ebookland Chapter 205: When Emperors Weep
Chapter 205: When Emperors Weep
Olivia froze, the air completely leaving her lungs as a thick, painful lump formed in her throat. Her mind reeled, fracturing under the weight of his confession.
"You... you know?" she managed to utter, her voice a fragile, trembling thread.
Lucius offered her a bittersweet, deeply sorrowful smile. "Unfortunately, yes, my dear."
"How?" Olivia pressed, her mind racing through every possibility, trying to find a anchor in the chaos. "I thought you... was it Kyle? Did Kyle tell you?"
In a split second, the hesitation drained from her posture, instantly replaced by a sharp, defensive hostility. Her eyes narrowed beneath her veil as she locked her gaze onto him. "Tell me! Who told you that I am—"
"Olivia, please, calm down," Lucius pleaded softly.
Carried by a sudden wave of paternal instinct, he gently extended his frail hand, reaching out to offer her some comfort. But the moment his fingers drew near, Olivia violently flinched backward on the bed as if his very touch would burn her skin.
"Do not touch me!" she snapped, her voice laced with sharp, unyielding panic.
She stared at him with wide, shocked eyes, entirely consumed by the whirlwind of emotions crashing inside her. She didn’t even realize that her stoic mask had cracked until a sudden, track of warmth cascaded down her pale cheeks—tears, spilling over silently without her permission.
Lucius’s hand remained suspended in the dead air between them for a long, agonizing moment. Slowly, his fingers curled into a tight, trembling fist, and he drew his arm back, resting it heavily by his side.
"Yes... you are right," he whispered, his voice cracking with a lifetime of profound regret. "I have no right to touch you. Not after everything you’ve been through."
He let out a weary, ragged breath, looking at the tears staining her face. "To answer your question... no, it wasn’t Kyle who told me, Olivia. It was your mother. And I only found out a short while ago."
"I have nothing to tell you that could possibly heal your wounds," Lucius continued, his voice heavy with a broken, hollow defeat. "I do not even know how you survived all these years under Roland’s wing. You must... you must love him as a father, and I would never blame you for that. He is the one who raised you. I only blame myself for being so naive—for leaving my own daughter to grow up in the embrace of my enemy. Selfishly, I just wanted to see my daughter in my final days. I didn’t want you to look at me as a stranger, and..."
"I do not love him."
Olivia interrupted, her voice cutting through his words like a shard of ice as she roughly wiped the remaining tears from her face. She raised her head, looking at him with a cold, piercing intensity. "He is not my father. Do not say that ever again, please. And I never lived in his ’embrace’. I lived like a dog at his mercy. Do not confuse the two."
"What...?"
Shock washed over Lucius’s pale face, his eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated horror. Gathering every ounce of his remaining strength, he pushed himself up from the pillows. Ignoring his frail body, he reached forward and tightly gripped her shoulders, his hands trembling.
"What do you mean by that, my little one?" he pleaded, his voice shaking with a sudden, rising panic. "Please, tell me. What did that bastard do to you?!"
Olivia looked into his eyes. In that frantic, terrified stare, she saw the exact same anxious warmth that Mathias used to give her—the same unshielded, raw love. At that moment, beneath the heavy weight of her suspicion, she knew with absolute certainty that this dying man’s anguish for her was real.
She gently disengaged from his grip, her composure locking back into place as she offered him a small, distant comfort.
"It is fine. There is no need to trouble yourself with what happened," she murmured softly, her voice flat as she locked her icy composure back into place. "It is already in the past."
But Lucius wouldn’t—couldn’t—let it go. The sheer, suffocating weight of his regret seemed to transcend all human limits, tearing through his frail chest. He looked at her, his eyes wide with an agonizing mixture of fury at Roland and a shattering guilt that consumed him from the inside out. He opened his mouth to speak, to demand justice for what had been done to her, but the words were instantly stolen from his throat.
A sharp, violent cough violently racked his chest.
At first, Olivia remained still, her posture guarded and cold. It is just his illness, she reasoned to herself, forcing her heart to remain steady.
But the coughing didn’t stop. Instead, it grew rapidly worse, deeper and more hollow, sounding as though his very lungs were fracturing under the strain. Lucius bent forward, his face turning from a ghostly pale to a terrifying, suffocating crimson.
"Your Majesty...?" Olivia spoke up, a hairline crack finally appearing in her detached facade. "Are you alright?"
He couldn’t answer. The violent spasms escalated until he was gasping for air that wouldn’t come. His trembling fingers clawed desperately at the silk bedsheets, bunching the heavy fabric into tight, white-knuckled fists as if he were trying to anchor himself to life. With every ragged gasp, the terrifying sound echoed off the opulent walls, cutting through the quiet of the grand chamber.
