Chapter : 1713

  "Good," Milody said. "That gives us a window. A small one." She began to pace again, her heels clicking rhythmically on the stone floor. "We cannot announce an illegitimate child. It would destroy Mina’s reputation instantly. She would be a pariah. The child would be barred from inheritance, a permanent stain. And you, Lloyd... the 'Saint of the Coil,' the 'Hero of the North'... you would be branded an adulterer and a fool who cannot control his own house."

  She stopped and looked at Nilufa. "We have to legitimize the child. There is no other way to protect the alliance between Ferrum and Siddik."

  "Legitimize?" Nilufa shook her head. "How? They are not married. The child was conceived while he was married to Rosa. The math does not work, Milody. The calendar is a cruel witness."

  "We change the calendar," Milody said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Or rather, we obscure it."

  She looked at Lloyd, her eyes hard. "Here is the reality. You are a man of immense power. You are vital to the King. The King will not care about your bedmates as long as you provide him with weapons and victories. But the Court... the Court cares about propriety. They care about the appearance of order."

  She took a deep breath. "We cannot hide the pregnancy forever. Mina will show. So, we must control the narrative of the conception."

  Lloyd felt a surge of unease. "Mother, I am not going to lie about my child’s parentage."

  "You will do whatever is necessary to ensure that child doesn't grow up as a social leper!" Milody shot back, her voice cracking like a whip. "You want to be a father? Then start by protecting your offspring from the wolves you invite to dinner."

  She turned to Mina. "How far along are you?"

  "Three months," Mina whispered. "Maybe four."

  Milody nodded, performing mental calculations. "Good. You are small. We can hide it for another month, perhaps two with the right corsets and illusion magic. That gives us time."

  "Time for what?" Lloyd asked.

  "Time to rearrange the board," Milody said. "We cannot claim the child is Rosa's. That would be too easily disproven if she ever returns, and it would be a cruelty beyond measure to claim a child from a barren womb. No. The child must be Mina's. But it cannot be a bastard."

  She looked at Lloyd, her expression unreadable. "You must marry her. Immediately."

  "I intend to," Lloyd said. "That was always the plan."

  "No, you don't understand," Milody cut him off. "I don't mean a grand wedding next year. I mean now. Within the month. A quiet ceremony. We will claim... we will claim that your marriage to Rosa was annulled privately months ago. That she left due to 'spiritual incompatibility' or some such nonsense. We will backdate the courtship with Mina. We will say you found solace in each other during the crisis with Nilufa's health."

  Nilufa looked up, her eyes narrowing. "You want to rewrite history? You want to erase my daughter's marriage to pave the way for her sister?"

  "I want to save your house from scandal, Nilufa!" Milody retorted. "If this gets out, House Siddik looks weak. It looks like you cannot control your daughters. It looks like your family is a chaotic mess. But if we frame it as a tragic romance? A shift of alliances? Then it becomes a story the bards will sing about, not a joke the drunkards will laugh at."

  She softened her tone, reaching out to take Nilufa’s hand. "I know it is hard. I know it feels like a betrayal of Rosa. But Rosa is not here. Mina is. The child is. We have to protect the living."

  Nilufa stared at Milody’s hand, then at Mina’s tear-stained face. She looked old, tired, and defeated. Finally, she nodded, a slow, jerky motion. "For the child," she whispered. "Only for the child."

  Milody squeezed her hand, then turned back to Lloyd. "It is settled. We spin the story. Rosa left months ago. You and Mina fell in love while caring for Nilufa. The wedding will be small, private, ostensibly out of respect for the 'recent separation.' And the child... the child will be born 'prematurely.' It happens. People will whisper, but they will not have proof."

  Lloyd felt a wave of nausea. It was a solid plan. It was logical. It was efficient. And it was built on a foundation of absolute, utter deceit. He was erasing Rosa from the narrative of his life, replacing her with a convenient fiction to cover his own mistakes.

