☀️ Chapter Expansion: An Invitation
The darkness of the present—the rage, the despair, the cold, still body on the bed—is only possible because of the light that came before. It's a cruel irony I've come to understand too late: shadows do not exist on their own. They are born from light. And mine… mine was born the moment she stepped into my life.
The gallery had been suffocating that evening.
Warm golden light spilled from chandeliers shaped like unfurled blossoms, illuminating polished marble floors and walls lined with canvases worth more than what most people earned in a lifetime. High‑society elites drifted in clusters, pearls glittering, champagne flutes tilting in slim fingers, their murmurs blending into a syrupy hum that coated the air.
I felt out of place. I always did in my father's world.
Standing at his side, spine rigid, hands locked behind my back, I was painfully aware of the weight of his expectations on my shoulders. I was nineteen—too young to understand power but old enough to know I was expected to wield it flawlessly. Every crease of my suit, every angle of my posture, every polite half-smile had been rehearsed.
My father laughed, deep and booming, with the owner of the gallery. It wasn't the laugh he used in private—this one was polished, calculated, designed to charm. I watched him, wondering when I would learn to wear masks that comfortably.
And then the owner said, with the pride of a man presenting a masterpiece:
"Let me introduce you to my daughter. Dia."
She stepped into the space between us as though she were entering a beam of morning light.
Her hair was a soft shade of brown, shimmering more gold than chestnut under the gallery lamps. A delicate silver pin held one side back, revealing the curve of her cheek. Her eyes—large, bright, impossibly gentle—met mine with a sincerity that felt out of place in a room built on pretense.
"This is Mr. Grayan, who made a significant investment in the gallery's expansion," her father announced.
Dia dipped gracefully into a curtsy, her dress flowing like quiet water around her legs. "Hello. I am Dia de Laurent."
Her voice was soft. Not timid—soft, like she wasn't speaking to a room, but to a person. To me.
For the first time that evening, something shifted. The air felt different—lighter, but also somehow heavier.
She lifted her hand, palm up, offering a greeting smile that wasn't forced or rehearsed. "Hello. It's nice to meet you."
I should have responded.
A normal boy—a normal person—would have taken her hand, introduced himself, maybe even smiled. But I wasn't normal. I was a son forged in the cold shadow of a man who valued strength over warmth, dominance over kindness.
So I froze.
My hands stayed locked behind my back, fingers digging into my palm out of habit, holding in every instinct to flee the spotlight suddenly trained on me.
Awkward.
Embarrassing.
Worse—genuine.
My father's irritation sliced through the air with surgical precision.
"Victor, why are you just standing there? It's rude not to return her greeting."
His tone wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The quiet reprimand hit harder than a shout ever could.
The gallery owner simply chuckled, oblivious to the tension stiffening my shoulders. "Since you two are the same age, you'll see each other often once you start at Dalincour. You should be good friends."
Friends.
I didn't know what that meant. Not really.
But she… she didn't lower her hand.
She didn't look offended.
She didn't force the smile, didn't falter, didn't pull back.
Instead, her expression softened, something understanding flickering in her eyes—as though she could see the panic I tried so hard to hide. As though she wasn't judging me.
That small shift, that quiet empathy… it pierced through me like a foreign warmth I had no defenses against.
A warmth that exposed every insecurity I had buried beneath ambition and obedience.
A warmth I didn't ask for.
A warmth I wasn't prepared for.
A warmth that would one day set fire to everything I knew.
This was the beginning.
This was the moment the light first shone upon the darkness I was destined to become.
This was the moment I should have run.
---
"…and that debt, like the one she owed me now, would be repaid in full."
Her voice still echoes in my memory—bright, warm, filled with an admiration I neither deserved nor knew how to handle. It was a tone that should have soothed me, yet it scraped against the raw edges of everything I tried to bury.
"It's fascinating to me, the ability to hear with your eyes. What's more, you can write scores in your head! That's amazing!"
She said it like it was something wondrous. Like it made me special. But to me, it was the heaviest chain I bore—the chain of my mother's legacy, the one Father despised more than anything. Music wasn't a gift in his eyes. It was a defect. A dangerous softness that had cost her everything.
Dia never understood that praise was a burden I couldn't afford.
"Hey, Victor…" she continued, her smile as light as a summer breeze. "Once you're a student at Dalincour, do you want to go see the opera together? An orchestral performance! How about it?"
