title a shield and a weapon. Paralysis healing art. He had bought it in Zakaria as a prop, a piece of his "Doctor Zayn" costume. But on the long journey back, driven by a new and unfamiliar sense of purpose, he had actually read it. He had cross-referenced its primitive, mystically-inclined theories with the perfect, biological data provided by his [All-Seeing Eye]. He had spent hours in the System interface, running complex analyses, cross-referencing this world’s limited pharmacopeia with the boy Tariq’s unique cellular decay.
He had not just been playing a role. He had been working. He had been trying to find a real cure. Not for the Qadir heir, whose life was already saved, but for the silent, sleeping woman in the southern provinces. For Nilufa Siddik.
The thought of her, a woman he had never met, a woman who was merely a political chess piece in the grand game, had become… important. He didn't know why. Perhaps it was a debt he felt he owed to the fierce, broken girl who was his wife. Perhaps it was a way to atone for the manipulations, the lies, the cold-blooded use of other people’s pain to achieve his own objectives. Or perhaps, and this was the most terrifying thought of all, he was simply doing it because it was the right thing to do.
He opened the book, the dense, academic text a welcome refuge from the chaos of his own heart. He forced himself to focus on the words, on the diagrams of nerve pathways and spiritual meridians. He would go tomorrow. He would face the ghost in the southern manor. He would use his impossible, otherworldly power to attempt another miracle. And he would do it not as a strategist, not as a general, but as a healer. As a husband. The thought was both terrifying and, in a strange, unsettling way, profoundly liberating.
The silence in the room stretched on, no longer an armistice, but a truce. A fragile, temporary cessation of hostilities in a war whose rules were still being written. And as the sun set, casting long, deep shadows across the room, Lloyd Ferrum, the man of a thousand masks, felt a single, unfamiliar certainty take root in his soul. He had no idea who his silver-haired wife was anymore. But for the first time, he found himself wanting to find out.
The silence in the suite was a living entity, a third presence in the room. It was no longer the cold, empty void of their previous coexistence but a heavy, charged atmosphere thick with unspoken questions and the aftershocks of their strange, brief conversation. Lloyd, feigning an intense focus on his book, was acutely aware of every subtle shift in that silence. He could feel Rosa’s presence behind him, not as a threat, but as an intense, analytical weight, the focus of a grandmaster studying a new, unpredictable move on the board.
He had expected her to retreat into her usual, impenetrable fortress of indifference. He had expected the conversation to be over, a bizarre, one-time anomaly. He was wrong.
“The paralysis,” she said, her voice cutting through the quiet, still a whisper but now stripped of its earlier coldness, replaced by a pure, clinical precision. “My mother’s. The royal physicians have called it a curse. The high priests, a test of faith. The mages, a novel form of spiritual entropy. They have given it a hundred beautiful names, and none of them have slowed its progress.”
Lloyd did not turn. He kept his eyes fixed on the page of his book, though he was no longer reading the words. He was listening, a commander receiving a critical intelligence briefing.
“It began ten years ago,” she continued, her voice a flat, emotionless recitation of a story she had clearly told herself a thousand times. “A creeping numbness in her extremities. The healers prescribed tonics. The priests, prayers. Within a year, she could no longer walk. Within three, she could no longer speak. For the last five years… she has been as you see her now. A beautiful, silent statue. Her spirit is strong, her mind is alive—the mages can feel it, a prisoner inside a cage of sleeping flesh—but her body… her body is a traitor.”
He felt a pang of something, a ghost of an emotion he could not name. It was not pity. It was a cold, professional respect for the sheer, unyielding endurance of the girl behind him, a girl who had watched her mother be dismantled, piece by piece, by an invisible enemy and had responded not by breaking, but by encasing herself in ice.
Chapter : 950
“You believe you can cure this,” she stated. It was not a question. It was a challenge. A demand for proof.
He finally closed the book, the soft thud of the leather cover a sound of finality in the silent room. He turned to face her. “I believe,” he said slowly, choosing his words with the precision of a surgeon, “that every lock has a key. The healers of this world have been trying to smash the door down with brute force. I prefer… to study the mechanism.”
It was the most honest he had ever been with her. He was not promising a miracle. He was promising a methodology. A new way of seeing the problem.
A long, profound silence followed. He could see the storm of thought in her dark eyes, the logical part of her warring with the desperate, hopeful part. Finally, she gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. “The Siddik estate is a three-day journey south. The household staff has been informed of my return. They will not be expecting you. It will… create complications.”
“My entire existence is a complication, Rosa,” he replied, a hint of weary humor in his voice. “I am beginning to think it is my primary function in the universe.”
For the first time since he had known her, in this life or the last, a genuine, fleeting, and utterly devastating smile touched her lips. It was a small, sad, and beautiful thing, a winter flower blooming for a single, impossible moment in the snow. “On this,” she whispered, “we can finally agree.”
The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but the memory of it was burned into his mind. The glacier had not just cracked; a sliver of it had melted.
She rose to her feet, her regal composure fully restored. “I will be ready to depart at dawn.” With that, she turned and glided towards her own chambers, leaving him once again alone on his side of the room.
But the invisible line was gone. The armistice was over. And in its place was the beginning of a fragile, terrifying, and utterly unpredictable alliance. Lloyd looked down at the book in his hands, no longer seeing a medical text, but a map to a new and dangerous land. And he knew, with a certainty that was both exhilarating and profoundly unsettling, that he would not be walking into it alone.
Lloyd stepped out of his suite, the heavy oak door closing behind him with a soft, final click. The air in the corridor, usually a space of quiet, sterile neutrality, felt thick and charged, like the moments before a lightning strike. His mind was a chaotic sea, the strange, unsettling new reality of his conversation with Rosa a powerful and unpredictable current pulling him in a dozen different directions. He had just navigated a conversation with a glacier and found, to his profound shock, a flicker of warmth, a hint of a hidden river flowing beneath the ice. It was a discovery so monumental, so fundamentally world-altering, that he needed a moment of quiet, a tactical retreat to his study to process the new intelligence and recalibrate his entire understanding of his own life.
He was not granted that moment.
Another storm was waiting for him. A more volatile, more immediate, and infinitely more passionate one.
Faria Kruts stood twenty feet down the corridor, a vision of fiery, incandescent rage. She was leaning against the cool stone wall, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her posture a masterpiece of contained fury. The easy, brilliant camaraderie of their artistic collaboration, the shared laughter over charcoal sketches and philosophical debates, was gone. In its place was a fierce, wounded pride, a sense of profound and personal betrayal that radiated from her in palpable waves. Her vibrant, crimson-violet hair seemed to crackle with a life of its own, and her beautiful face was a thundercloud of raw, resentful emotion.
The moment she saw him, she pushed off from the wall, her movements sharp, predatory. Before he could even fully process her presence, before his mind could shift from the cold, complex calculus of Rosa to this new, blazing variable, she attacked. Her voice was not a shout, but a low, furious hiss, a sound that was somehow more dangerous, more potent, than any roar.
“A second wife.”
The words were not a question. They were an accusation. A verdict.
“You agreed to a second wife,” she continued, each word a perfectly aimed, venom-tipped dart. “A princess from a foreign land. A political arrangement. I understand the game, Lloyd. I am not a fool.” She took a step closer, her eyes, the color of a stormy twilight, blazing with a righteous, wounded fire. “But you did not even consider me?”