  "It feels... wrong," Lloyd muttered.

  Chapter : 1714

  "It feels like politics," Milody corrected him. "Welcome to the mud, my son. You wanted to play the Great Game? This is the price of admission. You don't get to be the white knight and the happy father. Pick one."

  She walked to the door, her posture rigid. "I will begin drafting the announcements. I will speak to the priests. You have one job, Lloyd. Keep Mina hidden. Keep her healthy. And for the love of the Gods, do not get anyone else pregnant."

  She opened the door, then paused, looking back at him. Her eyes were not angry anymore, just sad. "You are a great man, Lloyd. You are building a world I could never have imagined. But you leave a lot of wreckage in your wake. Try to build something that lasts this time."

  She swept out of the room, leaving a vacuum of silence behind her.

  Lloyd looked at Mina. She was trembling. He sat beside her, pulling her into his arms. She buried her face in his chest, sobbing quietly. He held her, staring at the empty fireplace. He had won. He had secured his future, his child, and his love. But as he sat there in the darkening solar, he couldn't shake the feeling that he had just lost something irretrievable. The ghost of Rosa seemed to stand in the corner, watching him with cold, grey eyes, silent and accusing. He had saved the situation, but he had done it by burying her memory in a shallow grave of lies.

  The silence in the solar following Duchess Milody’s departure was not peaceful; it was the heavy, pressurized silence of a submarine diving too deep. The plan was set. The lie was constructed. But the emotional debris was still scattered all over the room, sharp and dangerous.

  Lady Nilufa sat perfectly still, her hands resting on her knees. She was staring at a spot on the rug, her eyes unfocused. She looked like a woman who had just watched her house burn down and was trying to decide which piece of ash to pick up first. Mina was still in Lloyd’s arms, her breathing hitching in small, ragged gasps. Lloyd felt the weight of her against him—warm, living, real. But his mind was elsewhere, dragged back to the frozen north, to a town square encased in ice, and a woman with hair that had turned from silver to black and back to white.

  He knew he couldn’t leave it like this. The lie Milody had concocted—that Rosa had left quietly due to "incompatibility"—was a shield for the public. But here, in this room, with Rosa’s mother, a lie of omission felt like a knife in the back. He owed Nilufa the truth. Or at least, as much of the truth as she could survive.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "Lady Nilufa, I mean mother-in-law," Lloyd said that for the first time. His voice was rough, like gravel grinding together.

  Nilufa blinked, slowly raising her head. Her eyes were dark pools of sorrow.

  The bitterness was subtle, but it stung. Lloyd accepted it. He deserved it. "I need to tell you... about Rosa. About why she really left."

  Mina stiffened in his arms. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with warning. Don't, her expression pleaded. Don't make it worse.

  But Lloyd shook his head slightly. "You deserve to know. Not the story we will tell the court. The truth."

  Nilufa’s gaze sharpened. The grieving mother vanished, replaced by the matriarch who had survived a decade of cursing. "Tell me," she commanded.

  Lloyd extricated himself from Mina and stood up. He walked to the window, looking out but seeing nothing. "It wasn't a simple disagreement. It wasn't just... us drifting apart." He took a breath, steeling himself. "Rosa came to find me. She tracked me to Serrum Town."

  "Serrum Town?" Nilufa frowned. "Why there?"

  "I was working," Lloyd said. "Trying to build the distribution lines. Trying to... forget. She found me in the square." He paused, the memory of the black blizzard assaulting his mind. "She knew about Mina. She knew about the child. She figured it out before anyone else."

  Nilufa closed her eyes. "She always was the smartest of us. The most observant."

  "She was angry," Lloyd continued. "Beyond angry. She was... broken. We fought."

  "Fought?" Nilufa asked sharply. "You struck her?"

