My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-157

Chapter : 313

The scribe’s voice droned on, each word a hammer blow. “‘The punishment for such treason, if the accused are found guilty after maintaining a plea of innocence, shall be swift and absolute. All conspirators shall be subject to summary execution. Their personal assets, their businesses, their guild holdings, shall be seized and forfeited to the Crown. Their families shall be stripped of all titles and status, and banished from the Kingdom for a period of no less than one hundred years.’”

The scribe finished reading and rolled up the parchment with a neat, final snap. He bowed to the Arch Duke and retreated back into the shadows.

The silence in the hall was absolute, broken only by the sound of ragged, panicked breathing. The eight men stared at the Arch Duke, their faces ashen, their earlier bluster completely, comprehensively, gone. They understood. They understood the terrifying, brilliant, inescapable nature of the trap that had just been sprung.

Roy Ferrum leaned forward, his voice a low, almost conversational, rumble. “So, gentlemen,” he said, the cold, predatory smile returning to his face. “We have your sworn testimony of innocence. We have a confession from the woman you paid, detailing your instructions, your methods. We have a corroborating confession from the enforcer you hired. We have financial records from the moneylender detailing the transfer of funds.” He steepled his fingers. “And we have a new Royal Decree, conveniently signed and sealed this very morning, defining your actions as high treason, with a rather… permanent… penalty for lying about it.”

He looked at them, his dark eyes holding no hint of mercy, only the cold, hard logic of absolute power. “I will ask you one last time. And I suggest you consider your answer very, very carefully. For the sake of your businesses, for the sake of your families, for the sake of your own necks.”

He paused, letting the full weight of the ultimatum, the choice between ruin and annihilation, settle upon them.

“Did you, or did you not,” Roy Ferrum asked, his voice a whisper of impending doom, “conspire to sabotage the AURA enterprise?”

It wasn’t a choice at all.

One by one, with choked sobs and trembling limbs, they fell to their knees. The blustering Guild Masters, the arrogant Bathhouse owners, the pillars of the merchant community… they were just terrified men, begging for their lives.

“We… we confess, Your Grace!” the lead Bathhouse owner wailed, his face buried in his hands. “We did it! We were desperate! Your son’s… his soap… it was ruining us! We… we were fools!”

“Mercy, Your Grace! Mercy!” a Bathhouse owner pleaded, his voice cracking, tears streaming down his face. “We will pay! We will make amends! Anything! Just… not treason… not… execution…”

They confessed everything. The plot, the payment, the cruel manipulation of the woman and her child. Their defiance was shattered, replaced by a raw, pathetic, desperate plea for clemency.

Lloyd watched the scene from behind his father’s chair, a cold, grim satisfaction settling in his heart. He felt no pity. They had used a child as a weapon. They had threatened everything he was building. They deserved this. All of it.

He glanced at his father. Roy’s expression was unreadable, but Lloyd saw the subtle, almost imperceptible nod. The confessions were what he needed. Not for justice—he could have exacted that privately, brutally. But for public consumption. For the record.

He knew what would happen now. They wouldn't be executed. The King’s decree was a tool, a threat, a weapon of political theater, not a literal death sentence. Not for this. Their punishment would be financial, political. Ruinous, yes. They would be stripped of their Guild leadership, their businesses heavily fined, their influence shattered. They would be made into an example, a stark, public warning to any others who might consider challenging the will of House Ferrum.

The AURA brand would emerge from this not just unscathed, but stronger. It had faced its first trial by fire, its first attack, and had emerged victorious, backed now by the full, terrifying, public weight of both Ducal and Royal authority.

The game had been played. And won. Absolutely.

Roy Ferrum surveyed the eight kneeling, sobbing figures on the floor of his Grand Hall, his expression as cold and unforgiving as a winter tombstone. The confessions, wrung from them by the terrifying, elegant leverage of a timely Royal Decree, were a symphony of desperation and greed. They had admitted everything. The conspiracy, the payment to the seamstress, the deliberate endangerment of the child, the malicious intent to destroy the AURA brand. It was all there, recorded by the silent Ducal scribe, a formal testament to their folly.

