kvmb Chapter 207: The Empress’s Last Madness
Chapter 207: The Empress’s Last Madness
A manic, echoing laugh burst from Alisha’s lips as she stumbled backward, swaying under the suffocating weight of her own delusion.
"Oh..." she jeered, her eyes gleaming with a twisted, venomous amusement. "It seems I gave birth to a fool, just like his father. Seriously, Kyle, do you think the world is a game? It is a savage struggle for survival! The strong devour the weak, and in this palace, I am the strong one, my sweet boy."
Before another toxic word could slip past her lips, Kyle stepped forward. Driven by pure, unyielding fury and a lifetime of suppressed resentment, his hand swung through the heavy air, delivering a brutal, resounding slap across her cheek.
The sharp crack of the blow shattered the silence of the room, snapping her head violently to the side.
For a second, Kyle stood frozen, staring at his own hand. A sickening wave of emptiness washed over him; he had just struck his own mother, breaking a sacred boundary. Yet, looking at her, his expression hardened. "It seems your balance of power is terribly distorted, Mother," he whispered, his voice deadly dark, trembling with a dangerous mixture of disgust and grief.
Alisha slowly raised her trembling fingers, pressing them against her burning, crimson cheek. A chilling, unhinged smile stretched across her face, completely devoid of maternal warmth.
"Oh... it seems you are even more of a fool than your father. Go on then, run and save him—that is, if you even can. Everything in this place is under my mercy. No matter how much you think you hold the reins of power, I am still the Empress, even if my authorities are stripped away. Everyone belongs to me... even your father."
In a split second, the last thread of Kyle’s restraint snapped entirely. He lunged forward, his fingers winding brutally into her silver hair, twisting it with a violent force that forced her head back, making her gasp in sudden pain.
Looking straight into her wide, startled eyes, his gaze held nothing but cold, absolute detachment. The boy who craved her approval was dead. "From this moment on, I will forget that you are my mother," he murmured, his breath hot against her face. "And I will handle you strictly as the Crown Prince."
He turned toward the heavy double doors, his voice booming through the silent suite like thunder. "Guards! Get in here!"
The doors burst open instantly, and his personal knights rushed inside, their hands gripping their hilts as they took in the shocking, taboo sight of the Crown Prince holding the Empress by her hair. "Your Highness! What are your orders?"
"Do what my father would do if he were standing here," Kyle commanded, his voice shaking with authority.
"Take her to the imperial dungeons. Strip her of these heavy silk robes. Until my father wakes and decides her ultimate punishment, she will rot in the dark with the very people she calls the wretched lower class."
Alisha stared at him in sheer, unadulterated shock as the guards stepped forward, shivering as they secured her royal arms. Kyle leaned down slightly, his final words cutting through her like a frozen blade. "And from this day forward... forget that you ever had a son named Kyle."
The guards dragged her away ruthlessly, her piercing shrieks echoing down the vaulted stone corridors of the Western Palace, staining the royal walls with her desperation.
"You ungrateful wretch!" she screamed, her face contorting with a hideous mixture of rage and disbelief. "I am your mother! Will you truly cast me aside for that pathetic excuse of a father?! I was going to bring you absolute glory, you defiant traitor! You will see what happens—you will regret this!"
Kyle didn’t even turn around. Her venomous threats fell on deaf ears. He stood completely still in the empty room, watching with a hollow chest as her royal status completely dissolved into the shadows.
The silence that followed was suffocating. Clamping his hand over the hidden vial in his coat, he took a deep, shivering breath to steel his racing heart and bolted out of the suite, sprinting through the dimly lit corridors back toward his father’s chamber.
The heavy double doors rattled on their hinges as Kyle burst back into the imperial suite, his breath ragged, his lungs burning, and his chest heaving from the brutal sprint.
Olivia didn’t even look up at first. She was standing by the bedside table, her posture rigid, holding a strange, intricately shaped glass bottle that one of the trusted servants had secretly smuggled to her. She turned her cool, calculating gaze toward him, taking in his pale, shell-shocked face.
"You have returned," Olivia murmured, her tone flat, deliberately testing his emotional state. "Judging by the look on your face, there is no need for me to ask."
Kyle let out a hollow, bitter laugh, a sound entirely devoid of humor. He leaned against the bedpost for support. "No, there really is no need. It was her. All along."
He stepped closer to the grand bed, his eyes anxiously scanning the motionless, gray figure of his father, who now lay in a deathly, still slumber. "How is he?"
"Alive," Olivia replied shortly, her fingers meticulously adjusting the strange bottle in her hand. "In any case, I sent a servant while you were away, and they managed to bring me the base elements I required. Did you find the poison?"
Without a word, Kyle reached into his coat, pulled out the hidden glass vial, and handed it over to her. "Here. This is what she hid."
Olivia took the vial. She uncorked it with a swift, practiced motion and brought it to her nose, inhaling the scent. Instantly, her entire body went rigid. Her movements froze. Her eyes narrowed into cold, dangerous slits as she looked up from the liquid to lock her piercing gaze onto Kyle’s face.
Kyle’s heart skipped a beat at her sudden, lethal shift in posture. "What? Is there a problem?"
