The snow was still falling when they passed through the castle gates, but the silence was different.

There were no guards.

There were no servants.

Only the wind—and the distant sound of wood creaking in the cold.

Paraphal's mansion felt alive, as if the building itself had witnessed everything that had happened there. The walls exuded a bittersweet smell of cheap incense and old blood. The corridors were long and cold, and the echo of Ester and Damon's footsteps mingled with the pent-up breath of those who saw them.

The maids were there.

Dozens of them, standing like statues, on the steps, in the doorways, in the shadows.

None dared speak.

They simply watched the two of them—the murderers, the invaders, the liberators.

Ester passed between them without saying a word. Her presence, cold and authoritative, was enough to clear the way. Damon, on the other hand, stopped in the middle of the main hall. He looked around at the women, their dark circles scarred, their pale faces pale, their hands trembling.

Then he spoke, his voice low but firm:

"He's dead."

The wretch died down there."

For a second, no one reacted.

The silence was so thick it felt like a thick cloth between them.

Until one of the women, one with short hair and a face covered in fine scars, took a step forward. A sob escaped her throat. Then another.

And then another.

In moments, the entire room was crying.

They wept softly, as if the very act of crying still required permission.

Some knelt. Others clung to each other. One of them collapsed completely, falling to her knees and covering her face with her hands. It was an old, suppressed, stifled cry. A sound that came from years of fear and silence.

Ester watched without moving. There was no tenderness in her gaze—there was respect. The kind of respect one has for survivors of war.

Damon, however, looked... lost.

He took a step forward, slowly.

He looked at the women—one by one—and something in his face, always ironic, faded.

"What did he do to you?" he asked.

His voice sounded hoarse than he expected.

The scarred woman looked up. Her eyes were red and empty.

"Everything..." she murmured. "Everything he could."

She began to speak.

And as the words fell, the air in the hall grew heavier.

She told of nights when they were summoned to their rooms and returned without remembering their own names. Of muffled screams behind locked doors. Of experiments—potions, bloodlettings, rituals. Of children taken and never seen again.

Of bodies thrown into the river, as if they were garbage.

And each sentence was a blade.

The others nodded, weeping. They spoke of broken promises, of guards who laughed as they obeyed. Of how the Duke marked them with symbols—saying that this way, "no one else would touch them without his permission."

Ester stood still, but her hands slowly clenched, her knuckles white with tension.

Damon, on the other hand, seemed to sink.

With each word, his face darkened a little more.

The flame in his hands, which normally flickered with shades of purple and gold, now wavered between black and blue. Cold. Unstable.

"He did this… to you?" he murmured, almost to himself.

The woman just nodded, weeping.

Something in him broke.

Damon took a step back, taking a deep breath—but the air seemed to falter.

The energy around him began to vibrate, reacting to what he felt. The marble floor beneath his feet cracked. He tried to hold it in, but his body trembled—the power was escaping, untamed, wild.

And then he exploded.

A muffled scream—not of rage, but of something deeper, something that came from deep within.

Damon swung his fist and punched the wall so hard the sound reverberated throughout the mansion. The impact opened a wide crater, and before any sparks could spread, cold engulfed it.

Ice.

Thick, white, bluish.

Freezing the marble, the air, even sound itself.

Ester watched him silently. Her breathing was even, but her gaze—sharp.

She felt her temperature drop unnaturally. His mana—normally warm, vibrant, alive—was mixing with something different. Something ancient, icy, almost dead.

A spiritual cold.

Not physical.

A kind of energy born of desperation.

This is going to be trouble, she thought, watching his aura flicker between colors. He's losing his balance.

Damon kept his fist pressed against the wall. Ice slowly spread through his fingers, up his arm, to his shoulder. But he didn't seem to feel pain.

Only anger.

Anger and disgust.

"I should have made him suffer..." he murmured, his voice low and hoarse, vibrating between his teeth.

"Damon..." Ester began.

"I should have made him beg." He laughed, a bitter, dry sound. "Just one cut, just one blow... and it was over. Too quickly."

He took a deep breath, but the air came out thick, almost like steam.

"This isn't justice." He looked up, his eyes now glowing an icy blue. "This is punishment. And he got the lightest possible one."

Ester stepped forward, her voice calm.

"He's dead. And that's enough."

"Enough?" He turned to her in disbelief. "Look at them, Ester!"

The slap came like a thrown stone—sharp, precise, slicing the air between them. Ester hit Damon's face hard enough to make him frown and take a step back, his lower lip trembling.

"Come to your senses," she said, her voice low and sharp. "Now."

There was more than rebuke there; there was a clear threat. It wasn't just a scolding. It was a line drawn: on the other side of her was discipline; on his, doom.

Damon held the hand where the blow had struck, his gaze darting around the room full of women still sobbing silently. For a slow second, the irony that always resided on his face tried to resurface—and then it died. He closed his mouth, the smile faded, and the sparkle in his eyes faded. He remained silent. Rigid. Eerily calm.

Ester took three steps forward, so that the toe of her boot touched the icy marble of his punch. She looked at him with the coldness of someone who has read all the routes to moral failure on the map of the human heart.