Her invitation felt like a world away—a world of velvet curtains and golden balconies, a world where I could be the person she saw in me instead of the weapon Father forged. A world that was dangerously tempting, because it whispered a truth I wasn't allowed to acknowledge: I wanted it. I wanted that life. I wanted her light.
But I couldn't take a single step toward it.
Not while Eiser—a boy younger, prettier, more obedient—was quickly becoming everything Father admired. Not while each passing month I spent studying, practicing, breathing like a normal teenager, was another month in which my position slipped further and further from reach.
My thoughts at the time were frantic, suffocating, looping in circles like a noose tightening around my neck:
I must become the successor to the House of Grayan.
I can't fall behind any longer.
If I stay away too long, Eiser will take everything.
I won't lose. I can't lose.
My musical talent… it had been my mother's gift. Her curse. The very thing Father said made her unfit for the Grayan name. In his eyes, it was a flaw he had tolerated once—and would never tolerate again.
I should've mirrored him. I should've been sharp where she was soft, unyielding where she was gentle. Instead, I inherited her talent, her passion, her weakness.
I hated myself for it.
And I hated Dia for loving that part of me.
That evening, twilight settled over the campus like a heavy blue curtain. The lamps lining the path hadn't yet turned on, leaving the marble staircase in a dull haze where shadows clung tightly to the cracks between the steps. I sat there, slumped, breathing hard from the fight I had initiated—no, engineered. Blood trickled from my lip, staining the white collar of my shirt a deep crimson. Proof of my recklessness. Proof of my desperation.
I needed Father to pull me out of school. I needed him to see the mess I'd made so he could discipline me, mold me, drag me back into his orbit where I belonged—where I could edge Eiser out again.
Heavy footsteps approached.
STEP.
I didn't bother looking up—not until her shadow stretched across my lap, sharp against the stone.
Dia.
But the girl standing above me wasn't the gentle, glowing creature from my earlier memories. Her eyes were hard, her jaw set, her presence cold. I had expected anger—maybe even fear—but not this controlled, resigned disappointment.
She didn't waste time with greetings or concern.
"I did as you asked," she said, voice flat as a blade gliding along whetstone.
I forced myself to look up. The chill in her gaze was unfamiliar, unsettling.
"I told the teachers you beat up Kane. They'll report this to the principal, and you'll soon be expelled. Satisfied now?"
Her tone was surgical. Professional. Like she was reading a verdict aloud. She wasn't angry at the accusation she'd delivered; she was angry because she understood exactly why I'd maneuvered events this way.
And that was the worst part: she truly understood me.
I lifted my chin slightly, absorbing her judgment without flinching. This was exactly what I'd wanted. Expulsion meant being dragged home into Father's direct attention. It meant reclaiming my position before Eiser could sink his claws deeper.
But the victory was hollow under her stare.
She stepped closer, fury crackling beneath her calm voice.
"I understand how you feel…" she admitted quietly, her words trembling around the edges. "But I don't know why you always have to go about it in the worst way possible."
Her hands, those small, gentle hands that once held daisies and sheet music, clenched tightly at her sides.
"It angers me and makes me sick whenever you do something like this."
There it was—the line she drew between us. The line that separated her world from mine. The line her purity could not cross.
She wasn't judging the strategy.
She was judging the person.
She looked down at me—bloodied, desperate, hollowed out.
"You seem like a broken person."
Broken.
A word that struck deeper than any punch I'd thrown earlier that day. A word spoken not in cruelty, but in sorrow—and that somehow made it worse. Dia wasn't calling me a monster. She wasn't calling me heartless or cruel.
She was calling me damaged.
And in a world where damage meant weakness, where weakness meant death, I couldn't allow myself to be seen that way. Especially not by her, the only person who had ever seen the softer parts of me.
I didn't argue.
I didn't deny it.
I let her words settle into my bones like ice, numbing something vital.
That was the moment something fundamental snapped.
Her compassion, once a beacon, now felt like a spotlight revealing every flaw I had tried to hide. Her righteousness, once admirable, became a judgment I couldn't endure. Her purity, once comforting, now stood in direct opposition to everything I needed to become.
To survive in the Grayan world, I had to be hard.
Cold.
Terrifying.
Untouchable.
And if Dia had to hate that version of me to preserve the innocence she clung to… then so be it.
I had chosen my path.
And she had chosen hers.
