I will be the perfect wife this time

Chapter 191: The Inheritance of Ash

The first sensation that reached Olivia was warmth.

It wasn’t peace—merely warmth. It felt heavy and alien, as if her physical self had been hauled back from a threshold it wasn’t yet ready to leave.

Her eyelids parted with agonizing slowness. Above, the ceiling was a dim expanse, its edges blurred and fraying like a memory that refused to anchor itself in the present.

She remained motionless for a long beat. She simply lay there, submerged in the silence, listening.

Then, she heard it: a soft, uneven hitch of breath nearby.

Olivia tilted her head by a fraction. Isabella was there.

She was slumped in a chair that had been dragged too close to the bedside, her posture broken by exhaustion. One of her hands lay anchored near Olivia’s arm—a tether maintained even in sleep, as if she had been terrified that Olivia might slip away the moment she closed her eyes.

The sight offered no solace. Instead, it brought a renewed weight—a quiet, unrelenting reminder of a reality she was no longer permitted to forget.

Olivia shifted, a movement so slight it was barely a ripple beneath the sheets.

Isabella stirred instantly. Her eyes snapped open, bright with the jagged alertness of someone who had been guarding a ghost rather than seeking rest.

"...Olivia?"

Her voice fractured as she spoke the name.

For a long, hollow moment, the air between them remained undisturbed. Then, Isabella let out a long, shuddering exhale, a sound that carried the weight of hours spent in suffocating suspense.

"You’re awake."

Olivia blinked, the movement deliberate and slow. Her voice, when it came, was a dry rasp. "I was asleep?"

Isabella didn’t offer a direct reply. Instead, she rose at once, her movements jerky and urgent, as if she feared that any stillness would invite the return of the previous night’s chaos.

"You need to listen to me," she said, her voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush.

Olivia’s gaze drifted toward the window, her eyes tracking the grey light of a world she no longer recognized. "I don’t think I feel like listening."

The silence stretched. Isabella stepped closer, invading the small circle of Olivia’s solitude. Her voice softened, yet it was braced by a sudden, iron-clad resolve.

"Olivia... you cannot continue to treat your body this way."

That, finally, drew Olivia back. Her focus shifted, landing on Isabella with a dull, questioning spark. "What are you talking about?"

Isabella hesitated. The air in the room seemed to thin for a heartbeat. Then, she forced the words out into the open.

"...You’re pregnant."

Silence followed.

It didn’t arrive with a crash or a thunderclap. It settled over the room like dust over a ruin—quiet, pervasive, and absolute.

Olivia didn’t flinch. She didn’t gasp. She simply stared at Isabella, her expression a blank slate, as if she were waiting for the sounds to translate into a language she understood.

Then, in a voice so quiet it barely disturbed the air:

"That’s impossible."

Isabella shook her head, a slow, solemn movement.

"It isn’t."

Another silence followed, stretching longer and heavier than the last.

Olivia lowered her gaze, her eyes coming to rest on her own hands. She studied them with a detached intensity, as if expecting the skin to feel different, the bones to have changed their shape. They remained as they were—pale, trembling, and hauntingly familiar.

"...Mathias," she whispered, the name escaping her before she could catch it.

Isabella flinched, the sound of his name striking like a physical blow, but she didn’t offer a correction. Instead, she moved with a sudden, protective grace, crouching beside the bed until she was at eye level.

"Listen to me," she said, her voice a low, steady anchor. "You are still here. That matters. And whatever comes next, you must choose to live—for yourself, and for the child."

Olivia didn’t answer. Her expression didn’t shatter; it simply dimmed, the last flicker of light retreating from her eyes. It was as if her soul had been denied its exit, forced back into a vessel that was now required to function without its own consent.

She stared at Isabella in a silence that felt like it might never end. For a fleeting, agonizing second, Isabella feared the words hadn’t even reached her.

Then—

Olivia laughed.

It wasn’t a soft sound, nor was it laced with the usual sting of bitterness. It erupted from her with a suddenness that made Isabella recoil.

