Chapter 938. I Was Positioned Between Them Before My Brain Even Woke Up
Iris struck with the focused fury of a storm breaking. She didn’t just intervene; she detonated into the space between Theo and his prey.
Her body became a projectile, slamming into his sword arm with the full, unyielding weight of her momentum. The impact was precise and devastating, a bone-jarring crack echoing through the room as her elbow caught his joint, driving his arm wide.
The ancient Nightwing blade was torn from his grip, clattering across the stone floor with a discordant shriek that sounded like a dying scream.
Theo didn’t even have an opportunity to register the failure of his strike before Iris was on him. She drove her knee into the small of his back with enough force to bruise lung tissue, while her forearm locked across his throat like a vise.
She pinned him to the floor with the merciless, mechanical efficiency of a predator who had spent her entire life learning exactly how to break a human being without killing them unless necessary.
Theo made a sound that defied description. It wasn’t quite a scream and not quite a sob; it was a wet, strangled noise, the sound of a man surfacing from a fathomless black abyss only to find the air itself was made of glass, cutting his throat as he gasped.
The violence tore through the room’s silence like a blade through silk. Rex was awake before the sound of the blade hitting the floor had even faded.
He moved with a terrifying, inhuman fluidity, already positioned between Diana and the door before his conscious mind had even processed the threat. His eyes were cold, lethal slits, and his body was coiled like a spring.
Diana scrambled upright a half second behind him, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her disorientation instantly hardening into sharp, crystalline terror as she saw Theo pinned beneath Iris, his face pressed against the cold stone.
"Iris," Rex commanded.
His voice was terrifyingly flat, devoid of panic, devoid of anger, and stripped down to pure, tactical assessment. "Report."
"He came in with a blade raised over both of you," Iris spat.
Her voice was tight, vibrating with a lethal cocktail of adrenaline and rage that she was visibly forcing down into something controlled. Her grip on Theo’s throat didn’t loosen; if anything, she pressed harder, feeling the frantic, rabbit-quick pulse beneath his skin.
"I don’t know how long he’s been lurking at that door... I only caught his shadow in the corridor."
Diana couldn’t speak. She stared at Theo’s face, at the glassy, hollow quality of his eyes—eyes that looked less like a man’s and more like windows into a burning house.
A wave of horror washed over her, but it wasn’t the fear of death; it was the soul-crushing realization that the cousin she had grown up with was gone, replaced by something monstrous.
Heavy, panicked footsteps thundered down the corridor. Aurelia burst into the doorway, still in her nightclothes, her hair disheveled and her face pale with the raw, unguarded alarm of a mother who had heard the sound of a breaking world from two floors away.
Her eyes swept the room with desperate speed. First, she saw the silver gleam of the ceremonial blade lying abandoned on the floor like a severed limb.
Then, her gaze locked onto the scene on the floor: her son, Theo, pinned beneath Iris, his chest heaving in obscene, terrified spasms.
Finally, her eyes traveled to the bed, to Rex and Diana, alive, unharmed, staring back at her with a stunned, haunted disbelief that mirrored her own.
"Theo," Aurelia whispered.
The name didn’t come out with her usual authority or the measured command of the household head. It came out raw, fractured, and utterly broken—the sound of a mother realizing her child had become a monster.
Theo’s eyes finally found hers. The glassy haze began to crack, revealing the raw, bleeding agony beneath. The adrenaline was receding, leaving behind only the crushing weight of what he had almost done. The image of their throats parting under his steel burned into his retinas.
"Mother," Theo choked out, the word breaking apart like dry earth. "I... I do not know what I just did."
Aurelia did not move for several agonizing seconds after Theo spoke. She simply stood frozen in the doorway, framed by the dim light of the corridor, her eyes fixed on the silver blade lying between them like a poisonous serpent.
The stillness that held her was not calm; it was something far more terrifying. It was the unnatural, pressurized silence that precedes a cataclysm; it was the paralysis of a woman whose fury had grown so vast, so impossibly large, that her body could not yet comprehend which shape of violence it should take first.
Then, something inside her snapped. The dam holding back decades of controlled composure shattered.
She crossed the room in three strides, each footfall echoing like a hammer blow against the stone. Without warning, she reached down and seized the front of Theo’s shirt with both hands, her knuckles white, her fingernails digging into his flesh.
With a strength born of pure, unadulterated rage, she hauled him upward, dragging him off the floor where Iris had pinned him. Iris, reading the lethal shift in the room’s atmosphere, released her hold instantly.
She stepped back into the shadows without needing to be told, recognizing that this was no longer a tactical situation; this was a primal reckoning that no third party should witness.
"Get up," Aurelia commanded.
Her voice was stripped of every ounce of the training hall’s measured authority. It was the raw, ragged, and splintered voice of a woman who had spent thirty years being the unflinching anchor for every crisis this household had ever weathered, only to discover a nightmare large enough to incinerate her very soul.
Theo rose unsteadily, his legs shaking like wheat in a storm. His mind was still trapped in that toxic fog, the residual whispers of the darkness still clawing at the edges of his consciousness.
He looked up at her with hollow eyes, uncertain if he was being rescued or executed.
He never saw the blow coming.
BAM!
Aurelia’s palm connected with the side of his face with the force of a breaking branch. The crack of skin against bone rang through the room as Theo’s head snapped sideways, the impact sending him staggering backward a full step.
The sting was immediate, but the humiliation was worse.
"I forgave the street," she said, her voice beginning to tremble not from fear but from the Herculean effort required to contain a rage that threatened to consume her. "I forgave the punch."
"When you lost control in front of everyone... and when you struck out in that pathetic display of wounded pride, I stood before this entire household."
"I looked them in the eye, and I told them that whatever weakness you were nursing did not excuse what your hand had done."
Her eyes burned with unshed tears that refused to fall, each one a molten drop of fury. "I made you apologize..."
"I forced you to face the shame of your own cowardice. And I meant every word of that forgiveness, Theo, because a punch thrown in anger is a human mistake."
"A punch is a thing a person can bleed from, heal from, and come back from."
Before he could draw a breath to respond, her hand flashed out again.
Crack.
The second strike was harder and more precise, and the sound of flesh meeting flesh was wet and brutal. Theo’s head lurched again, his vision swimming in crimson spots as the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth.
He staggered, his knees buckling, but he refused to fall, held upright only by the sheer terror of the woman standing before him.
Aurelia leaned in close, her breath hot against his cheek, her face inches from his own. Her expression was one of pure, devastated hatred.
"This," she hissed, the word dripping with venom as she stared at the discarded blade on the floor, "is not a punch..."
Aurelia seized his collar once more, her fingers locking around the fabric like iron talons, dragging him forward toward the threshold of the room. By now, the corridor had become a gallery of ghosts.
The household staff had gathered in the shadows, drawn by the sounds of violence that tore through the sanctity of the night. They stood in their nightclothes, pale and motionless, watching with the horrified fascination of those witnessing a ritual of slaughter, the kind of memory that would haunt their dreams and become the whispered scandal they would all spend years pretending they had never seen.
Two night guards stood like statues at the corridor’s edge, their hands hovering near their weapons but their feet rooted by shock. A young maid pressed a shaking hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.
Aurelia did not lower her voice. She did not care that her shame was being laid bare before her servants.
She wanted them to hear. She wanted the very walls to remember.
"You stood over a sleeping woman with a blade," she snarled.