But I never forgot the price of her moral purity—it was bought with my destruction.
And that debt, like the one she owed me now, would be repaid in full.
The blue‑washed memory clung to me like frostbite—cold, lingering, impossible to shake even as the gilded warmth of the present room pressed against my skin. It was the final time she had spoken to me with honesty sharp enough to wound, the last moment where her words still reached for something human in me before they turned to fear.
We had stood beneath the shadow of the stone statue—tall, elegant, carved into a permanent expression of serenity I could never replicate. Its unchanging grace mocked us both, a frozen reminder of what neither of us could become.
Dia's voice trembled—not with fear at first, but with exhaustion.
"Not only are you not getting any better... you're slipping further out of control. At this rate, I'm afraid that by the time you're an adult, you'll be an even more terrifying person than you are now."
The words settled like dust on my shoulders, fine and suffocating. I kept my gaze fixed on the ground, letting each sentence settle into the cracks in my bones. Every reckless fight, every calculated cruelty, every cold decision—I had driven her to this breaking point with the force of my own ambition.
"You always have someone who's sick, shattered, broken beyond repair," she murmured. "I didn't mind it so much when we were young... because I believed you were just a little different from the other kids, and that if I tried my best, you'd change."
Her voice had once been a constant melody in my life—soft, hopeful, naïve enough to believe warmth could thaw a boy raised in the shadow of Grayan. Now that melody was thinning, fading, each note fraying into despair.
"Which is why I think every day about how nice it would've been if you were a little more like other boys. If you were a little more human, a little more considerate..."
The ache in my chest then was something I didn't know how to name—shame, fury, longing, resentment. I only knew that it hurt.
"But I'm tired now, and don't know if I can keep going. No matter how hard I try, you're still the same."
Her eyes lifted to me then, and for the first time, I recognized it fully—fear. Not the startled, fleeting fear of a child. But the deep, gut‑level terror of someone standing too close to a monster who hadn't yet noticed what he'd become.
"And... you and I are supposed to marry? The thought terrifies me so much, I'd rather run away."
Even now, the memory struck like a blow. She had already begun to free herself in her mind. Already preparing to flee from the darkness that had grown inside me.
"My life is tied to yours... and I'm scared I'll become broken, just like you. I find you increasingly wearying and frightening, Victor. I don't know what to do anymore."
The air around us had turned sharp, like winter settling abruptly into spring. I didn't respond. I didn't move. I simply listened as she dismantled the last illusion we shared.
"And I'm also afraid of how much I might change if I'm by your side," she confessed, voice cracking. "Or perhaps if you aren't named the successor... if you could live the life you want, you'll stop before you turn into a complete—"
She never finished the sentence.
But she didn't have to.
Her expression—stricken, resigned, terrified—completed the verdict silently.
Monster.
A title I had earned.
A title she had given up trying to fight.
And when that memory shattered, dissolving back into the present—
—her echoing terror died in the hushed opulence of the bedroom.
The velvet curtains, the scent of medicinal alcohol, the quiet tick of the antique clock—all of it pressed into my awareness as I stood over her unconscious form. My hands gripped the carved bedrail, knuckles whitening with the force of restraint I no longer felt obligated to use.
The jars of pills the physicians spoke of sat in a careless cluster, incriminating and pathetic. Tools of escape. Tools she had used to choose oblivion instead of facing the man standing above her now.
"Did you really think I'll let you leave me like this?" I whispered, my voice roughened by something dangerously close to grief.
You wanted silence.
You wanted freedom.
You wanted a world without me.
But your debts aren't settled, Dia.
Not even close.
Her chest rose in a slow, artificial rhythm—the only sign that she had been denied the escape she chose. My eyes caught the sheen of the chandelier's light in their reflection, twisting the room into a warped mirror of the past.
I leaned in. My voice was a vow carved from the remnants of the boy she once tried to save.
"You can't."
A pause. A breath.
A smile—cold, triumphant, warped into something only a villain could wear.
"You won't die this way."
The rage in me cooled, solidifying into a weaponized calm. She had tried to run. She had chosen death over bearing the weight of my shadow any longer.
But she would wake.
She would face me.
She would see what her fear had shaped.
I straightened slowly, every line of my posture sharpening into resolve. Into ownership. Into vengeance dressed as devotion.
She wanted to escape?
Then I would ensure escape became impossible.
"I won't let you," I murmured to the air, to her, to the ghost of everything we once were.
