Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)-Chapter 259 - 253: Invitation to a Ruin

Hadeon stood like a man at the edge of a hunt, not a party.

His voice dropped an octave, still pleasant and polished, but with an undertone of hunger. The kind that didn’t feed on food or sex or even revenge.

It fed on unraveling the strong.

Hadeon lifted his glass again, not to drink, but to admire the frost lining the rim. Like the last breath of something beautiful before it broke.

Then, with the practiced ease of a monarch without a crown, he turned toward the gathered crowd—nobles draped in velvet and power, eyes too still to be innocent—and let his words fall like a curse dressed in silk.

"Let’s see how good all of you are," he said, every syllable laced with promise and poison. The mansion’s enchantments carried his voice to every corner, but it felt intimate, as if he were whispering into the ears of each sick mind present.

"Who can break the Golden Consort—without killing him?" He stopped looking amused by a new twist. "What fun would that be if he’s dead?" He laughed, soft and slow. "No. I want him breathing. I want him shattered and seated at court, looking beautiful and broken."

A beat.

"And the one who does it..." Hadeon raised his glass higher, the light catching the edge like a blade. "Will have my favor. Your sons, your daughters, your little omega cousins in need of a title—they will become the new Empress. Or whatever we decide to call the glass doll that comes next."

Gasps were stifled. Smiles sharpened.

"You’ve all wanted a place at my side," he continued, his voice velvet-drenched and venom-lined. "Well—earn it. Show me who among you can twist pride into shame. Make power look like madness. Strip away his wit, his edge, his spark... without ever touching a knife."

He tilted the glass toward his lips, pausing just before drinking.

"And remember," he added, almost thoughtfully, "the Emperor made a bond. But I’m offering a crown."

He drank.

And somewhere across the ballroom, a noble whispered:

"May the Consort last long enough to entertain us all."

—

Alexander was out in the gardens of House Erthra, hearing every word Hadeon said without being seen, without even a ripple of presence to betray him—no breath, no warmth, no hint of the man beneath the cloak of shadows he wore like a second skin.

The runes etched along his collarbone and wrists pulsed faintly, reacting to the sound enchantment threaded into his cloak, a sophisticated weave of ether and old blood magic designed not merely to mask but to erase—to make him something less than visible, less than remembered.

Above him, the high windows of the ballroom gleamed like the eyes of a beast mid-feast, their panes lit with curated lightstorms and the shimmer of wealth spun into architecture, but it was the voice drifting down from within—polished, indulgent, poisoned with charm—that froze the garden air more effectively than any spell.

Hadeon’s words had started as performance, as theater meant for the elite and the cruel, but somewhere in the middle they had sharpened into something colder, more deliberate, a command wrapped in a wager in the twisted pleasure of watching a golden thing tarnish slowly.

Alexander did not flinch, but the breath he released was measured, controlled, and forced into stillness by discipline rather than calm, because what he had just witnessed was not mere gossip or social cruelty—it was an invitation, one extended to every power-hungry vulture in the room, and Gabriel was no longer a target of slander or intrigue but a toy in a hunt dressed as a coronation.

Rosaline was beside Hadeon, her voice curling into his like smoke, like silk dipped in arsenic, and Alexander didn’t need to see her expression to know that she had enjoyed planting this seed—that she had planned every glance, every whisper, every detail of this moment down to the color of her dress and the weight of her smile.

He didn’t know how he would report this to Damian without setting the world on fire.

Because Hadeon hadn’t declared war in the traditional sense—there were no blades drawn, no laws broken, not yet—but what he had done was far worse: he had made Gabriel’s suffering a sport, had turned court politics into a sick spectacle with a crown for a prize and a shattered consort as the entertainment.

Alexander activated the silent rune embedded in his palm, severing the sound link and letting the last of Hadeon’s voice die in the back of his mind like the final echo of a gunshot in a cathedral.

He would report. He had to.

But he also knew that when Damian heard it—truly heard it—not as an emperor, but as a mate, as a man who had carved kingdoms with his bare hands only to give them to Gabriel—

He would not respond with silence.

He would not respond with mercy.

Alexander’s ether-scorched hands fisted with so much force that his scarring became white, like thunder before a storm—like pressure building beneath the skin of the world, too silent to be noticed until it was too late.

The jagged remnants of old burns stretched over his knuckles and wrists, raw marks left from past missions where magic was wielded too close to the bone, where sacrifice was measured in flesh rather than glory—and tonight, they pulsed again, not with pain, but with the unbearable weight of knowing.

Knowing that the Empire’s enemies had stopped aiming for the throne and had begun carving paths toward the heart.

Knowing that the target was no longer the Emperor but the man Damian could not afford to lose.

Gabriel—brilliant, difficult, sharp-tongued Gabriel—was never meant to be a spectator in this war, never intended to be vulnerable in their eyes, and yet now he was a stage, a challenge, a game piece passed between monsters in silk and gold who wanted to see how close they could bring him to breaking without shattering the Empire itself.

And Alexander, crouched beneath the whispering hedges, shadows sliding over his shoulders like breathless ghosts, could already see the cracks forming—not in Gabriel, never in him—but in the rules that held Damian’s control in place.

They had made it personal.

Alexander stood slowly, unfolding from the hedge line like a shadow stretching back into its own body. The ether shifted around him in muted waves, absorbing the last of the ballroom’s laughter and sealing it behind silence. His body moved like a weapon remembering its purpose.

He tapped the rune on his wrist—once to disable the cloak, twice to locate the Emperor.

The response was immediate: Damian’s location pinged in bold red across his intercom, hovering just above a single word, secure, and still, Alexander sighed.

A long breath. Heavy, reluctant. Not from fear, but from knowing what came next.

He teleported into the armored car with the soft crack of reality folding in on itself.

"I assume someone’s dying if you teleported here," Damian said, his voice cool, perfectly even, like the blade of a sword pressed flat against your neck. He didn’t look up, didn’t flinch. He was seated in the back of the vehicle, legs crossed loosely, an imperial tablet balanced on one knee.

Onscreen, a series of warning sigils flickered, first red, then gold, then blue, and finally green.