Investing In My Lv.999 Devoted Wife Makes Me a Tyrant

2 | The Silent Bride

Allen didn't know how long he'd been sitting there. Minutes. Maybe an hour. The flame had melted a small crater into the wax, and the shadows on the walls had shifted with its slow death, but he hadn't moved. The chair creaked when he breathed. That was the only sound besides the wind outside.

He'd been watching her.

Seraphina Valemont lay on the bare bed frame, motionless as she'd been in the chapel. The white cotton dress pooled around her like foam on still water. Her arms rested at her sides, palms up, fingers slightly curled. Empty. Like her hands had forgotten how to hold things.

Her chest rose and fell. That was something. She was breathing. She was alive.

But her eyes were the same as before. Open. Violet. Ringed with silver. They reflected the candlelight, but her gaze was somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

Allen leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

"Can you hear me?"

Nothing. No blink. No twitch.

He hadn't expected one.

The slum outside had gone quiet. The drunk had stopped shouting. The fights had ended or moved elsewhere. All that remained was the wind pushing through cracks in the walls, and the candle, and her.

Allen stood. The chair scraped against the floorboards. He walked to the window and looked out through the empty frame where glass should have been. Darkness. A few distant lights from other shacks. The silhouette of the city in the far distance, too far to matter.

If the Veton family had wanted him dead, they'd have killed him. This was something else. Slower. More deliberate. A punishment designed to stretch. His father wanted him to wake up every morning and remember what he'd lost. What he'd never had.

And Seraphina? What had her family wanted?

He turned back to her. The candlelight caught her hair again, that impossible silver and those garnet tips. In the chapel, he'd thought they looked like dying embers. Here, in the smaller dark of the shack, they looked like something else.

Blood. Old blood, dried on silver.

He shook the thought away.

He dragged the chair closer to the bed. Sat down again. This time, he was close enough to see the details.

Her skin wasn't just pale. It was porcelain. Smooth, unblemished, almost translucent at the temples where faint blue veins traced paths beneath the surface. Her eyebrows were thin and elegant, the kind of arches that didn't need maintenance. Her nose was straight. Her jaw was soft but defined. Her lips were full, pink, slightly parted. If he leaned close enough, he could hear her breathing through them. Shallow. Steady.

She was beautiful. She was the kind of beautiful that made rooms go quiet.

And someone had broken her.

Allen had seen enough crippled Hunters to know the difference between an accident and something else. Gate accidents left scars. Burns. Missing limbs. The kind of damage that screamed wrong place, wrong time. Seraphina didn't have those. Her body was intact. Unmarked except for a thin scar at her left temple. A pale line, almost invisible against her skin.

That scar wasn't from a monster.

Someone had done this to her. Deliberately. Precisely.

'Just like they did to me. Different method. Same result.'

"I don't know your story," he said. His voice was rough from the silence. He cleared his throat. "I know what they say. S-rank. Silver Death. Solo-cleared gates that killed entire parties. But that's not a story. That's a résumé."

He paused. The candle flickered.

"I'm Allen. Allen Veton. I'm F-rank. Level 7. The lowest of the low." A dry sound escaped his throat, not quite a laugh. "My family threw me away because I wasn't strong enough. Because I couldn't Awaken. Because I embarrassed them. They kept me alive because killing me would've been too quick."

He looked at her hands. Pale. Still.

"I don't know why your family threw you away. Maybe for the opposite reason. Maybe because you were too strong. Maybe because they couldn't control you." He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was just bad luck. Wrong gate. Wrong time. And now you're here."

He leaned back.

"The officiant said we're husband and wife. I don't think that means anything to you. I don't think anything means anything to you right now." He paused. "But I signed the paper. So I guess that makes us something."

The candle popped. Wax dripped onto the table.

"I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm doing. I don't. I've never taken care of anyone before. I could barely take care of myself." He looked at her face, at those empty violet eyes. "But they threw us both away. That makes us the same. And I don't abandon things that are mine."

He wasn't sure why he'd said that last part.

She wasn't his. She was a stranger in a white dress, paralyzed and mute, and he was a stranger to her. The marriage was a joke his family had played on both of them. If she could speak, she'd probably tell him to go to hell. If she could move, she'd probably walk out the door and never look back.

But she couldn't. And he was here. And the words had come out before he'd thought about them.

'Things that are mine.'

He stared at his own hands. Long fingers. Thin wrists. A thinker's hands, not a fighter's. His Intelligence was high. He knew that much from checking his own System Panel years ago. 1,247. An anomaly. A genius trapped in a body that couldn't back it up.

What good was a genius who couldn't lift a sword?

What good was a husband who couldn't protect his wife?

He pushed the thoughts down. They wouldn't help him now.

The candle was halfway gone. Allen stood and walked to the corner of the room, where a cracked basin sat on a crooked shelf. He'd filled it with water earlier. Cold water, from the pump outside. He dipped a cloth into it, wrung it out, and returned to the bed.

"I'm going to clean your face," he said. "The chapel was dusty. You've got dirt on your cheek."

He didn't wait for a response. There wouldn't be one.

He pressed the cloth to her forehead. Gently. The way you'd touch something fragile. He wiped across her brow, down the bridge of her nose, across her cheekbones. He avoided her eyes, not because he was squeamish, but because the emptiness there made something twist in his chest.

The dirt came away. So did some of the dust from the journey through the slums. Her skin was even paler underneath, almost luminous in the candlelight.

He cleaned her other cheek. Her chin. The line of her jaw. When he was done, he folded the cloth and set it aside.

"There," he said. "Better."

He sat down again. The chair creaked.

"Tomorrow I'll find food," he said. "I don't have any money. Not yet. But there's a market in the slum. Maybe I can trade something. My jacket's worth a few meals, probably. After that..." He trailed off. "After that, I'll figure it out."

He looked at her.

"You're going to need a lot of care. Bathing. Feeding. Moving so you don't get sores." He remembered reading about it once. How paralyzed bodies needed constant movement, or the muscles died, the skin broke down. "I can do that. I'm not strong, but I'm careful."

A pause.

"If you want me to stop, if any of this bothers you..." He almost said tell me. Caught himself. "Just blink. Once for yes, twice for no. I'll learn."

She didn't blink.

But her eyes moved.

It was subtle. So subtle he almost missed it. A shift in her gaze. Just a fraction. From the ceiling to him. Her pupils, which had been fixed on a point somewhere above, drifted downward and met his.

Allen stopped breathing.

"Can you... can you hear me?"

Nothing. No blink. No second movement.

But her eyes stayed on him.

They were still empty. Still distant. But they were looking at him now. Directly at him. Seeing him.

He didn't know what that meant. He didn't know if it meant anything at all. Maybe it was involuntary. A reflex. Or he'd imagined the whole thing.

But her eyes stayed on him, and he stayed very still, and the candle burned between them like a tiny sun.

The flame guttered. Wax had pooled around the wick, and the light was starting to fail.

Allen stood. "I need to let this go out. There's no more candles."

He looked at her one last time. Her eyes were still on him. Or maybe they'd drifted again. It was too dark to tell.

"We'll figure this out," he said. "You and me. Somehow."

He pinched the wick. The flame died. Darkness swallowed the room. Thick. Absolute. Broken only by the faint outline of the window and the distant glow of the city.

Allen found his way back to the chair in the dark. He sat down. The wood creaked.

And in the silence, he listened to her breathe.