The battle wasn't over.
It had just begun.
The air in the luxurious bedroom hung thick and stagnant, like a punishment. Not even the fant floral scent from the expensive diffuser could mask the bitterness of the moment. I stood over her motionless form, my shadow stretching across her pale face like a bruise that refused to heal.
"Why are you acting like you're the only victim here?" I whispered, though my voice scraped like stone against stone. "You were just as cold and cruel to me."
She didn't move. Not a twitch. Not a flicker. Her blonde hair, radiant even in the half‑light, spilled across the pillow like scattered gold—mockingly alive compared to the stillness of her body.
"You've been tormenting me all this time too…" My fingers trembled, betraying the frustration churning inside me. "So stop it and wake up."
The silence felt deliberate, as if she were punishing me by refusing even the smallest acknowledgement.
I dragged a hand through my disheveled dark hair, trying—failing—to steady the storm inside my chest. My gaze dropped to her serene, infuriatingly peaceful features. She always did look like this when she slept, untouched, unreachable, untouchable.
"Had I not forced you to stay," I muttered, each word heavy with a truth I despised, "whether with debt or by physical means… you would've run from me."
Saying it aloud nauseated me. The admission tasted like iron on my tongue.
"What more am I supposed to do, damn it?!"
My hand hovered near her shoulder, trembling slightly. Memories I never wanted to face flickered through my mind—her refusing my compromises, my confessions, the twisted bargains I offered in desperation.
"And even when I offered to play the villain and give you everything you wanted," I said, my voice cracking despite my effort to hold steady, "you still said no."
The ache that followed was deep, raw, unguarded—an old wound carved open again.
I reached out, barely letting my fingers graze her cheek before snatching my hand back, curling it into a tight, shaking fist.
CLENCH.
"Wake up," I whispered, leaning close enough for my breath to brush her skin. "Wake up and glare at me with disdain… insult me, as you always do."
That cruel familiarity—those sharp, cutting words of hers—were the only things that had ever anchored me.
"After that," I murmured, "having seen each other at our lowest… it's only fair we witness our fall to rock bottom together."
I straightened, swallowing the painful tightness in my throat. My chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. Her stillness made the room feel colder.
"If this is really what you want…"
I took one slow, deliberate step back from the bed, my movements controlled, even as everything inside me raged.
"…You can wait until after seeing how it all ends."
The dimness of the room made my reflection in the window look like a stranger—harsher, more jagged, a man carved out of desperation and fury.
My hand rose, almost unconsciously, fingers slipping into her soft strands of golden hair. I curled my fist around them, holding on as if gripping the very last tether that tied her to me.
SO UNTIL THEN…
CLENCH.
The strands tightened between my knuckles, the gesture both possessive and pleading.
"…DON'T YOU DARE EVEN DREAM OF DYING, DIAH."
The words came out as a low snarl, meant not just for her but for fate itself. I would not permit it. Not now. Not yet. Not like this.
I pulled my hand away abruptly, turning toward the door.
My men straightened the moment I emerged into the hallway. Their expressions tightened at the tension thickening the air around me.
"Find a new physician to monitor Diah's condition," I ordered, my voice reverting to its cold, commanding sharpness. "And search her car, room, closet, undergarments—anything that belongs to her. Get rid of all the drugs she's hiding."
"Yes, Sir Victor."
I continued walking without slowing, my polished shoes slicing through the silence like blades.
"Her secretaries must be delivering them to her. Start with them."
Another crisp nod. The orders were already in motion.
The cool night wind hit me as I stepped outside, the sharp scent of rain lingering on the stone path. My vintage car waited at the foot of the steps, gleaming in muted moonlight.
Just as the door was opened for me, I added quietly:
"And one more thing… get me Petletta."
The man closest to me stiffened—surprise flickering across his face before he masked it again.
"Yes, sir. How many do you need?"
I lowered myself into the leather seat, its familiar embrace doing nothing to soothe the tension wrapped around my bones.
"As much as possible," I replied. "Scour the kingdom and bring me every single one you can find."
The driver closed the door.
CLACK.
The interior dimmed, leaving only the faint glow of the dashboard illuminating my hardened profile. My eyes reflected something cold, something final.
"IT'S ABOUT TIME I PUT AN END…"
My voice dropped to a chilling whisper.
"…TO THIS BITTER FEUD BETWEEN US."