The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 575: Sealed

ERIS "I’m fine," I said.

The lie tasted like copper. It was a thin, brittle thing that I threw between us like a barricade, hoping he wouldn’t see the way my hands were vibrating against his forearms.

I wasn’t fine.

I was a fraying tapestry held together by the singular, desperate hope that he would walk through the door, and now that he was here, the adrenaline was trickling out of me, leaving nothing but a vast, hollow exhaustion.

I looked at his face, really looked at it.

He was gaunt, his skin sallow under the layer of dust and dried blood, his eyes shadowed by the kind of hollow stare that only comes from seeing the underside of reality.

He had spent a month dismantling five provinces and then, by some miracle of stubbornness, crawled out of a void that shouldn’t exist.

Deciding not to tell him everything right now was a mercy, though it felt like a cowardice.

I wanted to give him one night. Just one single night where he didn’t have to carry the weight of a dying seal and the impossible physics of our existence.

He deserved a few hours of being a husband before I made him a soldier again.

Beneath my ribs, the triplets shifted, a series of dull, rhythmic thumps against the inside of my skin. It was as if they were signaling their presence, confirming that they, too, had felt the shift in the air the moment he crossed the threshold.

I know, I thought, pressing my palm flat against the fabric of my nightgown. I know you’re there. Just hold on a little longer.

Not tonight. I wouldn’t break the peace of his return with the terror of what was coming.

Soren’s expression didn’t shift, but I felt the change in the way his hands gripped my shoulders.

He had spent the last few months learning the specific topography of my face, how I looked when I was angry, how I looked when I was calculating, and exactly how I looked when I was offering the closest available alternative to the truth.

"You are," he said, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that sent a shiver down my spine. He looked almost amused, but the tightness around his jaw betrayed him. "A very terrible liar, Eris."

Before I could summon an argument or sharpen my tongue to deflect him, he leaned in and kissed me.

It was a deliberate, tactical move, designed to stifle the protest before It could form. It worked. My mind went quiet, the frantic gears of my planning grinding to a halt under the heat of his mouth.

Fair, I thought, my eyes fluttering shut. That’s a fair play.

When I finally managed to pull back, just an inch or two, the gravity of the last month came rushing back. I needed to know. I needed to hear the words so I could stop imagining the horrors.

"Tell me what happened," I whispered, my fingers tracing the jagged edge of a dent in his pauldron. "Everyone... every scout, every captain, the entire empire... they were looking for you. Where were you? What happened at the border?"

Soren hesitated. It was immediate and jarring.

He was a man who moved through life with the certainty of a landslide, yet now he looked like he was searching for a container that didn’t exist to hold a story that shouldn’t be told.

He looked at me with a specific, searching intensity, trying to gauge if I would believe the impossible or if the telling of it would make him sound like a madman.

"I’m not sure if the words exist," he said quietly.

I decided to help him. I reached into the dark and pulled out the one detail that had haunted the reports. "Was it the crack, Soren? The one in the sky?"

He froze. His entire body went rigid, the muscles in his neck cording.

The look in his eyes was one of pure, unadulterated shock, the look of a man who had just heard a secret he thought he had buried in another dimension.

"How do you know about that?" he asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous, careful level.

"The soldiers," I said, my voice steady despite the way my heart was hammering.

"The men who were with you. They said you asked if anyone could hear it. If anyone could see the seam before it happened. They thought you were losing your mind, but I knew you weren’t."

He processed this, his eyes scanning mine for a flicker of something else. He seemed to almost accept it, but there was a lingering shadow of doubt.

He was too sharp; he knew the soldiers hadn’t seen what he saw, and he knew they couldn’t have described the ’cracks’ with the precision I was implying.

He doesn’t believe me, I realized. He knows there’s more.

"Fine," I sighed, leaning my head against his chest. "I’ll come clean. As much as I can."

I took a breath and started from the beginning. "The old mage. The one you sent for months ago? He arrived. Shortly after you left for the northern provinces."

Soren’s expression changed instantly. The suspicion was replaced by a look of genuine, staggered surprise, the expression of someone who had prayed for rain and finally heard the first crack of thunder.

"Aldwin?" he asked. It wasn’t a question so much as a stunned realization. "Aldwin is actually here?"

"Yes," I said. "He’s in the guest wing. Or he was, until he moved into the library to live like a hermit. He told me about the letter you sent him. He told me about the research, the cracks, and what you’ve been trying to find for years. A student and I have been working with him. We’ve been trying to understand what is happening to the borders... and what is happening to me."

Soren listened with a terrifyingly complete attention. The exhaustion didn’t leave him, but he pushed it into a corner of his mind, making room for the data.

He looked like a man who had been wandering in the dark and had finally seen a distant, flickering torch.