  "No," Lloyd said quickly. "We fought with power. She... she lost control. Her Sovereign power, the ice... it reacted to her grief. She nearly froze the entire town." He turned to face Nilufa. "It wasn't a tantrum, Lady Nilufa. It was an explosion. She attacked me. She tried to kill me."

  Chapter : 1715

  Mina gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. She hadn't known this part. Lloyd had spared her the violence of the encounter until now.

  "She tried to kill you?" Nilufa whispered, her face pale.

  "She thought she did," Lloyd said, his voice dropping to a haunt. "I had to... trick her. To stop her without hurting her. I used a doppelganger. She strangled it. She thought she was strangling me. And when she realized what she had done... when she thought I was dead..." He trailed off, the image of Rosa’s scream echoing in his memory. "She broke. She couldn't face it. She fled. She flew north, into the wastes. She thinks she is a murderer."

  The room was silent. The horror of the image—Rosa, the dutiful daughter, the perfect Ice Queen, driven to madness and believing she had killed the man she loved—hung heavy in the air.

  "So that is why," Nilufa whispered, tears streaming down her face. "That is why my winter flower has withered in the dark. She is not just in exile. She is in hell."

  She looked at Lloyd, and for the first time, there was no anger in her eyes, only a profound, devastating pity. "You didn't just break her heart, Lloyd. You broke her mind."

  "I know," Lloyd said. The admission was a physical weight. "I tried to find her. I searched for days. My spies are still searching. But she is gone. She has erased herself."

  "She is punishing herself," Nilufa said, her voice cracking. "She was always like that. Even as a child. If she failed a lesson, she would stand in the snow for hours. She demands perfection from herself. And you... you made her a monster in her own eyes."

  Mina stood up, her legs shaking. She walked over to her mother and knelt beside her, burying her face in Nilufa’s lap. "I'm sorry, Mother," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry. I didn't want this. I never wanted to hurt her."

  Nilufa stroked Mina’s hair, her touch mechanical. "We never want the avalanche, Mina. But we shout in the mountains anyway."

  She looked up at Lloyd. "You saved my life, Lloyd. You pulled the curse from my veins. I owe you everything. And yet... looking at you now... I wish you had never come to the South."

  The words were a spear through Lloyd’s chest. He bowed his head, accepting the judgment. "I cannot change the past, Lady Nilufa. I can only try to protect what remains. I will protect Mina. I will protect the child. And if Rosa ever returns... I will face her judgment."

  "She won't return," Nilufa said, her voice hollow. "Not the Rosa we knew. That woman died in Serrum Town."

  The emotional atmosphere in the solar had shifted from high-stakes political tension to a thick, suffocating grief. The revelation of Rosa’s true fate—the violence, the madness, the self-imposed exile born of guilt—had stripped away the last layers of defense from everyone in the room. They were no longer nobles plotting a strategy; they were a family standing over a spiritual grave.

  Mina remained kneeling at her mother’s feet, her sobbing having subsided into quiet, rhythmic hitching breaths. She felt like a thief. She was carrying a new life, a symbol of hope and future, but it had been purchased with the currency of her sister’s destruction. Every time the baby moved or she felt a flutter, she would remember that her happiness was built on the scorched earth of Rosa’s sanity.

  "I feel her," Mina whispered, her voice muffled by the silk of her mother’s dress. "Sometimes, at night. I feel her cold. It’s like... like a phantom limb. We were always connected. Even when she was the Ice Queen and I was the scholar... I always knew she was there. A wall protecting me. Now... the wall is gone. And it’s just cold wind."

  Nilufa continued to stroke Mina’s hair, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. "She protected us all," Nilufa said softly. "When I was sick... she froze her own heart to survive. She became a weapon so that we could remain human. And now..." She looked at Lloyd, her gaze piercing. "Now the weapon has shattered."

  Lloyd stood by the window, feeling like an intruder in his own tragedy. He wanted to offer comfort, to say something that would fix it, but his engineer’s mind offered no solutions. There was no lever to pull, no circuit to rewire. This was a catastrophic structural failure of the human heart.

