An Extremely Overpowered God Of War

Chapter 5

“What the hell is going on here.” Raymond's voice came out harder this time, louder, the kind of loud that cut straight through the music and the murmuring and every other sound in that hall and silenced all of it at once. His eyes moved from the room to his wife, and the look on his face was something that hadn't been there when he walked through that door something raw and burning underneath the surface of it. 

“Victoria, what the hell is this nonsense?”

His gaze snapped to the man standing beside her.

“And you.” The words dropped out of him like something cold and heavy. 

“You good-for-nothing bastard. Marcus.” He said the name like it tasted wrong in his mouth. “What the hell is happening here? Can someone anyone explain to me what this madness is?”

The hall had gone completely quiet.

Victoria didn't say anything. She stood where she was in that white gown, her eyes on Raymond, her face unreadable in a way that somehow made everything worse. Marcus didn't speak either. 

He just stood there, straight-shouldered in his military wedding uniform, and said nothing.

It was Victoria's mother who moved first.

She stepped forward, and the look on her face wasn't shock or embarrassment or even guilt it was something closer to contempt, sharp and immediate, like she had been waiting for exactly this moment and had already decided how she felt about it.

“Oh.” The word came out slow and deliberate. 

“So this fool is actually still alive.” She looked Raymond up and down once, the way a person looks at something they have already decided has no value, and then let out a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. 

“Just imagine. Still alive, and you actually think it makes sense to show your stinking, good-for-nothing face here.”

Victoria's father stepped forward beside her. Her sister and younger brother moved with them, forming a line that felt less like a family and more like a wall.

Raymond stood very still for a moment after that. The anger was still there it hadn't gone anywhere but something else had moved into the space beside it. Something that felt like the ground shifting underneath a person's feet when they weren't expecting it to move.

He looked at Victoria's mother, then at her father, and when he spoke again, some of the heat had dropped out of his voice not because it had cooled, but because what he was feeling had gotten too big and too tangled for straight anger to carry all of it on its own.

“Mother.” The word came out careful and tight. “What....what the hell is going on here? Why is my wife —” He stopped. Then started again. “Why is she getting married?”

Victoria's father looked at him the way a man looks at someone who has just asked a question so obvious it borders on insulting.

“So you're blind now as well?” His voice was flat and unbothered. “Can't you see what's right in front of you? Yes. She is getting married.” He tilted his head slightly, something dismissive sitting in the gesture. 

“Isn't it obvious enough for you?”

Victoria's mother wasn't done.

“So you are still alive,” she said, and the way she said it made it sound less like relief and more like an inconvenience. 

“And the first thing you think to do the very first thing is show your stinking face here thinking Victoria was just going to be sitting around waiting for you?” She let out a sharp breath and shook her head like the thought itself offended her. “How dare you even think something like that. What is wrong with people nowadays?”

She looked him over from head to toe, slowly, the way a person inspects something they have already decided to throw away.

“You are still alive and you can't even look after yourself properly. Just look at you.” Her voice climbed higher with each word. 

“You look far worse than you did before you even joined the military five years ago far worse. And you walked in here with what, one bag? One cheap, empty-looking bag on your shoulder and you thought what, exactly? That we were going to throw a party for you?“ A short, humorless laugh escaped her. 

“Oh, you thought this was your celebration, didn't you? Just imagine.”

Before the last word had fully left her mouth, Victoria's younger sister and brother burst out laughing the loud, performative kind that wanted to be heard. The sister dramatically covered her nose with the back of her hand, and her brother did the same, both of them fanning the air around them like something unbearable had entered the room with Raymond.

“What is that smell?” the sister said loudly, turning her face away with exaggerated disgust.

“This place stinks,” the brother added, still laughing. 

“It stinks so badly.”

Victoria's eyes moved to Raymond then, and her expression carried something that was almost boredom like this was all mildly tiresome rather than anything that required genuine feeling from her.

“Who else could it be,” she said, her voice light and unbothered in a way that was somehow the sharpest thing in the room, “if not this good-for-nothing Raymond.” She glanced around at the guests nearby with a small, practiced smile. 

“He's literally polluted the entire air just by walking in.”

A ripple of uncomfortable laughter moved through the guests standing closest to them.

Raymond heard all of it, every single word.

He stood there and he heard it the laughing, the covering of noses, the words that had been designed to reduce him to something small and embarrassing in a room full of people and he didn't react to any of it.

 Not because it didn't land. But because somewhere underneath everything he was feeling right now, none of it surprised him the way it should have. 

He had always known, in the quiet part of himself that didn't lie, that if anyone in this world was going to drive a knife into his back without losing a night of sleep over it, it was going to be these people. 

Their love for money and status had never been something they tried to hide not really. He had just chosen not to look at it directly.

But Victoria.

His eyes moved to her and stayed there, cutting through everything else in the room the noise, the guests, the flowers, the man standing beside her in that uniform until it was just her face and his.

When he spoke, his voice had dropped to something low and stripped of everything except what it needed to say.

“Victoria.” He took one step forward. 

“How could you do this?”