His fingers remained caught in her hair, trembling.
"Why, Olivia? Why would you do this?"
His voice broke on the question, and for a fleeting second, the storm of his anger collapsed into something far worse: disappointment. Grief. Betrayal.
Olivia, who was often the coldest soul in any room, suddenly found herself unable to breathe under the gaze of a man who looked at her not as a wife, nor an enemy, but as a stranger.
A flicker of confusion crossed her face. She took a sharp step back, brushing his hand away from her arm. Her voice was steady, but laced with a sharp edge of indignation.
"Mathias, what are you talking about? You drag me from my bed at dawn, hurling accusations I haven't even been told, and expect a confession? To what, exactly?"
But instead of answering, He lunged forward. He seized her wrist in a grip of iron.
A sharp, agonizing hiss escaped Olivia's teeth, and for a split second, her vision went white.
He had caught her exactly where Elvira's name was carved—the fresh, jagged signature hidden beneath her sleeve.
The pressure was a new kind of torture, threatening to reopen the wounds Isabella had so carefully tended.
"Let go," she managed to gasp, her voice trembling with a pain she desperately tried to mask as anger.
Mathias, blinded by his own betrayal, only tightened his grip, oblivious to the fact that he was crushing scorched skin and fresh scars.
He dragged her through the hushed corridors, each of Olivia's steps a battle against the searing fire spreading up her arm.
They stopped before a familiar set of doors. The chambers of the former Duchess.
Mathias's hand, which had been a vise of rage moments ago, began to shake. His fingers loosened around her wrist.
He stared at the handle before him, the weight of it suddenly appearing unbearable. For a moment, he looked genuinely afraid.
Then, he threw the door open.
Inside, the chamber was shrouded in a terrible, weighted stillness. Heavy velvet curtains stifled the dawn, permitting only a bruised, grey light to seep into the room.
A few men stood within the shadows—grim-faced and silent, their gazes fixed resolutely on the floor.
Among them stood the Duchy's Chief Anatomist, his silver-trimmed livery impeccable despite the hour, his assistants flanking him like statues carved from grief.
The doctor turned as they entered. With a somber expression, he stepped forward and pressed a small, purple glass vial into Matthius's hand.
He leaned in, whispering in a low tone that barely stirred the air, but Olivia caught the jagged edges of his words.
"The Violet Hand," he murmured. "There is not a shadow of doubt. Its source is exclusive to... well, you know from where it hails."
He did not need to finish the sentence.
The moment Olivia's eyes locked onto the vial, a cold shock collided with her chest, stealing the air from her lungs. Her throat tightened into a knot of pure ice.
She knew that bottle. She knew it as intimately as one knows a childhood scar.
That poison—silent, perfect, and merciless—had been the preferred instrument of her father's reign. It was the weapon used in the dark to erase threats, rivals, and dissenters.
It left behind nothing but a pale husk and violet-stained extremities—the telltale mark of the blood failing to reach the limbs in those final, suffocating moments.
And Isabella's father... he had been one of its victims.
Olivia's heart began to hammer against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her gaze swept the room, finally coming to rest on the motionless form draped across the canopy bed.
A white linen cloth had been drawn over the Duchess's face, veiling her features in eternal silence.
One hand had slipped from beneath the shroud; slender fingers, stained a deep, bruised amethyst, curled slightly toward the ceiling in a final, unanswered plea for mercy.
The evidence was absolute. The Duchess was dead. Poisoned.
The crushing weight of the truth collapsed upon Olivia, a hundred buried memories and a thousand suppressed fears screaming in the back of her mind.
Beside her, Matthius was staring at her as if a vast, infinite chasm had just opened between them.
Almost in spite of herself, Olivia reached out. She moved to touch the Duchess's hand, a desperate, irrational need to feel if some warmth still lingered.
But Matthius caught her wrist again. This time, his grip was not iron-hard, but trembling with a sorrow so profound it was visceral.
"Please," he rasped, his voice broken and hollow. "Don't. Have you not done enough?"
Her head snapped toward him, her features hardening into a mask of pure, crystalline disbelief.
"What—?" The word was a jagged breath. "What are you saying? You truly believe this of me? By the gods, Matthias, what possible reason would I have to spill her blood?"
Matthias's reply was a ghost of a sound, barely tethered to the air.
"You were seen, Olivia. Entering her chambers under the shroud of last night."
The world seemed to halt. Olivia went rigid, the blood draining from her face until she was as pale as the marble statues lining the hall.
"And then, there is this," he added, his voice hollow.
He slowly unfurled his fingers. Nestled in his palm, delicate and damning, lay her missing silver earring.
It caught the flickering candlelight—the same trinket she had fastened with such care only the evening before.
In an instant, the floor seemed to tilt beneath her. The atmosphere grew heavy, a suffocating velvet that pressed against her lungs.