The sound was sharp and fractured, a jagged spill of noise that trembled in her throat before twisting into something louder—something wild, rhythmic, and horribly wrong. She doubled over, a hand clamped over her mouth as the laughter coursed through her frame in violent, uncontrollable waves.

Isabella went cold. "Olivia...?"

But Olivia only laughed harder. Tears began to bead in the corners of her eyes, though whether they were born of grief or the sheer force of her hysteria, Isabella could no longer discern.

"Of course," Olivia whispered through the broken remnants of her laughter. "Of course this is the path the world has chosen for me."

Her shoulders shook with a terrifying force.

"The universe truly does savor its little ironies."

"Olivia, stop—"

"Life really does give candy to those without teeth, doesn’t it?" she said, her head snapping up. She looked at Isabella with a smile so shattered, so utterly ruined, that it made Isabella’s chest seize. "How cruel."

Isabella recoiled, her face pale with alarm. "What are you talking about?"

The laughter vanished as abruptly as a candle snuffed out by a sudden draft.

Olivia’s features didn’t just change; they collapsed, disintegrating into a look of raw, unadulterated terror.

"I don’t want it."

The words were a mere thread of a whisper, barely audible against the silence. Then, they surged with a frantic, desperate strength.

"I do not want this child."

Isabella’s breath hitched, her eyes widening in shock. "Olivia—"

"I cannot do this." Her breathing grew shallow and panicked, a trapped animal’s rhythm. "I cannot."

The moment Isabella moved to offer comfort, Olivia flinched away, her head shaking in a frantic, rhythmic denial.

"No. No, do not look at me with that pity." Her voice fractured, the pieces falling like glass. "I wanted a child with *Mathias*. Do you understand? With him." She pressed her hand against her sternum with a sudden, violent force, as if she could reach inside and tear the ache from her marrow. "I wanted a family with him—not this... not this hollow echo he left behind."

"Olivia, this is his child—the last of him—"

"And he is dead!"

The scream erupted from her throat with a primal force, a jagged sound that seemed to make the very walls of the room shudder in its wake. "He is gone, Isabella! He is gone!"

The silence that followed was deafening, crashing down like a physical weight.

Olivia’s body folded inward, the strength abandoned her bones as if she had been hollowed out. She slumped, a ruined thing amidst the sheets.

"I cannot do it alone," she whispered, her voice a fragile, broken wisp. "Every time I look at this child, I will only see the shape of his absence. I will only remember that he is gone."

Isabella surged forward then, capturing Olivia’s trembling hands in a grip that wouldn’t allow for another retreat.

"What has become of you?" Isabella whispered, her own tears finally spilling over. "You were the one who knelt beside me when I wanted to give up. You were the one who begged me to keep my baby, telling me that a child born of such love could never be a curse. Where is that woman now?"

Olivia let out a jagged, hollow sound—a phantom remnant of her earlier laughter.

"That is precisely why I cannot endure it," she whispered, her lips trembling with such violence it was a wonder she could speak at all. "I wanted *him* to see our child. I wanted him to be the one to hold it."

And then, as if the last pillar of her defiance had crumbled, the dam broke. For the first time since the world had ended in that graveyard, Olivia truly began to weep.

"I do not understand why the heavens have chosen me for this," she choked out, her voice sounding scraped raw, as though every word was a stone being dragged over glass. "I truly cannot do this anymore."

She lowered her head, her fingers twisting weakly, almost rhythmically, against the heavy blankets. "I simply want to vanish. There is no reason left—nothing to tether me to this earth."

"I know of one."

The voice cut through the room like a blade of ice.

It was sudden, cold, and unnervingly steady. Olivia lifted her tear-blurred gaze, her vision swimming as she looked toward the doorway.

Leon stood there.

He looked like a man who had walked through hell and carried the ash with him. The exhaustion beneath his eyes had carved deep, hollow shadows into his face, yet he remained impossibly rigid, held together by a resolve that was harsher and more brittle than mere strength.

Isabella stiffened, her protective instincts flaring. "Leon—"

He didn’t so much as glance at her. His gaze was a fixed point, burning with a singular, terrible focus as it remained locked on Olivia.

"You wanted a reason to keep living?" he asked, his voice dropping to a low, perilous hum. "Fine. I shall grant you one."