"Kyle," Olivia whispered, her voice dropping into a chillingly quiet register that made the air in the chamber turn to ice. "She fooled you. This isn’t the raw poison at all. She was lying to your face."
Kyle’s breath caught entirely in his throat, the ground shifting beneath his feet. "What...?"
"I am telling you, she fooled you! That is exactly why you found it so easily," Olivia snapped, her voice breaking through her usual frozen composure, sharp, venomous, and laced with rare fury. She took a fierce step toward him. "Where is Alisha right now?!"
"She... she is..." Kyle stammered, his mind reeling as the terrifying reality of his mother’s endless cunning began to set in. "I sent her to the dungeons. Personally."
"Then go and get her back, right now!" Olivia commanded, her eyes flashing with a desperate, wild anger. "Why are you standing there frozen like a statue? Go and bring her here this instant, you fool! She holds the real key!"
But before Kyle could even turn toward the door, a series of sharp, frantic knocks shattered the tense silence of the imperial chamber. It wasn’t a normal request for entry; it was an alarm.
Kyle rushed to the door and pulled it open, his jaw clenched as he faced the Commander of the Guards, who stood in the corridor looking pale, breathless, and completely broken.
"What is the meaning of this?" Kyle demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous register.
The Commander bowed hastily, his iron armor clanking as his hands trembled. "Your Highness... you ordered the immediate imprisonment of the Empress, correct?"
"Yes, and I want her brought back here immediately!" Kyle barked, his patience wearing thin.
"I am deeply afraid... that we cannot fulfill your command, Your Highness," the Commander whispered, dropping his gaze to the stone floor, unable to meet the prince’s eyes.
"What do you mean you cannot?!"
"It seems... it seems the guards in the western wing were completely loyal to her from the start," the Commander confessed, his voice shaking with dread. "They turned on us. They staged a diversion in the lower halls, slaughtered the cell guards, and freed her. We cannot even locate her position within the palace, Your Highness. She is gone."
Kyle gripped the Commander’s heavy iron collar, pulling him forward until their faces were inches apart, his eyes widening in pure, unadulterated fury. "How could you lose the Empress?! Have you all lost your absolute minds?!"
Unable to sit still under the suffocating weight of the Commander’s words, Kyle threw him aside and bolted out of the grand chamber, desperate to verify the treason with his own eyes.
When he finally reached the depths of the imperial dungeons after a frantic run, his worst fears were violently realized. The heavy iron bars of her cell stood wide open, the dark chains clinking loosely against the damp stone floor. The cell was entirely empty. His mother was gone, and the guards who were supposed to watch her had vanished into the labyrinth of the palace.
Meanwhile, back in the dim, heavy stillness of the imperial suite, Olivia sat frozen beside the Emperor’s bed. She kept her fingers pressed against his cold wrist, her mind desperately charting a way to keep him alive as his pulse grew weaker by the minute.
Suddenly, the heavy click of the chamber doors breaking open shattered the silence.
Olivia let out a shallow breath of relief, instinctively turning around, thinking it was Kyle returning with news from the dungeons. "Kyle, she lied about the vial—"
The words withered on her tongue. The freezing air in her lungs turned to pure lead.
It was not Kyle.
It was Alisha.
The Empress stood in the doorway, framed by the suffocating darkness of the corridor, looking like a literal nightmare torn from a dark tale. The once-immaculate woman was unrecognizable. Her magnificent silk robes were torn and tattered, hanging in jagged, mud-stained ribbons around her ankles. Her silver hair fell in wild, matted knots over her face, obscuring everything but her eyes—which were wide, bloodshot, and completely unhinged.
And gripped tightly in her trembling, pale hand, reflecting the flickering candlelight, was a sharp, lethal blade.
"Well, well, well..." Alisha rasped. Her voice didn’t sound like a queen anymore; it was a low, guttural hiss, scraping against the silence of the room. She took a dragging step forward, the torn silk whispering against the stone. "I should have expected to find the little whore lurking here the moment everything started falling apart."
Olivia’s reflex was instantaneous. Her fingers bolted downward, locking tightly around Lucius’s cold, frail hand. For the first time in years, a primal spike of fear pierced through her iron defense mechanisms.
Alisha looked completely dangerous—a cornered apex predator with absolutely nothing left to lose. In Olivia’s current, bone-deep exhaustion, trying to reason with a woman who had crossed the threshold of sanity was absolute madness.
"What do you want, Alisha?" Olivia asked, forcing her voice to remain as flat and steady as possible, though every muscle in her body tense-shielded the dying man behind her.
Alisha advanced slowly, the blade gleaming dangerously under the dim glow of the candles. "I want my glory. I want everything back. And I want your pathetic death, you wretched parasite. But today... today I will make sure the man who stripped me of my title and power leaves this world first."
Looking at the manic, murderous glint in the older woman’s eyes as she raised the weapon, Olivia squeezed her father’s hand tighter, a cold sweat breaking on the back of her neck.
Damn it, Olivia muttered to herself, her heart hammering violently against her ribs. This madwoman has entirely lost her mind.