CHAPTER 62: SURVIVE

There wasn’t the slightest tremor on Willabelle’s face. While storms raged within me, she stood before me in the middle of the night, as cold as a black monolith.

"I had to do it," she said. Had to... For what? For whom?

My blood boiled, my mind clouded with rage. Yet my body remained heavy as stone, my arms and legs bound as if in chains.

"Whose will be you carrying out, Willabelle? Ronald’s? Or your own?"

Her eyes glimmered. Her voice, just above a whisper, mingled with the wind sighing through the forest: "My only interest is your survival."

Her words lodged in my throat. Alongside my anger, an empty void opened in my mind. My survival? Yet it was she who had struck me down, left me paralyzed on the ground.

I tried to frown, but even the muscles in my face refused to obey. A broken syllable slipped from my lips: "Nonsense..."

Willabelle leaned closer. Her fingertips did not touch me, but she was so near I could feel her breath. "Listen, Leonardo. Ronald is preparing to lure you into a trap. His spies leaked information deliberately so that it would reach your ears. If I hadn’t carved out a path for you myself... you would already be dead in that forest."

Her words cut into my mind like knives. My spymaster’s warning, the suspicious urgency in Ronald’s behavior; all of it fell into place at once.

And yet I could not trust her.

"And you..." my voice rasped, "you thought stabbing me... was the way to save my life?"

"If you were standing before me now with all your strength," she asked, "what would you do to me?"

Her question pierced my soul like an arrow from the dark. My eyes widened. My lips twisted into a cracked smile.

"You ask what I’d do?" My voice had sunk to almost a whisper. "I would show you... how swift death can be."

The words burned my throat like venom. Each syllable etched itself onto my will, despite the heavy paralysis of my body.

But Willabelle... did not move. She did not flinch, nor recoil. Her face remained carved from ice, her eyes lit by some strange gleam.

"That is precisely why..." she murmured, "I had to bring you to your knees."

For a moment, my heart seemed to tear through my chest. She had spoken not out of hatred, but as if out of fear—fear of my strength.

"Then what do you want from me?"

My voice rolled from my throat like a stone, carrying both anger and hurt. Willabelle lowered her head, her gaze trailing from my face to my chest, then down to my hands. As though she were staring at a beast in chains.

"Don’t ask what I want," she said, her tone cold as frost. "Ask what you need."

I struggled to frown, my lips moving in a trembling growl: "What I need... is not betrayal."

For the first time, I saw a faint, fleeting stir on her face. It was neither anger nor a smile. More like the narrow line between pain and acceptance.

"I will help you win this war. I will feed you as much information as I can. If after that you still call me a traitor... so be it."

Her words hung in the air like an oath carved into the night. The fury in my heart clashed with the doubt seeping into my mind, waging a loud war within my chest. Yes, she had betrayed me. But that light in her eyes... That was not the lie of a cold-blooded spy. It was something else entirely.

"You’ll help me, will you?" I hissed between clenched teeth. My voice was low, almost a snarl. "Why should I trust you?"

Willabelle’s eyes didn’t flicker. They were steady and deep, like a frozen lake in the dark.

"You don’t have to trust me," she said. Her voice was calm, though a faint tremor hid beneath it. "My words are one thing... your choices another."

She paused, tilting her gaze upward. Starless darkness stretched above us. "I understand if you hate me. I’m not doing this to win your love. I do it because I owe you. But if you want a guarantee..."

Suddenly, she drew a piece of paper and a quill from her coat. Her hand moved swiftly, and then she pressed the paper against my chest. In the dim light of the moon, I saw an address scrawled upon it.

"This is where I hid my son. I kept him hidden so that bastard Ronald wouldn’t find him. I’d heard the rumors about him, but to see with my own eyes what he does to innocent children... it sickened me."

Her words struck me like a second blade.

Magnus... Behind Willabelle’s mask of ice, there was a mother’s heart. Unexpected as betrayal, searing as war.

I stared at the paper. A few simple marks, winding paths, a small sign near a lake. And yet that sign was the place where she had buried her entire heart.

"Why..." My voice was hoarse. "Why show me this? Aren’t you afraid I might harm him?"

For the first time, her gaze wavered. In her eyes, a spark of fire fought to break free of its frozen shell.

"No, you’re not that kind of man. I gave you this address without hesitation. Ronald doesn’t even know I have a son. Do you see now? I am not your enemy."

Her words echoed in my ears, not fanning my anger but cloaking it in a heavy fog. I saw the tremor in her eyes, not the look of a cold spy, but of a mother forced into silence.

And yet trust... trust remained a summit too distant to reach.

"Then why not tell me your plan?" I growled. "Wouldn’t it have been better if I’d known from the start?"

Willabelle fell silent. For a moment, she closed her eyes, then looked at me again.

"Lord Leonardo... I’m sorry, but I never had any such plan at the start . My only priority has always been Magnus’s safety. I understand what you mean, and I wish I’d been clever enough to weave such a plan from the start. But life doesn’t give us everything we want."

Her words landed inside me like a stone. She had no plan, only the will to survive, the desperate courage of a woman who would risk everything for her son. And yet, the explanation didn’t satisfy me.

The ache in my chained muscles roared in my head, but her voice still cut through the night’s chill. I studied her; her face was as expressionless as a statue in the moonlight, yet in her eyes, those cracks could not be hidden.

"So what happens now?"

My words rasped like a dry whisper. At that moment, chains imprisoned me less than my own mind.

Willabelle looked at me. Her silence pierced the night like a blade. Finally, her lips moved, barely perceptible.

"Now... we survive."

The answer was so stark, so bare, it spread a sheet of ice over my anger. Yet bare did not mean simple. It carried weight, hidden layers. Survive... for whom? At whose expense?

I tried to narrow my eyes but failed. "Survive... but by whose side?"

For the first time, her gaze flickered with hesitation. That was enough. Her vaunted composure stood on the thinnest of cracks.

"By your side," she said at last. Her voice carried resolve, but also the weight of confession.

The fog within me shifted. Those words could have meant a thousand different things: to mask betrayal, to manipulate me, or perhaps... because she truly believed them.

Perhaps Willabelle was still playing both sides. Any possibility could have been real.

Through my teeth, I whispered: "I understand... I want to believe you."

Of course, I wasn’t naïve enough to trust her blindly. But neither was I foolish enough to discard the knowledge she might bring me.