Olivia’s brow furrowed, a faint, weary ripple on an otherwise stagnant sea. She looked at him as though she no longer possessed the requisite spirit to translate human speech.

"What are you saying...?"

Leon took a step into the room, his presence heavy with the scent of rain and cold iron.

"Revenge."

The word didn’t just fall; it anchored itself, siphoning the air from the room.

Isabella’s eyes went wide, her hand rising in a frantic gesture. "Leon, enough—stay your tongue—"

"No." His voice sliced through her protest, sharp and final. "She has earned the right to the truth."

Olivia stared at him, her silence absolute. And for the first time since the earth had closed over Mathias’s casket, something other than the grey fog of grief stirred within the hollows of her eyes.

A spark of confusion.

Slowly, Leon reached into the folds of his coat, his movements deliberate.

"You believe my brother fell in some tragic, honorable skirmish?" he asked, the words dripping with a corrosive bitterness. "No, Olivia. That war was a grave, dug and measured for him long before his boots ever touched the frost of the North."

Her breathing hitched, the rhythm of her heart suddenly erratic.

"What...?"

"Your father had a hand in the carving of it," Leon continued, his tone flat, devoid of mercy. "And that bastard Sylvester held the shovel."

Isabella lunged forward, seizing his arm with a desperate strength. "I said enough!"

Leon wrenched his arm free without deigning to look at her, his focus never wavering from Olivia’s face.

"I am well aware that Mathias spent his life shielding you from the rot," he said. "But there is no longer any virtue in your ignorance."

Olivia’s lips parted, but no sound escaped. The world seemed to tilt on its axis.

Leon’s features darkened, the shadows in the room seemingly bleeding into his skin.

"That campaign was no ordinary deployment. It was a calculated execution disguised as duty." His jaw tightened until the bone threatened to break. "A punishment built upon a foundation of lies—fabricated charges of treason designed to erase him."

Olivia’s eyes widened, the pupils dilating until the grey was swallowed by a sudden, terrifying clarity.

"What did you say...?"

"Yes," Leon replied, his voice a jagged edge. "My brother was not sent to the North to lead. He was sent there to be extinguished."

A suffocating silence swallowed the room whole.

Olivia looked as though the world had tilted beneath her feet yet again, the floor falling away into a bottomless chasm. Her father. Sylvester. The campaign. The whispers of treason. Suddenly, the disparate, jagged pieces that had never fit together began tearing into place with brutal, devastating force. It wasn’t a tragedy of war; it was a harvest of blood.

Leon walked toward her at last, his shadow stretching long and thin across the bedsheets. Then, without a word of warning, he drew a dagger from his belt. The steel sang a low, mournful note as he placed it directly into her trembling hands.

The metal was a shock against her skin—a biting, silver cold.

"So now the choice is yours," he said quietly. His voice offered no comfort, no warmth; it was a dry husk of a sound, held together by sheer exhaustion. "You can choose to stay buried in this grave you’ve fashioned for yourself..."

His fingers tightened briefly over hers, forcing her grip to close around the hilt of the blade.

"...or you can reclaim the honor that was stolen from my brother."

Olivia stared down at the steel in silence. Her reflection flickered across the polished surface—distorted, pale, and trembling.

"Leon..." Isabella whispered, her voice shaking with a mixture of terror and disbelief.

He stepped back, the tether between them finally snapping.

"Come," he said, his back already turned toward her. "We are leaving."

"But—"

"No." This time his tone softened by a fraction, though the underlying steel remained. "This is her decision to make. Alone."

He paused at the threshold and looked back at Olivia one final time. In that gaze, the sibling was gone, replaced by a soldier acknowledging his sovereign.

"In the end," he murmured, the words weighted with a heavy, ancient expectation, "you are still the Duchess of Locron."

Then, he bowed his head toward her. It was a formal gesture—precise, deliberate, and chillingly respectful. It was a reminder of the title and the power that her grief had made her forget.

"I will see you later, Your Grace."

And with that, he turned and vanished into the hallway, leaving only the cold weight of the dagger and the heat of a new, dawning fire in Olivia’s hand.

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