A sudden, primal dread began to claw its way into Olivia’s mind. The chilling reality of the situation shattered her logic—this wasn’t just a sick man coughing. He was suffocating right in front of her. The Emperor was dying, right now, in this very room, before a single truth could be saved.
Panic, foreign and unyielding, flooded her veins. Forgetting her fierce vow to never let him touch her, Olivia instinctively reached forward, her hand moving through the dead air toward his collapsing figure.
The minutes that followed were a blur of absolute desperation. She patted his trembling back, her hands moving in awkward, unpracticed motions, trying to ease the violent tremors destroying his frame. She could feel the sharp line of his spine beneath his silk tunic—he was so much thinner, so much more fragile than the terrifying ruler the Empire whispered about. Slowly, agonizingly, the vicious spasms began to subside, leaving him trembling and gasping for breath against her side.
As the room finally quieted into a heavy, fragile stillness, a dark, chilling thought crossed Olivia’s mind: All of this rage, all of this physical collapse, just because I told him he treated me poorly... What on earth would happen to his remaining life if he discovered the full, grotesque depth of what I truly suffered under Roland’s roof?
"Calm down, Your Majesty," she murmured softly, her voice carrying a rare, unfiltered trace of gentleness as she pulled her hands back. "Your condition only worsens the more you agitate yourself."
Wiping the fresh crimson from his lips with a shaking silk handkerchief, Lucius spoke through the sheer, burning haze of his pain.
"I am sorry... I am so truly sorry," he choked out, his eyes swimming with a lifetime of hidden agony as he stared at her. "I am sorry that you have such a wretched excuse of a father. A man who was too blind, too weak, and left you to suffer..."
Before she could process his words or raise her defenses, Lucius reached forward with a sudden, desperate surge of strength and pulled her tightly against his chest.
Olivia stiffened, every defensive instinct screaming at her to push him away, to protect herself as she always had. But as the warmth of his embrace enveloped her, she didn’t pull away. For the first time in her entire life, she was experiencing the embrace of a father—a protective, unconditional warmth she hadn’t dared to even dream of while surviving in the shadows of the Locron estate.
"My precious little girl..." Lucius whispered, his voice breaking entirely as his tears soaked into her shoulder. "Please, forgive me."
With his broken plea, the final, unyielding dam inside Olivia completely shattered. Her tears returned with a violent intensity, and a ragged, heavy sob escaped her throat. A strange, suffocating storm of emotions warred within her; she didn’t know whether to feel a tragic joy that she finally possessed a father, or a crushing sorrow that she was destined to lose him to the grave almost immediately. Her fingers curled tightly into the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him like a child drowning in a stormy sea.
Slowly, she tilted her head up, looking through her blurred vision only to find that he, too, was entirely drowned in his own tears. An Emperor, a ruler who held the fate of millions in his hands, was weeping out of pure, unadulterated love for her.
The defense mechanism she had built over years of abuse dissolved. The child inside her, the one who had spent nights crying in the dark wondering why she wasn’t wanted, finally took control of her tongue. Wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, she poured all her pent-up longing and pain into one desperate question.
"Why did you leave me with him?" she cried out, her voice cracking into a raw, painful sob. "Why did you leave me to suffer alone... Papa?"
At the sound of that single word—Papa—Lucius’s violent sobs intensified for a fleeting, beautiful second, and then, a sudden, terrifying stillness followed.
Olivia felt the immediate, heavy slackening of the body holding her. The warmth didn’t disappear, but the strength completely drained from his arms, leaving his limbs to fall away like dead weight.
Pulled by a sharp, electric jolt of panic, she frantically backed away, her hands trembling violently as she reached out to steady his slumped frame. But as her fingers brushed against his skin, her breath caught entirely in her throat.
The heavy fabric of his royal sleeves had fallen back, exposing his pale wrists and hands under the dim light of the chamber.
There, marring the ghostly white of his skin, were dark, mottled blue streaks—like bruised veins suffocated of air, winding brutally up his arms.
Olivia’s mind, even while drowning in panic, instinctively locked onto the sight. Her inner cold logic, the one forged through years of surviving monsters, sent a chilling realization through her veins. This isn’t the natural decay of an illness, she thought, her heart hammering against her ribs. The sudden collapse, the blood, and now these marks... Could it be that he isn’t just sick? Could it be that someone is...?
Before her spiraling thought could find its dark answer, Lucius’s head loll’d heavily back onto the pillows, his eyes completely rolling shut.
"Your Majesty...?" she whispered, horror instantly eclipsing her suspicion as she shook his cold shoulders. "Your Majesty?! Hey... Papa, wake up! What is wrong with you? Please, answer me!"