This was the moment. The silence between us was heavy, ripe with the opportunity to finally speak the truth.

I could tell him about Orrian. I could tell him that we were characters in a story that was being rewritten, that the cracks were the seams of a fictional world buckling under the weight of our defiance. He had seen the void; he would believe me. He deserved to know what we were fighting.

Tell him, my mind urged. Tell him everything.

I opened my mouth, the words fully formed in my throat. I knew exactly how to say it. Soren, this world isn’t what you think it is.

"There is something else," I began, my voice clear. "I need to tell you about the cracks. What they actually represent. What they mean for—"

I stopped.

The words were there, hovering just behind my teeth, but they wouldn’t come. It wasn’t a hand over my mouth, and it wasn’t a physical pain. It was something far more unsettling, a sudden, total absence of the ability to form the sounds.

It was like reaching into a familiar drawer for a key and finding that the drawer had been perfectly, seamlessly sealed shut.

I tried again, my brow furrowing. "We are—"

Nothing. My throat clicked, but no sound followed.

I tried a third time, my desperation rising. "This world—"

Silence.

A cold wave of goosebumps erupted up my arms and settled at the base of my neck. I felt the weight of the universe pressing down on me, a silent, invisible hand reminding me of my place.

The world does not give me permission, I realized, the horror of it landing like a stone in my stomach. I cannot tell him what we are. The story will not let me.

Orrian’s warning, the one he had tried to shout after me as I ran, finally arrived in my mind. Was what he was trying to say? Was that what he was trying to tell me... that there were barriers I couldn’t break, no matter how much I loved the man in front of me?

Soren was watching me, his confusion turning into a gentle, worried sort of concern. He reached out, his thumb brushing my cheek. "Eris? What were you going to say?"

I had to move. I had to pivot before the silence became an admission of its own. I rearranged my face into a mask of mild, regal annoyance, forcing the terror down into my gut.

"I was going to say," I began, and this time the words flowed easily, "that you smell considerably like a man who has been on horseback for a month without adequate bathing."

The shift In his expression was almost comical. The intense concern evaporated, replaced by a dry, weary sort of deadpan. He blinked at me, his hands sliding down to rest on my waist.

"I see," he said.

"It is offensive to the imperial nose," I added, gaining confidence in the lie.

"Well," he said, a small, tired smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "In that case... come bathe with me."

"Absolutely not," I snapped, though there was no heat in it. "I am the Empress, not a stable hand. I have standards."

"Eris—" he started, his eyes flashing with a familiar, playful spark.

I gave him the look, the one that had ended rebellions and silenced council members. He subsided, though he looked reluctant, his hands lingering on my waist for a second too long before he finally stood up.

"Aldwin," he murmured, shaking his head as he looked toward the door. "How strange it will be to see him again after all this time. It feels like a lifetime ago that I sent that letter."

"I don’t know what he was like before but I think I can assure you that he hasn’t changed much," I lied. "He’s still a nuisance."

Soren laughed, a short, ragged sound, and began to move toward the washroom. "I’ll be quick."

"You will be thorough," I corrected, following him to the doorway. "I am going to arrange for a dinner that doesn’t involve dried meat or hardtack. You are going to wash until you resemble a human being again. And tomorrow... tomorrow we will sit with Aldwin. All of us. And we will talk."

He paused In the doorway, looking back at me. The lamplight caught the blue in his eyes, but it also caught the realization there. He knew there was more.

He knew I was hiding a mountain behind a molehill, and he was letting me do it because he loved me enough to wait. But the look told me he wouldn’t wait forever.

He didn’t say a word. He just gave me that long, searching look before the door clicked shut behind him.

The room was suddenly very quiet.

The relief of his presence was still there, a warm hum in the air that made the room feel smaller, safer. But the weight of everything unsaid was just as heavy.

I moved my hand back to my abdomen, feeling the slight, firm curve there. The triplets were quiet now, pacified by the proximity of their father’s magic.

Tomorrow, I thought, staring at the closed washroom door. I will tell him tomorrow. I have to find a way to break the drawer open.

Orrian’s unfinished warning sat at the back of my mind like a ticking clock. What were you going to say? What did you need me to know that was so important you couldn’t let me run?

I looked around the room. His things, his books, his discarded cloak, the quill he had left on the desk, were exactly where they belonged.

The month of his absence was already beginning to reverse itself, the room re-forming around him as if he had never left.

He is home, I told myself, a small, fragile peace settling in my chest. Whatever the story tries to do next, whatever consequences Orrian is afraid of... Soren is home.

Inside me, one of them moved, a gentle, rolling sensation.

"Yes," I whispered to the empty room. "I know. He’s home."