The warmth that had once lived in Matthias's eyes—the soft flickers of trust and the quiet alliances they had forged—had been extinguished.
He looked at her now as one might look upon a specter, or perhaps worse: a reflection of a monster long since buried.
Two nights ago, he had held her hand and whispered that she was her own person—that he saw no trace of her father's shadow in her soul.
But now, that grace was gone.
He looked at her exactly as he had once looked at the old King: with a cold, jagged cocktail of loathing, caution, and the bitter sting of a betrayal that had no name.
The Irony of the Noose
Olivia's gaze remained locked onto his, unblinking and frozen, as if her eyes had lost the memory of how to turn away.
A dry ache tightened in her throat. She swallowed hard, a brittle, ironic laugh bubbling up from the hollow of her chest.
"Heh... I must admit," she whispered, her lips twitching with a ghost of a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"The craftsmanship of this trap is remarkable. I think... I think they truly intended for the noose to hold this time."
Matthias remained unmoved, his arms folded across his chest, his posture as rigid and unyielding as a blade of iron.
There was no room for her irony in his expression—only the freezing depth of a winter storm.
"I cannot find the map to your mind, Olivia," he said, his voice clipped, vibrating with the tension of a sword barely held in its scabbard.
"I truly cannot. They saw you. You were in that room. All I ask is for the truth of your malice. If it had been me you struck down—or even Isabella—God knows I could find a path to understanding. But her?"
His eyes drifted, almost involuntarily, to the lifeless form draped across the bed.
The Duchess, once a titan of pride and lineage, now reduced to nothing more than a breathless shadow beneath the linens.
When he spoke again, his voice fractured, the sound of a man breaking.
"She lacked even the strength to lift a hand from the sheets," he choked out, the words thick with grief.
"Had you found the patience to wait but a few months more, nature would have claimed what you stole. There was no need... you didn't have to..."
He couldn't finish. His fist collided with the stone wall—a dull, sickening thud that vibrated through the marrow of the chamber.
He remained there, forehead pressed against the cold rock, his entire frame trembling with a silent, violent storm.
Olivia's voice tore through the heavy air, raw and bleeding with desperation.
"I have asked you once, and I ask you again—why? Why would I murder your mother? What prize is there to be won from her blood?
You and I... we have lived as strangers under one roof, true, but I am no monster! I would never have laid a finger on her!"
He raised his head slowly, his eyes bloodshot, burning with a feverish disbelief.
"And yet, there sits your earring," he spat, the words like venom. "Discarded by her very bedside. And the witnesses, Olivia—the voices that place you there.
What is your defense now? Are you branding every soul in this house a liar?"
"She is framing me!" Olivia snapped, her composure shattering into jagged shards. "Of course she is! That harlot wants me erased from this world!"
His gaze narrowed into twin slits of ice.
"A maid? A girl who barely knows your name? Tell me, why would a servant risk the gallows for perjury just to see you fall?"
A laugh, sharp and brittle as breaking glass, burst from Olivia's throat. It held no mirth, only a deep, festering resentment that had finally come to the surface.
"You speak as if I am loved in this house," she hissed, her voice trembling with bitter clarity.
"As if they require a reason beyond their own spite. They blame me because I am the jagged stone in their perfect, polished court.
I am not their darling; I am not the sweet, obedient doll they craved.
Your mother never deigned to hide her scorn for me—and the Master of this cursed estate would see me in irons simply for the crime of breathing."
She took a step toward him, her frame trembling like a reed in a storm, yet her spirit remained unbowed.
"Has it ever crossed your mind—even as a fleeting thought—that I might be speaking the truth?" she pleaded, her voice a fragile thread.
"That she lied? That they all lied? That someone meticulously crafted this nightmare to wear my face?"
He remained a statue of silence, his gaze fixed and unreadable.
She clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white.
"So, what is the next act in this play? Will you drag me to the dungeons like a common thief? Will you finally grant them the pleasure of watching me rot behind stone walls?"
The silence that followed was a physical weight, suffocating and vast.
Outside, the wind shrieked through the stone corridors, a spectral mourner for the truth buried beneath layers of deceit.
He looked at her, but the words died in his throat. He looked like a man watching a kingdom slip through his fingers, paralyzed by the sight of his own undoing.
With a chilling, graceful finality, Olivia reached across the table. Her fingers curled around a slender vial that shimmered with a ghostly light in the glow of the candles. Poison.
It sat between them like a silent death sentence. She held it with a delicate reverence, turning to him with a smile so hollow it seemed to fracture the very air between them.
"I will not go back to a cage," she whispered, her voice sharp with the edge of resignation.
"I would rather perish here than wither for a sin I never committed. But you know, Fine then—I shall grant you your freedom from this tragic farce of a marriage."