Chapter 271: Blade To The Iris
Gwen was stunned to her core that Aliana already knew so much.
Then another thought crossed her mind.
Even if Aliana knew about the cult... she clearly didn’t know everything. If she could stall them long enough, the ritual downstairs could be completed by the time this interrogation was over.
A vicious smirk slowly curled across Gwen’s lips as she sneered, "Oh, is someone worried about my dear Cedric? Don’t tell me you’re also in love with-"
Slap!
A brutal slap cracked across her face, echoing sharply through the silent room. The sheer force left Gwen’s head ringing, bringing her to the brink of blacking out.
Gwen trembled as Aliana’s hand immediately shot out and locked onto her neck in a suffocating grip.
"Answer the question," Aliana spat. "What do you plan to do with Cedric, and what do you hope to achieve?"
All four of them were impressed by how rough Aliana was handling Gwen. Cillian couldn’t help but mutter under his breath, "Remind me never to get on her bad side."
Beside him, Andrew nodded in quiet agreement. Meanwhile, Gavriel and Jade kept their eyes locked on Gwen.
Since Aliana had asked the question, they had been wondering the same thing.
What could they possibly achieve by involving Cedric in all of this?
Gwen clearly had no affection for the man. So why go through the charade of marrying him if the goal was simply to use him in some sick ritual?
If all they needed was a person, they had plenty of human captives at their disposal in the dungeons to use instead of Cedric.
But Gwen remained stubborn. She knew that as long as she was useful, they wouldn’t dare harm her, let alone kill her, no matter how much the woman standing before her clearly wanted to.
A wicked grin slowly spread across her lips.
"Or what?" Gwen taunted. "Are you going to kill me? Well, go ahead. You’ll never find out."
Aliana’s icy eyes stared at her in silence for a few seconds.
"Gav," she raised her free hand without breaking eye contact with her. "Pass me the knife, please. Since she won’t answer, I might as well gouge out the eyes she used to stare at my husband."
The grin instantly vanished from Gwen’s face, while Gavriel’s lips finally curled into a smile.
Without another word, he reached for the table, picked up a sharp carving knife, and placed it in Aliana’s hand.
"Here you go, wife," he said affectionately.
Jade and Andrew’s eyes widened, while Cillian’s lips curled into an amused grin.
Gwen stared in terror as Aliana brought the blade closer to her face, stammering, "W-What... do you really think I’ll give in to your t-threats?"
Aliana’s lips curved up, and without a warning, the blade sliced a clean, shallow line across Gwen’s cheek.
Gwen shrieked in agony as blood welled along the cut.
"Keep talking," Aliana warned, her voice unnaturally composed. "And your tongue comes out next, seeing as you clearly don’t know how to use it to save your own skin."
Pure terror surged through Gwen’s chest. Her wide, frantic eyes stayed glued to the steel inching back toward her face.
’Fuck, this woman is fucking crazy! She is actually going to carve me up!’
Just as the cold point of the knife brushed the delicate skin at the corner of her eye, Gwen broke. "W-wait! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everything!"
Aliana did not retract the weapon.
Instead, she held the steel mere millimetres from Gwen’s iris, her tone dropping into a deadly whisper. "Start talking, and don’t even think about lying. Because your tongue will be next... followed by every other organ, just like what your cult did to those innocent people."
Standing nearby, Gavriel could practically taste immense fear rolling off Gwen’s trembling frame. He knew Aliana had shattered her resolve completely. Though a quiet part of him still wondered if his wife would have truly gouged the woman’s eyes out.
His morbid curiosity was cut short when Gwen finally began to confess. "T-The ritual requires a groom! A willing groom to be offered as a sacrifice to our goddess."
Aliana narrowed her eyes, her grip on the knife steady. "A willing groom? What nonsense is that? Cedric looked anything but willing."
Gwen swallowed hard, her chest heaving as she stammered, "W-we were dating before all of this. So we... we influenced him into m-marrying me."
She did not need to elaborate further.
A dark silence fell over the room as everyone instantly grasped the truth.
The cult had twisted Cedric’s mind with black magic, forcing a false consent to satisfy their ritual requirement.
Aliana pressed further, "Why go through such elaborate lengths for Cedric when you could have dragged any miserable soul from your dungeons?"
"T-that was because the groom had to be someone with a pure heart," Gwen stammered.
"H-he told me he was in love with a woman from his childhood, so he fit the requirements written in the book. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t in love with me. As long as the groom carried love in his heart, he could be used as the sacrifice. He also had connections to the country’s elite. We needed someone capable of bringing enough powerful people here so that we could... control them."
"You fucking bitch!" Jade finally snapped, glaring at the vile woman for targeting someone as kind and innocent as Cedric.
Gwen’s eyes instinctively turned towards Jade but didn’t dare move another inch. The knife trembling beneath Aliana’s grip remained only centimetres from her eye, a chilling reminder of what one wrong move could cost her.
"What do you gain from this ritual besides controlling people’s minds?" Aliana asked coldly.
"O-Our goddess grants us one wish through the ritual. T-This time everyone wanted to wish for permanent control over others." Gwen answered reluctantly.
"And what was the purpose of that lab?" Gavriel asked.
"L-lab?" Gwen’s heart shuddered. "T-that was where we harvested organs for rituals like today’s... a-and we also exported them to the black market."
Gavriel’s gaze sharpened. "She’s still hiding something."
Aliana’s crimson eyes narrowed. "What else?" she demanded, pressing the knife just a fraction closer. "Answer... or..."
"I-It was the will of our goddess!" Gwen blurted out. "She speaks to us sometimes during the full moon."
At those words, Cillian’s and Gavriel’s eyes sharpened. As demons, they knew that the full moon greatly amplified a demon’s powers.
Gwen hurriedly continued. "It was her command that we assist a man who came from Aria. He wanted to determine whether organs from different species could be successfully transplanted into a human body. W-we did everything he asked for several years before he suddenly ordered us to shut the lab down. Then he left, taking only one human body with him... the only one that had shown signs of successfully adapting."
As soon as Gwen finished speaking, Aliana went completely still. Her eyes widened as she recalled the mysterious missing human cases in Aria that Ivan and Evelyn had mentioned, where victims returned completely deranged.
She couldn’t stop her mind from racing back to the terrifying creature she had encountered back then.
’Could they have been involved in creating something like that?’
Aliana knew nothing about the laboratory in Aria that Ivan and Evelyn had later discovered, but she was sharp enough to connect the pieces on her own.
Meanwhile, although Cillian and Gavriel had already harboured their own suspicions, they didn’t jump to conclusions right away. After leaving the underground tunnel with the women, Cillian had returned to inspect the body, yet unlike the ones they had encountered in Aria, it bore no demonic mark.
One thing, however, became abundantly clear.
The demoness the cult worshipped was either responsible for all the chaos and someone Mord was serving. Or she herself was merely working for someone even more powerful, the true mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows.