I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 59: A Debt to Be Paid

"Your Grace! God, your shoulder...." Cherion’s voice wavered. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the knife sticking out of the Duke’s back. It looked wrong. Like something cheap and cowardly had no right touching him.

But Zarius? Zarius didn’t even flinch. He didn’t hiss in pain, didn’t grunt, didn’t so much as stagger. He just stood there, treating the assassination attempt with the same level of concern one might give to a particularly persistent mosquito in high summer.

The silence lasted for exactly three heartbeats. Then, the world exploded.

"Move! Down on the ground! Now!"

Elios and his riders came like a breaking wave. hooves thundering, men shouting, metal clanging in a wild, chaotic chorus. Before Soren could even register the failure of his strike, or perhaps because he was already too far gone to care, he was slammed into the frozen dirt. The soldiers pinned him with a lack of ceremony that bordered on the brutal, knees pressed into his spine and faces shoved into the slush.

Soren wasn’t fighting. That was the truly unsettling part. He was incoherent, a pathetic, sobbing mess of a man wailing Zarius’s name over and over again, as if the repetition might somehow rewrite the last sixty seconds of his life. His mind had clearly snapped, the realization that he had actually spilled the blood of the man he worshipped finally shattering whatever glass remained of his sanity.

Zarius turned slowly. He reached over his opposite shoulder, his leather glove creaking in the stillness. With a wet, muffled thwac, the Duke simply wrenched the dagger out of his own muscle. He didn’t look at it. He just let the bloody steel slip from his fingers, watching it vanish into a drift of snow as if it were a piece of worthless trash.

"Is this," Zarius began, his voice dropping low, so low it seemed to vibrate through the ground, "the extent of your loyalty, Soren?"

Soren didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was hyperventilating, his chest heaving as he stared at the blood beginning to bloom across the back of the Duke’s tunic.

"Your Grace, for the love of everything, stop playing the hero and sit down!" Cherion scrambled toward him before grabbing at Zarius’s arm. "You’re bleeding! You’re literally leaking through your clothes, you absolute, self-sacrificing idiot! Why didn’t you use your sword? Why did you use your actual, physical body as a shield?"

Zarius looked down. He didn’t look like a man who had just been stabbed. He looked bored. Truly, deeply bored.

"It’s a scratch, Cherion," he muttered, his gaze finally shifting from the traitor to the boy at his side. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

He didn’t listen to the medical scolding. Instead, Zarius’s eyes scanned Cherion’s miserable state. He saw the missing shoe, the shivering frame, the tired face, and the way the boy’s silver hair was matted with pine needles and dirt.

A low, vibrating growl started deep in the Duke’s chest. Without a word, he took off his own massive, fur-lined cloak. It was heavy enough to crush a smaller man, but he draped it over Cherion’s shoulders anyway, wrapping him in a scent of cedar, cold iron, and that strange, metallic scent that always followed him.

"Stay here," Zarius commanded.

He turned back to Soren.

As Zarius walked toward the man pinned on the ground, the forest itself seemed to hold its breath. Then he let it out, a low, vibrating rumble from deep in his chest, a presence so raw and alive it pressed on every living thing in the clearing

Cherion felt the weight of it in his lungs, but the soldiers? The soldiers were actually buckling. Behind him, he heard the dull thud of knees hitting the snow as the elite riders, men hardened by a decade of border wars, struggling to stay upright in the shadow of their lord’s anger.

Zarius only cared about one thing. What was his. Had been touched. Threatened. Hunted.

"He’s a pest, My Lord!" Soren shrieked from the dirt, his face purple with the effort of breathing under the pressure. "A leech! He’s a parasite from the Capital sent to drain you! He will bring nothing but ruin to the North! I did it for you! I did it for Valtrane!"

Zarius didn’t stop. He stood over Soren, his shadow swallowing the smaller man whole.

"Flio told me to just dismiss you," Zarius said, his voice a gravelly, terrifying whisper. "He said you were a loyal dog who had simply lost his way. He asked for mercy. I should have listened to my own instincts. I knew you were a mistake the moment you looked at him with that filth in your eyes."

Zarius drew his own blade.

The sword slid from its scabbard with a long, screaming whistle that cut through the pines. Snow whipped around Zarius’s feet in a sudden, furious swirl, as if the wind itself obeyed him.

"One will answer for what they’ve done," Zarius murmured, the word sounding more like a prayer than a sentence. "Every one of them. No exceptions. The debt will be collected, whether they live to see it or not

He raised the sword high. The moonlight caught the edge, making it look like a sliver of the frozen sky had come down to judge the earth.

Soren closed his eyes, his breathing hitching as he waited for the steel to descend. The soldiers turned their heads, unable to watch the Duke go full-on rage.

No. Not like this.

Just as the sword swung down fast, a flash of silver and dark fur shot forward.

Cherion didn’t think. He didn’t worry about the sword that could cut him in two. He lunged, hands wrapping around Zarius’s massive forearm, fingers digging into the leather.

The blade stopped.

Zarius didn’t look at first. His whole body was tight, coiled like he was holding himself together with sheer will.

"Your Grace," Cherion whispered, his voice the only steady thing in the clearing. "Stop. Look at me."

Zarius didn’t realize it, but his arm began to shake under Cherion’s touch. His breath came in a ragged, pained huff, his gaze slowly, painfully shifting away from the traitor on the ground and upward, until it finally locked onto Cherion’s blue eyes.