Chapter 191: Changed Roles
Lorraine stopped, steady and cold, watching the woman who should have been hollowed with grief after her husband and daughter’s disappearance. Instead, Illyria gleamed as though preparing for a morning call, hair meticulously arranged, gown flawless, jewels flashing with each step.
Yet one thing was missing: the key she always wore on her waist, dangling from its ostentatious chain that was a declaration to the household that she alone commanded the family’s coffers.
Lorraine’s gaze shifted. On Lysander’s wife’s neck glinted that very key, threaded into a chain like an unspoken coronation. A laugh threatened to spill from her lips. Her father was gone for just a couple of days, and yet her brother had grown bold indeed if his young bride dared pry the key from Illyria’s grip.
Good. The household was learning who it should obey.
But her musing was cut short. Illyria, in her arrogance, decided to raise her hand to strike Lorraine.
"Don’t you dare touch my sister!" Lysander’s voice rang out as he burst from the study. His shout carried more than anger; it carried years of silence finally broken. He had been too young to stop the cruelty his sister endured in this house once. But no longer.
Lorraine’s lips curved faintly. To hear such words, to hear someone claim her aloud, felt like balm she had not known she craved. For so long, there had only been silence around her suffering. Now there were voices: her brother’s, her husband’s... that refused to let her stand alone. Also, they were not the ones by her side. She had countless others.
But she had no intention of letting Lysander intervene. Before Illyria’s hand could land, Lorraine stepped forward. She caught the woman’s wrist midair, her grip sharp enough to stagger her. And before Illyria could even draw breath, Lorraine’s palm cracked across her face.
A slap harder than any she had ever given her husband in jest or anger, landed on Illyria’s soft cheek.
The sound echoed down the corridor.
Illyria’s head snapped to the side, eyes rolling back as her knees buckled beneath her. She crumpled gracelessly, gasping, taking several long moments to gather her bearings before she could even lift her head.
Lysander stood in stunned silence. For a moment, he almost could not believe the woman before him was his sister. She wore no silk, no ornaments, nothing to mark her as anything more than a commoner, her face half-veiled in shadow. Yet the power of that slap still echoed in the room, cutting deeper than any crown or title could.
For years, he had watched her from afar, always with a sinking heaviness in his heart. Lorraine had seemed so isolated, standing at the edge of gatherings, half-hidden in shadows, as though she carried solitude like a cloak. He had mistaken that silence for fragility, that stillness for defeat. But as he looked at her now, he wondered...
Had she ever been weak? Or had she only been a predator, silent and patient, waiting for the right moment to strike?
The sight of her stirred something raw within him. The same yearning, the same guilt, the same ache that had always haunted him when he thought of her, but it was now mingled with something else. Pride. Relief. Joy, even.
His sister. His son’s aunt. His blood. His family.
When Lorraine turned and met his eyes, Lysander felt his breath falter. Power and grace lived in her gaze, steady as firelight. She did not need to speak; her eyes told him everything he needed to know.
Without hesitation, he lifted his hand and pointed to where Elyse’s sons were in the mansion. Then, without another word, he turned and walked to his wife, drew her close, and led her forward.
He would listen to his sister. It appeared that she knew what she was doing.
Lorraine turned her attention to Illyria once her brother’s family was settled. She had never felt much anger toward this woman. Irritation, yes. Those barbed remarks, flung whenever they crossed paths, had cut deep enough. But true anger? No. Illyria had always seemed too removed, too inconsequential.
And perhaps that was the problem. Lorraine had not thought about it until now.
She herself ran a household. She did not dangle the key to the coffers like a trophy, as Illyria did, but she knew everything that happened under her roof. Every servant’s whisper, every child’s step, every silence that lasted a moment too long—nothing escaped her notice. Power was not in coins or contracts, but in vigilance.
So what excuse did Illyria have? In this vast, sprawling house, how could she not know? How could she fail to see her own daughter lying to her husband, or the little mute girl whipped raw by her father’s belt? No woman who managed a house so large could be blind. If she had stayed silent, it was not ignorance. It was choice.
She had chosen to turn her eyes away. She had chosen to welcome it.
A bitter smile slipped from Lorraine’s lips.
Without hesitation, she seized the older woman by the hair. Illyria cried out, stumbling, but Lorraine did not stop. She dragged her forward, each step pulling her toward the place where Elyse’s sons were hidden. Illyria’s scream rang through the hall, shrill and useless. When clutched by her hair, she was nothing more than a doll jerked on strings.
A few servants peeked from the corners, but none dared intervene. Lorraine’s gaze swept over them, cold as a blade, and they scattered back into the shadows. They had always been trained to look away, to pretend they saw nothing when lords and ladies bled their cruelties into these walls. It was the same silence they had offered when she was the one beaten and broken in this very house.
Now the roles had shifted. The abused had become the abuser, and the household responded the only way it knew how. By averting its eyes, by holding its tongue. By pretending, once again, that nothing was happening at all.
Lorraine went to the children’s study library. She had always known this place, not from within, but from absence, because she had never been allowed inside. As a girl, she had slipped instead into the lesser library, the one stripped of anything worth reading, while this one remained forbidden, locked behind her father’s rules.
Even now, its size startled her. Tall shelves, rows of polished wood, and the stained-glass windows casting fractured light across the floor, but denied to her.
The governess looked up from her desk at the sound of Illyria’s scream. Lorraine met her eyes and gave a sharp jerk of her head. That was enough. The woman bolted, skirts hissing against the floorboards, without a word of protest.
It seemed her father had never earned true loyalty.
Lorraine dragged Illyria across the threshold and hurled her forward. The grand duchess crumpled to the floor, gasping. Lorraine shut the door and latched it with a decisive click.
The silence that followed was thick, heavy, and colored by the shifting jewel-tones of the windows. Lorraine’s lips curved.
Now, all she had to do was wait.