Chapter : 314

“Enough,” Roy’s voice cut through their pathetic, blubbering pleas for mercy like a shard of ice. The sobbing instantly ceased, replaced by a heavy, fearful silence.

He rose from his throne-like chair, descending the dais with a slow, deliberate stride that made the kneeling men flinch as he approached. He stopped before the lead conspirator, the portly, tear-streaked Master of the Washerman’s Guild, a man who, just weeks ago, had arrogantly demanded a private audience to complain about AURA’s ‘unfair market practices’.

“You speak of desperation,” Roy said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. “You speak of ruin.” He looked down at the man with an expression of pure, unadulterated contempt. “You know nothing of ruin. Ruin is not a decrease in quarterly profits. Ruin is not the obsolescence of an outdated business model.” His gaze flickered for a fraction of a second, a silent, almost imperceptible glance towards Lloyd, a look that held a universe of unspoken, shared history. “Ruin is the ashes of your home, the whispers of assassins in your own halls, the weight of a legacy threatened by forces both internal and external.”

He shook his head slowly, a gesture of profound, almost pitying, disgust. “Your desperation was born of greed. Your fear was for your purses. And for that, for your own petty profit, you were willing to use a child as a weapon. You were willing to endanger an innocent to protect your own comfortable, stagnant way of life.”

He turned away from the man, his gaze sweeping over all eight of them. “You ask for mercy. But you showed none. You ask for leniency. But your crime was not just commercial sabotage; it was an attack on the honor and stability of this house. An attack on my son. My heir.”

The weight of those words, my son, my heir, delivered with such cold, possessive finality, was a fresh wave of terror for the kneeling men. This wasn't just a business dispute anymore. This was personal.

“You will not be executed,” Roy declared, the words offering a flicker of hope that he immediately, brutally, extinguished. “Treason is a charge I reserve for those who threaten the very foundations of this Duchy, not for… pathetic, grasping merchants who have mistaken their own greed for a noble cause.” The dismissal was absolute, contemptuous. “But there will be a reckoning. A price. A very, very, steep price.”

He began to lay out their punishment, his voice calm, clinical, each word a nail in the coffin of their former lives.

“You will, each of you, pay a fine to the Ducal treasury. A fine equivalent to ninety percent of your declared personal and business assets from the previous fiscal year. My Bursar will be conducting a thorough, and I assure you, exceptionally unforgiving, audit to determine the precise sum.”

A collective, choked gasp went through the eight men. Ninety percent. It wasn't just a fine; it was financial annihilation. They would be left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a mountain of debt.

“You will be stripped, permanently, of your positions within your respective Guilds,” Roy continued relentlessly. “Your influence, your authority, your very names, will be erased from the ledgers. You will be barred from conducting any form of commerce within the capital city for the remainder of your lives.”

“And finally,” he added, his voice dropping to a near whisper, a final, cruel twist of the knife, “you will issue a public apology. A full, comprehensive, and deeply, humiliatingly, contrite apology. To the people of this city. To House Ferrum. And most especially,” his gaze settled on the seamstress, Zora, who was being held in a separate antechamber, “to the woman and the child you so callously used as pawns in your pathetic, failed scheme. You will publicly fund the boy’s continued medical care—under the direct supervision of Mistress Dorathi—, as atonement for your crime.”

The punishment was not death. It was worse. It was a living death. They would be ruined, disgraced, their names a byword for folly and dishonor for generations to come. They would live, but they would live as ghosts, haunting the city they had once held influence in, a constant, public reminder of the price of crossing House Ferrum.

“The guards will escort you to the Bursar’s office to begin the… liquidation process,” Roy concluded, turning his back on them, the matter, in his mind, finished. “Do not let me see your faces in this hall again.”