Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 416 - 410: Never yours

Chapter 416: Chapter 410: Never yours

He reappeared mid-step, the palace air slamming into his lungs like a storm wall. The crystal-inlaid floor of Olivier’s private wardroom caught his heel, and he landed steady, the silence of the teleport fracturing around him like glass that hadn’t quite broken.

Outside, the imperial wards screamed with light; every strand of protection flared like a thousand lines of fire tracing the sky above the capital. The last shard had almost died.

Gabriel had to find the Damian of this world to finish it... Or had he?

The pain hit before he could stop it.

Not physical, but worse. Memory.

It crawled in through his spine, through the smallest cracks in his consciousness, slow and merciless. He remembered how Olivier died.

No... how he killed him. He always knew that he killed Olivier, but not how or when exactly.

It hadn’t been dramatic. There were no screams. No final speeches. Gabriel hadn’t given him the satisfaction.

Olivier had stood in the center of that ruined sanctum, hands already cracked with leaking ether, threads of power spiraling from him like rot-colored veins across the air. He had still believed he could win.

He always did.

"You’re still just a child," he’d said.

Gabriel hadn’t answered.

He’d raised his hand, fingers steady, and let the ether unfurl, not like Damian’s fire or rage, but like something older than both.

The room had dimmed, as if even light refused to witness what came next.

Gabriel’s ether lanced forward, split into seven threads, sharp, thin, and exact. One for each anchor Olivier had bound to himself, hidden behind flesh, bone, old imperial tech, and buried contracts no one else had dared to touch. Gabriel touched them all.

One thread pierced the center of Olivier’s sternum. Another buried itself just beneath the curve of his jaw. A third weaved through the spine, interrupting the control flow of ether like severing the nerves of a man playing god.

Olivier collapsed mid-sentence, ether unraveling like silk torn at the seam. His hands still twitched. His mouth moved without sound.

But Gabriel didn’t stop.

He stepped forward, once, then twice, and placed two fingers against Olivier’s temple.

The last thread didn’t slice. It sank. Deep. Straight into Olivier’s core.

And for a breathless second, Gabriel saw everything.

The memories. The horrors. The pride and manipulation. The way Olivier had burned down cities in his mind long before he ever touched a weapon.

He saw the boy Olivier had been and the monster he’d chosen to become.

And then he saw the blood.

Not just a pool, not just a stain, but a rising tide that painted every inch of that sanctum until the world itself looked drenched in it. It dripped from the ceiling, slithered along the cracks of the walls, and seeped into the grain of the floorboards as if every surface were hungry to drink it in. The smell was suffocating, copper and ash and something so rancid it clung to the back of his throat, making it hard to swallow, hard to breathe.

Gabriel’s shoulders froze. His whole body locked, seized by the grotesque stillness of a child trying not to exist in a world that had turned into hell. He was young then, and his mind, though sharp, wasn’t built for this. He could outthink assassins and merchants, dismantle political schemes before they took shape, but this, this gore, this inhuman spectacle of ether-twisted bodies dangling like puppets, nearly cracked him.

He couldn’t look away.

The blood wasn’t just Olivier’s. There were bodies, dozens, maybe hundreds, hollowed out shells of people Olivier had used as ether vessels, their skin pale and thin, stretched like paper over bones that shouldn’t have been able to stand. Their eyes were wide, but they weren’t looking at anything. They were just there. Empty. Silent.

Gabriel wanted to vomit.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to run and rip the walls down with his bare hands until there was nothing left.

But he didn’t. Because Olivier was still alive, kneeling in the center of the carnage, smiling like this was all part of some magnificent plan.

"Do you see, Gabriel?" Olivier’s voice had been soft, almost kind, as if he were speaking to a child who simply needed to be taught the truth of the world. "Power doesn’t ask for permission. It takes. It carves the world until it belongs to you. Until you belong to it."

Gabriel remembered lunging forward, remembered the precision of his ether, how it slid through Olivier like blades forged from will itself. He cut him down without mercy, thread by thread, each slice unraveling a tether, each one spilling more of that sickening blood across the floor.

In his last seconds, when his body was more ether than flesh, Olivier reached out with the kind of malignant will that lingers in the bones of empires. His bloody hand trembled, and Gabriel felt it, like a cold chain clamping around his spine.

"I’ll leave you something," Olivier whispered, voice rasping, a sound half between laughter and death. "A gift."

The contract hit him before he understood.

It was inside him, carving through his own ether channels like acid, rewriting the very core of who he was. Gabriel felt pieces of himself tear away, memories of his name, his family, the certainty of who he had been before this room. He clawed at it, tried to burn it out with his own power, but the contract was older, deeper, and designed to feed on every ounce of resistance.

The last thing Gabriel saw was Olivier’s grin, split and red, and then... silence.

"Do you remember now?" A cold voice came through the haze of his mind.

Olivier.

Drenched in blood, his once-golden hair clinging in thick, matted strands to a face carved down by madness. The elegance he used to wear like a crown was gone, what remained was stripped, sharp, skeletal. Those soft pale eyes, once the darling of the courts, stared wide and trembling with something far more ancient than desperation. Something feral.

"You win again, Gabriel," he whispered, swaying slightly, blood trailing from his fingertips like ink bleeding through silk. "I’ve tried to take Hadeon. Gods, I’ve tried. I told myself I only needed one good vessel. One more crack in the lattice. One last war to burn this world into remembering me."

His lip curled, not in amusement but something nearer to grief, near to the sound a building makes when it collapses in on itself.

"But your mighty mate," he said, and the bitterness was thick enough to drown in, "your mighty god... was faster."

Gabriel didn’t move. He stood at the center of the dying shard world, his pulse steady, his fingers curled with silent restraint.

Olivier stepped closer. Limbs wrong, bending at angles too sharp to be human.

"I should’ve killed him," he said, eyes gleaming with the raw ache of every failure. "Back then, when he came out of the tower with his golden eyes and that cursed light pouring off of him like fire. I should’ve torn out his throat before he reached you. But you didn’t let me."

The floor cracked under Gabriel’s feet. Not from Olivier. From the world remembering who it belonged to.

"I loved you," Olivier hissed suddenly, the words breaking like a bone being set wrong. "You could’ve been more than this. More than his."

Gabriel’s voice, when it came, was soft. Final.

"I was never yours."