The memory of his daughter's shattered expression burned behind his eyelids.
Effie—his fierce, brilliant Effie—curled into herself in that academy dormitory, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Not the dramatic tears of childhood, but the broken whimpers of someone who had been betrayed by the one person meant to protect her.
"I told you…" her voice cracked between gasps, "so many times… I didn't want to be near him…"
Each word was a knife twisting in his gut.
Because she had told him. Over and over. And every time, but he dismiss it while patting her head and called it childish rebellion.
Not knowing he was creating a hell for his own daughter.
Because Grey Ravenwood, despite being a worthless cripple, was still a Ravenwood. Because if Effie could leash him, their family's standing would rise.
Damn it...
Damn it all.
His fingers dug into his thighs as he sat at the table, his wife beside him. She hadn't spoken a word since they arrived, her hands clenched so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had turned white. Lady Liana was murmuring soft comforts, but they fell on deaf ears. Nothing could erase the shame, the fury, the helplessness they felt.
And yet, despite everything, Cedric had to lower his head.
Because the man sitting across from him was Lucien Ravenwood.
The father of the boy who had ruined his daughter.
The strongest guild leader on the continent.
Cedric had tolerated Grey's existence only because of Lucien. He had even forced his own daughter, Effie, to stay by Grey's side, believing that if she could control him, it would elevate their family's standing.
But now?
After what this bastard had tried to do to Effie?
'If he weren't Lucien's son, I would have ripped his throat out already.'
Yet, he couldn't. Because Lucien was here. Because despite their friendship, Lucien was still his superior. And so, Cedric sat, seething in his own helplessness
Now, seated beside him was his wife Isolde bennet. she sat like a lifeless statue, her fingers clawed into her skirts. Lady Lianna's murmured comforts might as well have been spoken to the wind. No words could mend this. Not when the proof of their failure walked through the door with his hands in his pockets and smugness dripping from his pores.
The moment Cedric saw him, something inside him twisted. There was no remorse in the boy's expression. No shame. If anything, he looked… Proud?
No—like the world bored him.
Cedric's fist clenched under the table, his nails biting into his palm. If not for Lucien…
But as angry as he was he didn't miss it..
The change...
Something was off about him.
Grey had always been timid. Weak. The boy who used to flinch at raised voices now surveyed the room with half-lidded disinterest, golden eyes glazed with something disturbingly close to amusement.
He can put it in word what was so uncomfortable about him...
he looked like he was... bored.
Yes that's right.
Bored.
That was the word.
He looked bored.
perhaps sensing something off.
His wife's sharp inhale hissed between her teeth. Cedric barely caught her wrist under the table before she could lash out any more.
Because he cannot allow it.
Not here.
Not when Lucien's presence made the air itself heavy with unspoken threat.
Through gritted teeth, he growled at Liana, "Look at him. Tell me—do you see even a shred of remorse?"
The way her delicate fingers tightened around her teacup was answer enough.
Then Lucien join in and the moment he did, he made it very clear that he wanted to marry his talented daughter with his cripple son...
The same boy who tried to rape her...
A month ago, those words would have made him ecstatic. Now? They tasted like poison.
Effie…
His daughter, forced to wed the very monster who had tried to violate her.
'I'm sorry my child' he thought bitterly. 'Your father is too weak to protect you.'
Hope had long since abandoned him.
What followed next passed in a haze—Lucien's commanding voice ordering Grey to apologize, the weight of the moment pressing down like a tombstone.
But what good was an apology now?
Could hollow words mend his daughter's shattered spirit?
Could they undo the betrayal in Effie's eyes when she realized her own father had sacrificed her for ambition?
No.
Some wounds ran too deep.
It was then that he heard it—
A voice cut through the fog of his despair, cold and razor-sharp, raising the hairs on the back of his neck.
"Apologize?"
The word hung in the air like a blade suspended mid-fall.
It wasn't just the words themselves.
It was the way they were spoken—effortless, dismissive, like the concept was funny—As if the very idea of Apologizing was beneath consideration.
That voice, dripping with icy amusement, carried a weight that made Cedric's head snap toward its source before he could think. The tone was so utterly dismissive, so casually contemptuous, it rendered the very concept of remorse absurd.
There stood the architect of his suffering.
Grey.
But he felt different he was not the boy he remembered.
As if he was a completely different person.
The boy tilted his head with feline indifference, golden eyes surveying them all like specimens beneath a glass.
That languid gaze held none of the meekness Cedric expected - only cold, clinical interest.
As if they were insects struggling in a web of his making.
"I would do no such thing."
Each syllable fell like a hammer blow.
The silence that followed was absolute - thick enough to choke on. It took several heartbeats for the words to register, for reality to rearrange itself around this impossible defiance.
Then-
BOOM.