Chapter 330: Chapter 330: Alone
In the anteroom off the main hall, the door closed behind the security detail with a soft click, shutting out the sound of the cameras. Ophelia’s perfume and panic still hung in the air, clashing with the neutral scent of disinfectant and polished wood.
Lucius stood at the edge of the long table, hands braced lightly on its surface, watching the girl they’d just removed from the floor. He had told himself, before she arrived, that she might still have some sense, that she was young, naïve, perhaps angry, but not yet beyond reach. Seeing her now, eyes fever-bright, dress rumpled from her struggle, he understood he’d been wrong. She wasn’t just angry. She was desperate enough to let men like Odin use her.
"You’ve caused a scene," he said quietly, his voice the even, patient tone of a man discussing weather. "You think it will help you. It won’t."
Ophelia twisted against the grip on her arm. "You don’t understand... Mother is alive! He told me... he showed me!"
Lucius’s brows lifted by a fraction. "He told you," he repeated, as if testing the words. "Of course he did."
He straightened, pulling a slim leather folder from the inner pocket of his jacket. The quiet sound of paper sliding against paper as he opened it and arranged the photographs one by one on the polished wood.
"Look at them," he said.
Ophelia’s eyes flicked down. For a moment she didn’t seem to understand what she was seeing. Then her breath hitched. The images were flat and cold under the overhead light: Misty Kilmer in a nondescript safehouse, eyes glassy, limbs slack, an IV line taped to her wrist. In each frame she looked less like a woman and more like an empty shell.
"She’s being drugged," Lucius said softly, almost clinically. "She has been for months. Whatever you think you’ve heard, whatever promises you’ve been fed... the mother you remember isn’t in there anymore. And these pictures... are the only ones age-appropriate for you to see."
Ophelia’s hand twitched over the table but didn’t touch the photos. "No," she whispered. "He said he saved her..."
Lucius’s eyes stayed on her, pale and unreadable. "Odin. Or rather, Alexander Stone. That’s his name. He isn’t your father. He isn’t your savior. He’s a career manipulator with half the intelligence services of the continent looking for him." His voice didn’t rise, but each word landed like a stone dropped in water. "And as we speak, special teams are arresting him."
Ophelia’s gaze darted up to his face, searching for some crack, some hint of bluff. There was none. Just the same calm man who had stood on the dais beside the Emperor, who now looked at her like a surgeon at a patient refusing anesthesia.
"You were given a seat at a ceremony to watch your brother become untouchable," Lucius went on. "Instead you tried to pull him back into a trap." He reached out, gathered the photographs into a neat stack, and slid them back into the folder. "That ends now."
"You knew!" she shot back, tears springing at the corners of her eyes. "You knew about Mother!" Even now she reached for a villain she could hit instead of the ones who had used her.
"Yes. We knew. She was bait to catch Alexander." Lucius leaned his hip onto the table corner, arms crossing loosely over his chest. "You were granted safety by Serathine, a second chance, and you chose to contact him anyway."
Ophelia’s mouth parted in surprise.
"Did you think we wouldn’t find out?" the prince asked, one brow lifting, the faintest edge of amusement sharpening his tone. "We knew before you finished your first call. And Serathine gave up on helping you the moment she saw where you were heading."
That landed. Her painted composure cracked like sugar glass. "She wouldn’t," she whispered, but it sounded more like a plea than an argument.
"She did." Lucius pushed off from the table, folder under one arm, his stance shifting from conversational to final. "Because she’s not a fool, and neither is your brother. The only one still pretending you’re a child is you."
Ophelia’s fingers curled against her skirt, the heavy silk twisting. "You’re lying," she hissed. "Odin saved her. He told me..."
Lucius didn’t even blink. "Alexander tells everyone what they need to hear. That’s how he builds his traps. Promises. Half-truths. Pretty pictures. And then he uses you."
He set the folder down on the table and slid it a few centimeters toward her, not enough to invite, just enough to make it clear the evidence wasn’t going away. "Look at your own reflection, Ophelia. He dressed you up, put jewelry at your throat and sent you into a room full of cameras to deliver a line for him. Did you think that wasn’t part of his plan?"
Her breath hitched; a tear cut through the powder at the corner of her eye. "He said... he said if I could just get close to Lucas..."
Lucius’s voice stayed level, but the softness was gone. "You were a message. Nothing more. If you’d succeeded, you’d have delivered your brother into his hands. If you failed, " he gestured at the door with a flick of his fingers, "this. Spectacle, headlines, a distraction while he runs. And now he’s running out of time."
Ophelia’s head snapped up, a flash of panic under the defiance. "No, he’s waiting for me. He said..."
"He’s being arrested as we speak," Lucius cut across her, calm and merciless. "There is no one waiting for you anymore."
She stared at him, her mouth opening and closing without sound, her chest rising in shallow, furious breaths. In the silence between them, she could hear her jewelry tremble faintly against her collarbone.
Lucius straightened, buttoning his jacket with a single, precise movement. "You wanted to stand in front of everyone and prove you mattered. Congratulations. You’ve done that. Now you’re going to sit here, and you’re going to decide whether you want to tell me everything Alexander fed you or whether you want to go down with him."
He nodded once to the guards at the door. "Take her to the side room."
The two plainclothes officers moved in quietly, guiding her toward the door. Ophelia resisted for half a heartbeat, then let herself be steered, the fight bleeding out of her posture even as her eyes still sparked.
Lucius watched her go, his expression unreadable. In his head he’d already marked the next moves on the board; Alexander Stone was no longer a ghost on a file, and the girl who had walked into the hall thinking she could pull Lucas back now knew exactly how alone she was.