My Bratty Wife
Chapter 251 - Two Hundred And Fifty One

Chapter 251: Chapter Two Hundred And Fifty One

"It wasn’t hard, actually," Byron continued, his voice a low tone that was horrifically out of place amidst the tension. "I just gave him a taste of his own medicine. A slow, wasting poison that mimicked a ’natural’ decline. A fitting end for a man who took such pleasure in slow, agonizing destruction."

Ryan stared at his brother, utterly mortified, utterly broken. The grand conspiracy, the destabilization of the kingdom , the murders that had consumed his life for over a year – all of it, all of it stemmed from this deep, poisoned well of his brother’s grief and vengeful madness.

The monster he had been hunting for so long was not a stranger, but his own kin, a boy whose heart had been shattered and had regrown into something twisted and terrible. He was speechless, the pieces of his world reassembling themselves into a monstrous new picture he could barely comprehend.

Byron then turned his head, a thoughtful, almost witty look on his face, as if a new, interesting memory had just occurred to him. "Ah, yes," he said brightly. "The members of Parliament. You didn’t ask me why I killed them, did you?" He let out a soft, dry chuckle. "Oh, they did the most unbelievable thing to me, Ryan. Something truly unforgivable."

He surprised everyone by suddenly lowering himself to sit cross-legged on the cold, damp floor, his posture almost childlike, his bloody hands resting on his knees. He looked up at Ryan, his expression now strangely earnest, though his eyes still held a wild, manic gleam.

"Let me ask you something, brother," he said, his voice soft, intimate. "How would you feel... if you came back home one day, a little boy, no more than four years old, calling for your mother because you were hungry? And you find her, not in the kitchen, but dangling from a rafter in the main room, her feet just inches from the floor?" He leaned forward, his gaze intense. "You call her name, over and over, ’Mama, Mama,’ but she doesn’t answer. So you go to her, you reach up and you shake her dangling legs, wanting her to come down and play. And you feel how cold her skin is, how utterly, terrifyingly still she is." He held Ryan’s gaze, his own eyes wide and unblinking. "Tell me, Ryan. What would you have done? What does a four-year-old boy do then?"

Ryan was silent, frozen in absolute horror. The image Byron painted was so grotesque, so profoundly tragic, that it stole the air from his lungs. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even think.

The silence seemed to stretch for an eternity, thick and suffocating. It irked Byron. His soft, conversational demeanor shattered in an instant. "Answer me!" he roared, surging to his feet with a terrifying abruptness. He raised his pistol and fired a shot into the crumbling stone wall above Ryan’s head, the sound deafening in the confined space, showering them with dust and debris. He reloaded with frantic, jerky movements, his hands shaking with rage, and pointed the weapon back at Ryan’s chest. "ANSWER ME, GODDAMNIT!" he spat, his face twisted in a mask of fury and pain.

The guards and Davis, who had relaxed their stances slightly, immediately snapped back to attention, their swords and pistols once again trained on Byron, ready to act on Ryan’s slightest command.

But Ryan remained silent, his face a canvas of pure, unadulterated shock and a dawning, terrible pity.

Byron watched his brother’s silent, horrified reaction, and his rage seemed to deflate as quickly as it had erupted, replaced by a bitter, mocking understanding. "Exactly," he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "You do nothing. You say nothing. Because you don’t understand. I was quiet, Ryan. I was so, so quiet. The neighbors who found us said I hadn’t made a sound for hours. I didn’t know what was going on."

He began to pace again, his earlier maddening energy returning, but this time it was fueled by a torrent of painful memory. "The Parliament," he hissed, the name a curse on his lips. "Those noble, righteous men. They drove my mother to it. They drove her to that rope." He stopped and looked at Ryan, his expression a terrible mix of grief and madness. "They favored Duke Charles’s claim, you see. His claim of not accepting me, his bastard child. They were supposed to be her last hope."

He gestured wildly with his free hand. "Society was already cruel to her. A prostitute, they called her, a fallen woman who had the audacity to get pregnant and have a child out of wedlock. She couldn’t continue her... her old work after I was born, and no one would give her any other kind. We were starving. So she swallowed her pride, what little of it she had left, and she went to your father, our father, and she begged him to take responsibility for me, because she couldn’t do it alone anymore. And he refused. He laughed at her."

Byron’s voice cracked. "So she went to the Parliament. She submitted a petition. She thought they were supposed to be the voice of the oppressed, the upholders of justice. But they sided with him, with the powerful Duke of Carleton. They dismissed her petition, told her never to show her face in front of him again, and to never, ever expect anything from him or his house. The disgrace, the humiliation, the utter hopelessness... it led her to take her own life. She left me behind in a world that had no place for either of us."

He smiled then, a broken, tragic smile, as tears began to stream unheeded down his face. "And do you know the irony, brother? The beautiful, terrible irony? Your father, to save face, to avoid the scandalous whispers of his common whore and the whispers his bastard child dying of neglect on his doorstep, had to come and collect me himself. He had to bring me to Carleton to live in the shadow of his legitimate, beloved son, a constant, inconvenient reminder of his hypocrisy."

He stood there, a mess of contradictions, the ruthless murderer and the grieving, abandoned little boy, smiling through his tears, his confession hanging in the ruined air between them like a death covering.