"I swear on everything," she murmured, barely audible, "that if you lose control again and decide to turn your personal punishment case into a spectacle, I will bury you along with the Duke."

Damon didn't answer. He only nodded once, curtly, and turned his face away. There was shame in the slump of his shoulder—a strange thing in those features that so often mocked other people's rules.

"Go on," she said shortly. "We have work."

They crossed the room in silence. The maids watched them pass, eyes filled with things they no longer had words for: fear, relief, distrust, and—as the two passed by—a gleam of fragile hope. No one touched them. No one spoke. The women kept to the shadows, wiping tear stains from their faces with trembling hands.

The stairs leading to the Duke's study were at the end of the hallway, behind torn tapestries. There was a suffocating smell of damp papers, of spent candles. The heavy doors creaked open, revealing the private room: maps, stacked letters, a wide wooden desk, and—in a corner—an iron box with a broken padlock, still reeking of juniper and iron.

Damon hesitated for a second at the entrance, as if observing a crime scene and trying not to become part of it. Ester was already poised at her desk, her eyes searching the drawers with the incisiveness of someone who's searched a thousand times for something that shouldn't exist.

"What are we going to do?" Damon asked, his voice low.

"Get the evidence," she answered without pausing. "Take it to Mirath. Give it to the Countess. And make it look like no one was ever here."

"Make it look like…" he repeated, arching his eyebrow. "Just like that?"

Ester smiled humorlessly. "Our advantages don't lie in the visible battle. They lie in the shadows we can reveal when necessary. If the Duke falls like rotten fruit, we need more than hatred: we need documents, witnesses, and records that explain why."

She opened a drawer and pulled out a thick folder, sealed with black wax. She broke the seal with the tip of her sword. Inside, there was the warm air of a long-dormant secret: lists of names, signed orders, payment receipts, postage stamps bearing the Duke's seal. Letters—some in shaky handwriting, others in firm ink—detailing transactions under the guise of "provisions." Beneath them, notebooks filled with notes on "experiments" and rituals; clinical terms scratched out with the same hand that had signed the tax cut authorization.

Damon approached and picked up one of the notebooks with a makeshift cloth glove. He leafed through it, his face changing with each line: crossed-out names, schedules, notes on ingredients procured "in the river region"—and, most torturously, small notes that appeared to be "consumption" records of people taken underground. There were no graphic descriptions; there were numbers, dates, accounting entries. The cold, accounting mechanics of monstrosity.

"This will burn Paraphal," Damon murmured, not wanting to smile. It was a stony smile.

Ester pulled a sheaf of letters from another drawer; seals from noble families, shrouded in glances and promises. There were signatures that, if exposed, would tarnish other names. Politicians, merchants, a priest whose seal repeated "in favor of the Duke" on several occasions.

"We need everything," she said. "Books, records, correspondence, anything that proves that Paraphal wasn't swallowed up by a common revolt, but rather held together by a web of corruption and deliberate acts."

Damon picked up an envelope bearing the coat of arms of a count who had done business with Paraphal. Inside was a short letter: "The favors have been granted. Don't ask." He dropped the paper, the words seeming more than ink, like dried mud.

"That's enough to burn reputations," he said. "But what about the people? The maids? Will they testify?"

"Some," Ester said, with the dryness of someone who had seen the world beyond evidence. "But witnesses speak. Letters don't lie. And where witnesses fail, papers fill in the gaps. When the game is political, we need documentary weight. When it's moral, we need the face of those who suffered. She"—he gestured to the women behind them, who were now approaching timidly—"will be the public voice. The documents will be the rest."

Damon carefully put the notebook away. His fingers were still a little cold, the memory of the punch making his skin tingle. There was a deeper wound: the knowledge that this entire system was sustained by dirty pacts, and that the filth came from afar.

Ester opened the iron box in the corner. Inside were vials of dark powder, leather ribbons with burned symbols, and a rolled-up parchment that emitted a faint bluish glow—a protective inscription that smelled of old blood. She rolled the parchment carefully, her hand steady, and deposited it all in a sturdy leather bag.

"Let's take this too," she said. "We can't destroy everything here. Some pieces need to go into safe hands. Others..." she looked around, her gaze sharp, "need to disappear."

"Do you want to burn the rest?" he asked.

"Burn and scatter. Make it look like looting. That will be more effective than admitting it was us. If they say there was a group, a raid, there will be those who believe it—especially if we leave false traces of battle and looting."

Damon considered, his expression grim. It was a strategic lie, but a necessary one. The naked truth could be twisted; the narrative, shaped by evidence, could not.

"And what about the women?" he asked, more quietly. "Will they stay?"

"They will stay," she replied. "Mirath will provide shelter. Elizabeth will make a statement. There will be fundraising, support. Their voices will be heard on the streets and in the square. If we do well, Paraphal will be studied by historians as an example of a power invested in rot."

"Historians are not always merciful," he murmured.

"We don't ask historians for mercy," Ester retorted. "We ask them to write the truth."

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