  Chapter : 1716

  "We have to move forward," Lloyd said, though the words tasted like ash. "We cannot live in the wreckage. We have to build something new."

  "Spoken like a man," Nilufa said, a flash of her old fire returning. "Always building. Always fixing. But some things, Lord Ferrum, are not meant to be fixed. They are meant to be mourned."

  She gently pushed Mina away and stood up, smoothing her skirts. The movement was slow, heavy with age and sorrow, but dignified. "However," she continued, her voice gaining strength, "Duchess Milody is right. We cannot let the world see us bleed. If we falter, the sharks will come. For the sake of this unborn child... for the sake of the only daughter I have left... I will play my part."

  She walked over to Lloyd. She was a small woman, frail from her years of illness, but in that moment, she seemed ten feet tall. She looked up at him, her dark eyes searching his face.

  "You are a good man, Lloyd," she said. "I believe that. You fight monsters. You save kingdoms. But you are dangerous. You are a storm. And storms destroy everything in their path, even the things they love."

  She reached out and took his hand. Her grip was cold. "Promise me one thing. Not as a Lord, but as a father."

  "Anything," Lloyd said.

  "This child," she said, glancing at Mina’s stomach. "This child will never know the cold. You will not let them become a weapon. You will not let them become a sacrifice. You will give them the one thing you never gave Rosa."

  "What is that?" Lloyd asked, his voice thick.

  "Peace," Nilufa said. "You will give them a boring, safe, peaceful life. Promise me."

  "I promise," Lloyd vowed. "On my life. On my honor. This child will be safe."

  Nilufa nodded, releasing his hand. "Then we have an accord. We will tell the lie. We will say Rosa left peacefully. We will say you and Mina found love in the quiet hours. We will smile at the wedding, and we will toast the union." She looked at Mina. "Get up, daughter. Dry your face. A bride does not weep for the sister she replaced. Not in public."

  Mina scrambled to her feet, wiping her eyes frantically. "Yes, Mother."

  "Go," Nilufa commanded. "Both of you. I need to be alone. I need to... say goodbye to my daughter in my own way."

  Lloyd nodded. He took Mina’s arm, guiding her toward the door. As he reached for the handle, he looked back. Nilufa was standing in the center of the room, alone in the fading light. She looked small, fragile, and infinitely lonely.

  He opened the door and led Mina out into the corridor. The air in the hallway was cooler, fresher. It felt like stepping out of a tomb.

  "Are we terrible people?" Mina asked, her voice trembling as they walked.

  Lloyd stopped. He looked at her—the woman he loved, the mother of his child. He saw the fear in her eyes, the guilt eating at her. He pulled her close, resting his chin on her head.

  "We are survivors, Mina," he said quietly. "And survivors don't get to be saints. We just get to be alive."

  He didn't tell her that he felt like a monster. He didn't tell her that every time he closed his eyes, he saw Rosa’s face in the blizzard. He kept that to himself. That was his burden to carry. He would carry the ghosts so she wouldn't have to.

  "Come," he said, gently steering her down the hall. "We have a wedding to plan."

  As they walked away, the shadows of the estate seemed to lengthen, stretching out like dark fingers trying to grab their ankles. The house felt empty, echoing with the silence of the missing queen. But in the center of that silence, a new heart was beating. Life, stubborn and relentless, was pushing forward, growing over the ruins of the past. They would survive. They would build a fortress of lies to protect their truth. And they would pray that the winter never came back to claim its due.

  If the solar had been a place of emotional devastation, the Duchess's private study, where Lloyd and Mina were summoned the next morning, was a war room. The air smelled of ink, sealing wax, and cold ambition. Duchess Milody sat behind her massive oak desk, surrounded by stacks of parchment, looking less like a mother and more like the CEO of a ruthless corporation preparing for a hostile takeover.