The Beloved One!

Chapter 28

The odor of something rotting and metallic slowly wafted in the bedroom chambers of the retired Duke and Duchess of Morley.

Vincent's eyelids lifted due to the new stimulus, his azure blue eyes saw the filled vial he had given his nephew's butler. Catching a hazy glimpse of it due to the sleep in his eyes caused them to grow large in magnitude. He snapped up in a sitting position. But his attention was immediately drawn to something else.

There on the bedroom chambers' floor had been bathed in fresh blood with decomposing corpses of men in black scattered about.

The Duke's left eye started to twitch as he undid the string that hang the vial from the cloth ceiling of the canopy bed. An image of his nephew flashed into his mind. 'A retaliation!' The twitching continued more rapidly. As he thought about the situation more and more, he tried to calm himself.

He breathed in slowly and then he breathed out slowly. The twitching of eye his lessened quite a lot but was still there. For him to divorce his daughter without no backlash. For him to regain the title of Archduke again. For him to stop scheme after scheme. Now for him to do something like this, had evidently said, 'I can kill you anytime.'

Even though he did not want to acknowledge it at first, but his nephew, that weak little boy who had been crying on his mother's and father's graves had grown up and had surpassed him..... drastically. But that boy could not get rid of them due to some reasons, or he would had straight out eliminated them. The twitching was now gone. His nephew was warning them.

A low dry chuckle was released from Vincent's mouth, his grip on the vail tightening. If he had known that this nephew of his would had become like this, he should had killed him when he had given him that same in his eyes as his father's third wife had. That look that seemed to stare into one's soul and knew all the truth. But that look had been the same reason he could not kill him. Why did that nephew looked so much like her when Alice looked nothing like her at all?

Esme Marshall.

She had became the third main wife of Nathan Morley at the age of seventeen. The first thing she had done when she had arrived was pester her husband's children, wanting to know everything about them and trying to get close to them.

At first Vincent thought it had just been her acting. She had easily won his little half-sister over but not him. He thought when she could see she could not fool him with that fake kindness then she would stop..... But she had never did. He later had found out that kindness was anything, but a lie. She had been the first person to show him warmth and kindness.

When he was eight, Duchess Morley asked him. "Hey Vince, do you think I will be a good mother to this child?" Esme gently placed her hand on her large stomach. It looked like the baby wanted to be born any second.

Her silky black curly hair was naturally a mess with a disobedient curl that stood animatedly on the very top of her head and her golden eyes were bright. She had a few small black beauty marks on her face. Two horizontal ones under her right eye and another one on the lower left side of her lip.

'More of an older sister than mother.' He answered politely, "you will, Mother Esme."

Then she gave him that look, her golden eyes did one short serious stare that was unlike her always cheerful personality. That look that saw through him.

Esme then smiled, her dimples etching out on her checks and the natural bubbly air around her instantly returning. She said in a sing-song voice. "you're lying."

Ba-thump.

He did not know how she did that. He always wondered if it had been her eyes that saw through all things or she just possessed a side magical ability that allowed her to do so.

The retired Duke had ordered for a sound proof barrier to be placed around the retired Duchess and for an incense that made one sleep to be burnt while the servants had worked in masks to clean the bedroom chambers.

If Emma had woken up to that scene, he couldn't imagine how she would react.

He was now in his study, listening to the information his servant had to report.

"I checked out the Book of Marriages like you had wished."

The Book of Marriages was a magical book that recorded marriages within the Kingdom. It's place would always be in the Grand Church and only the Grand Priest or someone with the Grand Priest's permission could open and read it.

After hearing about the type of marriage contract he and his daughter had, Vincent had sent someone to investigate.

He nervously gulped before continuing. "In the book there is no mention of the Archduke ever being married to the Duchess, only the name of Ellen Smith besides his when he had a ghost marriage with her the day before his wedding with the Duchess. Then there was a status change of that ghost marriage to a normal one, a year later."

Anything involving marriages, no one could reword or erase from the Book of Marriages, not even the Grand Priest. For there to be no mention of Tazanna, that meant there had never been an actual marriage.

'It was like an act.' He thought. 'If the wedding had been an act-' The image of his granddaughter popped into his mind. Was she his child? That could be an act as well. "Run a paternity test between him and Lila. Bring the results back immediately." The retired Duke had ran DNA tests before that had proved that Kalila was Anzor's biological daughter, but who knew if that nephew had used those scheming hands of his to manipulate the results? It was likely.

An hour and thirty minutes later, the results had been given to him. He sighed. 'Like the marriage. It was an act.' They had no hold over him. With everything now, it was best to take the warning and refrain from doing anything for now. The next time he stroke, it had to be from something they could not recover from and Anzor had to be included. But with the power that nephew had now to do that, he would need to contact him. It was going to be a while.