TopAppnovel Chapter 190: The Survivor’s Burden
Chapter 190: The Survivor’s Burden
"She’s... what?"
Kyle’s voice came out lower than he intended, a fractured rasp that barely carried across the room.
Leila didn’t repeat it immediately. She seemed to be weighing her words, choosing them with a precision that suggested even speaking them aloud might cause the ceiling to collapse under their weight. She let the silence linger for a heartbeat longer, as if trying to delay a truth that could not be undone.
"Pregnant," she said at last.
She followed it with a clinical explanation, an attempt to shroud the shock in medical logic. "It is in the very early stages... and easily overlooked given the sheer amount of physical and emotional trauma her body is enduring. But I am certain."
For a moment, the world seemed to stop. The air in the chamber grew suffocatingly tight, as though the walls were closing in, drawing the oxygen out of the room.
Isabella’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes welling with tears almost instantly. "A child..." she whispered, the words barely audible. "A life within her..."
Kyle didn’t look at her. He couldn’t move. His mind had been seized by a memory—sharp, jagged, and merciless. He saw Olivia again. The chandelier. The terrifying stillness of her body as it swayed in the dim light.
A knot of pure agony tightened in his throat.
"If she had died..." he said under his breath, the thought too horrific to voice fully.
Leila lowered her gaze, her voice dropping to match the gravity of his realization.
"She nearly did."
The silence that followed her words was far worse than the revelation itself. It was a silence that screamed with the knowledge that Olivia hadn’t just tried to end her own life—she had very nearly taken an innocent soul into the abyss with her.
Leila straightened slightly, the clinical mask of the physician hardening into something more decisive, more protective.
"She cannot be left alone anymore," she declared. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was an ultimatum.
Kyle finally spoke again, his voice firm—almost sharp with a newfound, desperate resolve. "Then she won’t be."
But Isabella didn’t look reassured. If anything, she looked more shaken than when the door was first broken down. She watched the Crown Prince, seeing the fire in his eyes, but she knew the heart of the woman lying on that bed better than any of them.
None of them were thinking about medical charts, palace guards, or the shifting tides of politics. They were thinking about the woman who had just tried to hang herself with her own silk scarves.
And they were facing the truth that no amount of surveillance could fix: Olivia had already tried to disappear. She had reached for the exit, and they had dragged her back. Now, she was a prisoner—not just of the estate, but of a world she no longer wished to inhabit, carrying a life she hadn’t asked for.
Far from the mourning halls of Locron, Roland Tharon stood before the charred remains of Sylvester’s estate.
The mansion had been reduced to a blackened skeleton of stone and ash, a skeletal monument to a fire that had consumed everything. No smoke rose anymore, yet the air still carried the bitter, metallic sting of something that had burned too hot and too fast to be forgotten.
Roland stood motionless, his silhouette dark against the grey rubble.
Then, quietly—
"Where is she?" he asked.
No one answered at first. The wind whistled through the hollowed-out windows, the only eulogy for the dead.
His gaze shifted sharply. This time, it landed on his personal assistant, who was standing several paces back. Before the man could even blink, Roland struck him—a blow so fast and precise it seemed to happen in the space between heartbeats.
The sound of the strike cracked through the ruins like a gunshot.
"Where is my daughter?" Roland’s voice dropped into a register that was low and dangerously calm. He seized the assistant by the collar, dragging the man’s face inches from his own. "Where is Elvira?!"
The assistant paled instantly, his legs turning to water.
"My Lord—!" he stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward the wreckage. "Lady Elvira came here to visit Lord Sylvester two months ago, as you know... but after that... we truly have no information. No one saw her leave, and no one has seen her since."
Roland’s grip tightened, the leather of his gloves creaking under the strain.
"Two months," he repeated slowly, tasting the words like poison. "Two months, and you are telling me that a Tharon has simply evaporated into the air? And no one thought to bring me a single piece of news?"
"W-We searched everywhere," the assistant choked out, his voice thin and reeking of terror. "There was no trace of her—none at all. It was as if she walked into the flames and became part of the smoke."
A cold silence followed, more suffocating than the ash-laden air. Roland’s expression didn’t shift; he simply stood there, a predator weighing the utility of a failing hound.
Then, he shoved the man back into the soot and debris.
"Then search again," he said quietly, his voice devoid of heat. "Or I will assume you chose to disappear along with her."
The assistant fell hard, coughing as a cloud of grey dust billowed around him. He scrambled backward, desperate to put distance between himself and the man he served, but Roland was no longer looking at him. He was staring at the horizon, where the jagged edges of the ruined estate met the leaden sky.
A cold unease had already begun to spread through Roland’s chest—slow, invasive, and unfamiliar. It felt like something taking root where his absolute certainty used to be, a hairline crack in a shield of iron.
Then—without warning—a memory broke through the ice of his composure.
Mathias.
He saw him clearly, standing at the edge of the northern abyss, drenched in blood that wasn’t all his own. The wind had been howling then, just as it did now, tearing at his coat like a thousand desperate hands.
Roland remembered the expression in the Duke’s eyes. It hadn’t been fear. It hadn’t even been the frantic rage of a cornered man.
It was something far worse. It was the serene, terrifying satisfaction of a man who had already laid a trap and was simply waiting for the snap of the jaws.
And his voice had been low, quiet enough to be mistaken for the whistle of the wind through the jagged cliffs:
"I left you a surprise you’ll never forget, you bastard."
