​"A price?" Talia echoed. The word hung in the air, followed by a laugh that didn’t sound human—it was a dry, rattling sound, She sank deeper into the silk pillows, her frail frame disappearing into the shadows, but her eyes remained fixed on him. They gleamed with a calculated, ancient malice that made the air in the room turn stagnant.

​"Telling you how to break it is a reward in itself, Mathias," she added, her voice dropping to a cold, razor-thin whisper. "Don’t waste your breath worrying about the cost just yet. You might find the truth far more expensive than any gold I could ask for."

​Mathias felt his jaw tighten until it ached. He was done with her riddles, done with the way she toyed with his sanity like a cat with a dying bird. He took a step forward, his shadow looming over her bed, heavy and suffocating.

​"Speak plainly, My Lady," he said, his voice dropping into a low, jagged threat that vibrated in the hollow of his chest. "I didn’t come here for a bedtime story."

​Talia laughed again—a hollow, mirthless noise that made the hair on his neck stand up. "Do you think these walls were built on love and charity?"

She leaned in, her pale face catching the flickering candlelight, making her look like a ghost. Her voice became a poisonous thread, weaving through his defenses.

"This is a curse, Mathias. A sickness that crawls through the blood of every first-born son in this house, feeding on their vitals before they even take their first breath. Did you truly believe my father simply... washed it away?"

​She paused, letting the silence stretch, heavy with the stench of medicinal herbs and old secrets.

​"Stop talking in circles," Mathias snapped, the last of his patience fraying like a worn rope. The darkness in his blood stirred, a low growl of frustration he could barely suppress. "I don’t give a damn about this family’s rot or the ghost stories of ancestors long dead. Tell me how to stop it, or get out of my way."

The laughter died instantly. A heavy, suffocating silence rushed in to fill the void. Talia’s gaze turned glacial, a look so detached it stripped Mathias of every ounce of filial standing, reducing him to nothing more than a stranger—or an intruder.

"The rot is your origin," she hissed. The sound was thin and sharp, like a serrated knife scraping against bone. "It is the marrow in your bones and the breath in your lungs. You can’t run from it, no matter how fast you ride or how deep you hide." She paused, her eyes narrowing into slits of pure venom. "And the worst part, Mathias? You’re my son. My blood. My failure."

Mathias didn’t flinch. Not a muscle in his face betrayed the sting of her words. Instead, he met her gaze with a coldness that made hers look like a flickering flame.

"Yes, yes. Save the hate speech for someone who actually gives a damn," he countered, his voice steady and dangerously quiet. "Do you truly think I wake up grateful for this lineage? Do you think I enjoy seeing your face ? The feeling is mutual, . Now, for hell’s sake, stop the theatrics and speak. What do I have to do to end this filth?"

He started to turn away, but a sudden, realization cut through his fury, locking his joints in place. He turned back slowly, his eyes wide with a new, horrifying curiosity.

"Wait," he whispered, the anger replaced by a cold dread. "You... you were the first-born. The only daughter. The curse should have claimed you. How did you get rid of it? How are you still here?"

Talia didn’t answer at first. She stared at him for what felt like an eternity, her face settling into a mask of grey stone. The light in her eyes went out entirely, leaving them void of anything remotely human. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat—a lifeless, mechanical sound.

"You have to kill the person you love most in this world," she said. No emotion. No hesitation. "Only then is the curse broken. Only then does the blood go quiet."

"What?"

The word was a choked gasp. Mathias took a stumbling step back, his boots dragging against the floor. For a second, he felt the entire room tilt, the stone beneath him shifting like water.

A slow, twisted smile spread across Talia’s lips—a grotesque expression that never reached the hollow darkness of her eyes. She watched his collapse with the hunger of a predator.

"I’m saying it’s simple, Mathias. I’m saying you have to kill that girl, Olivia, if you want to be free of your hell. Her life for your peace. A fair trade, don’t you think?"

Mathias swallowed hard, a sudden, violent chill rattling his bones. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

"Are you playing with me because you hate her?" he whispered, his voice finally breaking, trembling with a desperate need for her to lie. "Are you trying to turn my curse into a blade just to kill your enemy? Tell me this is one of your sick games!"

"No."

The answer was a single syllable, sharp as a razor and just as final. It cut through his hope, leaving nothing but the cold, hard truth bleeding in the air between them.

"If that were true..." Mathias began, his voice regaining its edge as he pulled himself from the brink of collapse. He straightened his back, pinning her with a gaze brimming with pure, unadulterated contempt. He didn’t just want to hurt her; he wanted to unmake her. "...then my father wouldn’t have survived a single day after marrying you."

