CHAPTER 85: CHAPTER 85: LIES

Then Jonathan’s gaze caught on Victor.

And everything stopped.

He froze. Just long enough for the betrayal of his own assumptions to register. Of the certainty that this meeting would be private. Controlled. Pity-filled.

Instead, Victor Numen, fully upright, coffee cup in hand, dressed in black slacks and a crisp designer shirt open at the collar, turned slightly in his seat at the breakfast table and raised an eyebrow with the faint amusement of someone used to being greeted with awe or terror, never anything in between.

"Jonathan," he drawled, voice low and casual, as though they’d spoken just last week. "How good of you to come uninvited."

Jonathan’s mouth opened. Then closed. His fingers twitched at his side like he wasn’t sure whether to bow or run.

"I... was under the impression you were in Vienna," he managed, trying to summon the voice he used in boardrooms. "Samael said you were..."

"Busy?" Victor interrupted smoothly. "I was. But apparently not too busy to catch a man trying to corner my mate while I was gone."

"Your mate?" Jonathan’s voice faltered at the word, as if it physically caught in his throat. Mate. He looked at Elias again, but this time with something unreadable behind his eyes, something hovering between disbelief and dawning dread.

His lowly son. The recessive omega he’d once ruled insignificant. Now seated in the heart of a manor larger than the royal palace, wrapped in velvet, lounging beside the most dangerous man on the continent.

And no wheelchair in sight.

Victor took another unhurried sip of coffee, like they weren’t watching a man’s entire understanding of hierarchy collapse.

"Yes," he said mildly. "My mate. I marked him myself. You were saying something about Vienna?"

Elias almost reacted from instinct and said that he wasn’t marked yet but kept his mouth shut the moment Victor’s crimson gaze fell on him.

There was no anger in it.

Just a quiet reminder.

Of what they both already knew.

Of what was inevitable.

Elias looked away, back to his plate, and carefully broke the corner of his toast, as if that required more attention than the fact that his estranged father now knew, believed, what even he hadn’t said aloud yet.

Jonathan’s expression twisted, not with shock or reflection, but with something far more familiar. Disgust. Disappointment. That same cold, clipped tone he’d used so many times before surfaced again, like muscle memory.

"You overstepped again, didn’t you?"

The air in the greenhouse shifted, subtly, but unmistakably.

Elias didn’t flinch; he had nearly nine years to deal with whatever remained after he had remained alone, and Clarke had actively attempted to fuck with his studies and work.

Instead, he lifted one brow beneath the soft gleam of his gold-rimmed glasses and looked directly at him. "Overstepped?" he repeated, voice cool and razor-sharp. "Mister Clarke, let me remind you, we are nothing more than strangers now. Whatever illusion of parental authority you believe still exists... it doesn’t."

Jonathan faltered, blinking once. The slip was brief, but Elias caught it.

And for once, he wanted to use it. To lean into the shadow at his side.

Clarke’s jaw twitched. "You wouldn’t have this platform if it weren’t for my..."

"My what?" Elias cut in. "Your intervention? Your warnings? The subtle sabotage?"

Clarke froze.

Because now Elias had said it. Out loud.

Victor set his cup down gently on its saucer.

The sound was quiet.

But the air didn’t stay that way.

"Intervention?" Victor asked, voice lower than it had been all morning, smooth and slow like oil on fire.

Crimson ether flickered across his hands like a pulse, crawling along his fingers and up the fine weave of his shirt sleeves. It shimmered like liquid glass where the sunlight touched it, but beneath that glow was something hungrier. Older.

"Yes," Elias said, unbothered now, sipping his coffee like they weren’t sitting in the eye of a brewing storm. "He told me not to trust you. To stay away."

Victor hummed.

It was not a pleasant sound.

It was not a sound built for mortals.

The chandelier above them gave a slow groan as its frame trembled slightly, its crystals swaying as if disturbed by an invisible wind. The greenhouse glass, thick and reinforced, didn’t rattle but wanted to.

Jonathan stepped back.

Only once.

But that was all Victor needed; his smile remained, but his eyes, his damn crimson eyes, looked like the pits of hell.

"I see," Victor said, rising to his feet with his usual grace.

Every movement was too smooth, too balanced, and too inhuman for someone who was supposed to have spent years in a wheelchair. The ether on his skin danced freely now, not raging, but ready. Waiting for its master to speak.

Victor came around the table with unhurried steps, the floor beneath him whispering a beat behind his heels.

He stopped just in front of Jonathan, not close enough to touch, but close enough to warn or destroy.

"You served under my name once," Victor said quietly, eyes glowing like the last thing a dying god might see. "Did you ever wonder if the stories were true?"

Jonathan didn’t speak.

Couldn’t.

Victor leaned in slightly, just enough to let his breath ghost against the shell of the man’s ear.

"They were. I did come back and, unfortunately for you, Elias is my mate."

Jonathan held his ground with the pride of a man who’d built his life on calculated risk and reputational armor, even as the air bent with power that didn’t belong to mortals.

"I always wondered," Jonathan said finally, voice thin but steady, "why you stopped answering. Why you disappeared."

Victor tilted his head, strands of dark hair catching the late morning sunlight.

"I gave you everything," Jonathan continued, a sharp edge of accusation threading his tone now, as if he had been the one abandoned. "Devotion. Sacrifice. I raised my children in your name. And when we asked for guidance, when we begged for direction, you went silent."

Victor said nothing.

The room said everything for him.

But Jonathan pressed on, his voice gaining strength in that way cowards often do when cornered. "You left us with nothing but faded commandments and relics we couldn’t use. What was I supposed to do? Keep believing in a god who wouldn’t even look at us?"

Elias blinked, astounded by the sheer audacity of this man. ’Was his always like this?’

Something inside him flinched with a strange recognition. That voice, that tone, that fury at being denied the obedience of others, it wasn’t new. It was just louder now. Closer to desperation.

"You mean," Victor said softly, "you needed proof."

Crimson ether flared across his shoulders, casting rippling shadows across the floor, his presence stretching wider, denser, thicker, until the light behind him warped like heat haze.

"And now that you have it, now that you see me with your own eyes, you think your lack of faith was my fault?"