Roland’s throat tightened, a sudden, sharp constriction that made the ash-heavy air feel like glass.
"No..." he whispered, the sound barely audible even to himself.
It made no sense. Mathias had been broken, surrounded, and pushed to the very edge of the world. He shouldn’t have had the time, the resources, or the reach to touch a Tharon.
And yet, for the first time in years, something unfamiliar stirred beneath his iron-clad composure.
Fear.
It wasn’t a loud, screaming panic. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just... persistent. A cold, rhythmic thrumming in his veins that refused to settle.
Could Mathias have done something to Elvira?
No.
The thought was rejected almost as soon as it formed. Roland shook his head, his jaw locking tight. Elvira was not a victim. She was sharp, calculating, and dangerous in her own right—a woman who always turned disappearance into a strategic game rather than a tragic consequence. She was a Tharon; she didn’t get caught in traps. She set them.
"She’s probably entertaining herself somewhere," Roland muttered under his breath, forcing a practiced steadiness back into his voice. "That girl has always had a taste for inconvenience. She is making me wait just to see me crawl."
But even as he spoke the words, they felt hollow. Incomplete. Like a puzzle piece forced into a space where it didn’t belong. There was a void in his logic that he couldn’t fill.
Because no matter how deep he tried to bury it, no matter how much logic he piled on top of the doubt, Mathias’s final words refused to stay buried in the frozen North.
They lingered in the air of the ruins.
Not as a mere memory—but as a living, breathing warning.
Without announcement, the doors to the Emperor’s study swung open.
Lucius looked up from the documents scattered across his desk, the amber glow of the candlelight carving deep lines into his face. His expression shifted the moment he saw Kyle—not surprised, but unsettled in a way he would never admit aloud.
The Crown Prince looked as though he had returned from somewhere that refused to let him go. Dust clung to his coat, and his eyes were haunted by a coldness that no hearth in the palace could warm.
Lucius slowly set his pen down, the soft clack of wood against the desk sounding like a gavel strike in the quiet room.
"How is the Duchess?"
Kyle hesitated. Too long. The silence was an answer in itself.
"She is... not well, Father."
The pause before the answer lingered longer than the words themselves, carrying the unspoken image of silk scarves and a shattered chair.
Lucius leaned back slightly, exhaling through his nose, a long, weary sound that seemed to age him a decade in an instant.
"I expected as much," he murmured, his gaze drifting toward the darkened window. "Whatever I think of it... I was the one who sent her husband to war. And now I cannot even look her in the eye to offer condolences."
Kyle’s fingers tightened subtly at his side, his glove creaking.
Your daughter, he thought, the bitterness rising in his throat like bile. And you speak of her like a stranger’s wife. Like a political casualty you can’t quite bring yourself to face.
But the words stayed where they always stayed. Unspoken. Buried under the suffocating weight of imperial duty.
Lucius broke the silence again, his tone turning clinical to mask the unease. "Tell me what happened in the North."
Kyle’s jaw tightened before he answered. "It was an ambush."
Lucius frowned. "Explain."
"At first, the advance was clean," Kyle said. His voice was steady, but the cadence was slower now. "Then Cedric arrived... with a masked man."
That name changed the air in the room, turning it brittle. Kyle continued, his words dropping like ice. "After that, everything collapsed. Formations broke. Men started retreating without orders. It wasn’t battle anymore. It was... collapse."
He paused, a flicker of something—terror, perhaps—crossing his face before he suppressed it. "That thing wasn’t a man," he added. "It was something that turned the field into chaos just by being there."
Lucius studied him in silence. He knew his son; Kyle wasn’t someone who exaggerated fear. That made the words heavier than they should have been.
"The line broke," Kyle said. "Mathias stayed behind."
The memory didn’t come gently. It crashed in, visceral and cold. Snow—white and endless, swallowing all sound but the ragged gasps of the dying. Blood on steel. Mathias standing at the edge of the cliff, breathing hard, as if the world itself had stopped arguing with him and simply waited for him to fall.
The masked figure advanced, a shadow against the blinding white. Kyle tried to move forward, his boots sinking into the drifts, his lungs burning.
But Mathias raised a hand. Not a command. A stop.
Then he laughed. It was a tired sound. Almost amused. As if the situation had finally become honest. He reached into his coat, his movements slow and deliberate. And pulled out a gold pendant.
Kyle had frowned, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes. "What are you doing?"
Mathias stepped closer and pressed the cold metal into Kyle’s hand. "Brother-in-law," he said, his voice roughened by blood and the biting cold air, "it seems I won’t be returning with you."
Kyle’s grip locked around the pendant. "What are you talking about?"
Mathias tightened his fingers around Kyle’s for a final, bone-deep second. "Take care of Olivia."
A beat. Then he let go. And turned.
He didn’t look back when he ran. He didn’t look back at the life he was leaving or the friend he was saving. He ran only forward—toward the storm, toward the thing waiting at the edge of everything.
Back in the Emperor’s study, Kyle exhaled slowly. His hand had tightened into a fist without him even noticing, the phantom shape of the pendant still burning in his palm.
The imperial palace had long fallen into silence by the time Kyle finally retreated from the study. The corridors felt unusually heavy now, as if even the sound of a footstep might disturb something fragile.
Lucius rose from his chair, the weight of the empire seeming to stoop his shoulders. "Kyle..."
But Kyle lowered his head first, the guilt finally breaking through the discipline.
"If I had been stronger," he said quietly, his voice barely a whisper, "he wouldn’t have died there alone."