The effect was instantaneous. The stone mask Talia had worn so carefully didn’t just crack—it shattered. She flinched as if he’d physically struck her, her breath hitching in a throat that had gone bone-dry. In the silence that followed, an invisible pain exploded in her chest, a rusty blade twisting into the deepest, most guarded corner of her soul. It shredded the last remnants of the pride she had used as armor for decades. It wasn’t just an insult. It was the raw, a truth she had tried to bury under a mountain of bitterness.

"You’re right about one thing," Talia finally managed, her head tilting with a chilling, sudden detachment. She looked at him, but her eyes were seeing someone else, someone long gone. "And you are dead wrong about the rest. Your father—the person I loved most in this wretched world—surviving my curse... it seems impossible, doesn’t it? A miracle of the heart?"

She let out a short, sharp exhale that might have been a laugh in another life.

A flicker of desperate hope sparked in Mathias’s eyes, bright and dangerous. He stepped closer, his voice ragged, stripped of its previous iron.

"Then there is a way? A real way to break it without... without her?"

"Of course there is," she whispered, the words smooth as silk.

"How?"

Talia sat up straight, her spine clicking with the effort. As she moved, the shadows in the room seemed to thicken around her, clinging to her like a shroud. The air grew heavy, tasting of ozone and iron.

"You have to feed it, Mathias," she said, her voice growing resonant, ancient. "You have to sink to the very bottom. You must strip away every shred of your humanity through slaughter. You kill until the curse is satiated. You drown the monster in so much blood that it finally chokes. That is how it breaks."

Mathias’s face went pale, his mind reeling as he tried to grasp the scale of the horror she was describing. He stammered, his hands beginning to shake. "I don’t understand... Who? Who am I supposed to kill if not her?"

"Everyone," she answered.

The word didn’t just fall; it froze the air between them, a cold so absolute it seemed to seep through his skin and settle in his marrow. For a fleeting second, the iron in her gaze flickered. Her eyes dipped, narrowing with a sudden, razor-sharp grief as she stared at her own palms—as if she could still see the stains. When she spoke again, her voice had sunk into a hollow, jagged regret.

"You kill anyone you see," she whispered. "Anyone who crosses your path. Just as I did for a man who didn’t deserve a single one of my tears. Maybe... maybe if you didn’t look so much like him, Mathias, I could have actually found it in me to love you."

Mathias’s brow furrowed, his mind reeling. The sheer scale of the atrocity she was suggesting felt like a fever dream, a sickening joke. He didn’t want to understand. He *refused* to.

"Kill?" he shouted, the word cracking in the silence. "Are you trying to play me? You know the curse craves blood, but murdering innocents won’t change what I am—it won’t break anything!"

"Of course it’s the answer!" she snapped, cutting him off with a ferocity that made him flinch. "Blood is the only key, the only currency this curse accepts!"

She fell silent then, the anger vanishing as quickly as it had come, replaced by a haunting, distant tone. She leaned back, her eyes locking onto his with a terrifying intensity. "Surely you’ve heard the stories, Mathias? The ones they whisper in the dark? About the night the bandits stormed the palace and slaughtered every living soul within these walls?"

Mathias nodded slowly. A dark reel of half-remembered ghost stories flickered behind his eyes—tales of a night where the hallways ran red and the screams could be heard for miles. "Yes," he said, his voice barely audible. "They say it was a massacre like no other. A tragedy that nearly ended our line."

Talia leaned forward, the candlelight casting long, distorted shadows across her face.

"Well," she whispered, her gaze pinning him to the spot, "those bandits... they never existed. They were me."

Mathias froze. A numbing, dead weight settled into his limbs, paralyzing him where he stood. The room plunged into a suffocating silence, broken only by the echo of a confession that seemed to rip the very air apart.

"To protect your father, I let the curse hollow me out that day," she began, her voice gaining a rhythmic, haunting cadence. "I fed it the blood of everyone I knew. I gave it everything."

She held up her hands, trembling not with weakness, but with the memory of the weight of a hilt.

"The servants who raised me, my nanny who sang me to sleep... even my own father didn’t escape my blade. My father—your grandfather—he didn’t fight back. He offered his life just to douse the fire screaming in my chest. He stood there and let me take him, a final payment for orphaning me and for the day he took my mother’s life to save his own."

Her eyes burned with a feverish light, the mask of the "Noble Lady" completely disintegrated.

"I slaughtered them all with these two hands! I piled the bodies high just so the curse would be too gorged to demand the one life I couldn’t give. All so I wouldn’t have to kill the man I thought was the love of my life.

" Her lip curled in a snarl of pure, unadulterated loathing as she spat the final words at him. "That bastard... that coward who looks exactly like you."

She slumped back, the outburst leaving her breathless, her gaze pinning him with a hatred that felt like a physical blow. Mathias couldn’t speak; he couldn’t even breathe.

He was drowning in it—the realization that his life, his breath, and his very existence weren’t a gift, but a monument built upon a mountain of innocent corpses. He wasn’t just a cursed man; he was the living evidence of a massacre.

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