Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)-Chapter 361 - 355: Rosaline’s end (2)

Gabriel only sighed slowly and long, as if she weren’t worth breathing, as if he’d been hoping, really hoping, for something more original after all this time.

Her hands clawed at his wrist, knuckles white, nails biting into skin that didn’t flinch. She kicked once, but there was no force behind it. Just desperation disguised as defiance.

"You’re a liar!" she gasped, voice hoarse against the pressure of his palm. "The child was Damian’s! It was!"

Gabriel didn’t even blink. His hand didn’t tremble. He didn’t tighten his grip; there was no need to. She was already fraying without his assistance.

He tilted his head slowly, watching her struggle as if he were inspecting a trapped moth behind glass. There was no heat in his eyes, just a quiet disdain that came from knowing how this would always end.

"I thought," he murmured, voice low and silk-soft, "that the first rule of lying was knowing your audience. But then again, I suppose you’ve never been very good at rules."

Her mouth parted like she meant to speak again. She licked her lips slowly, deliberately, as if she was enjoying the moment before the bite. A wicked smirk curved her lips, dragging false sweetness over rot.

"Do you think your child is better?" she asked, her voice sharp with venom and thick with something more than spite. "If they ever think it’s less than Damian wants, he’ll get rid of it, just like he did with mine."

The words settled in the room like blood in water. Heavy. Ugly.

Gabriel didn’t flinch.

He simply looked at her, the way someone might look at a rotting fruit on a silver plate: disgusted, but not surprised. His fingers didn’t tighten, didn’t tremble. But something in his eyes went still, like a blade being sheathed just for the pleasure of drawing it again slower.

"My child," he said, voice a breath above silence, "is already more wanted than you’ve ever been in your entire life."

And then, as if remembering she was still pinned, still speaking, he leaned forward, close enough that his breath ghosted against her cheek.

"You’re not in pain because Damian discarded you," he said. "You’re in pain because he never looked at you in the first place."

From the doorway, Alexander still didn’t move. But his head tilted slightly, a faint gleam in his eyes. Not shocked, he’d expected Gabriel to be sharp. But this?

This was cruel.

Rosaline made a sound, something between a sob and a laugh, but it came out strangled against the pressure at her throat. Her smirk had crumbled. What remained was raw.

And Gabriel... Gabriel finally let go.

Rosaline collapsed against the wall with a soundless gasp, one hand flying to her throat, the other catching her balance. Her breath came in broken, high-pitched pulls, but she didn’t cry. Couldn’t. She was still trying to understand how the world had turned on its axis, how he had turned out to be the monster in the room.

Gabriel didn’t spare her a glance.

"Alexander," he said, already turning toward the door, his voice smooth as silk on glass, "have Rosaline try coffee the way Damian likes it."

There was no cruelty in his tone. Only instruction. Like a recommendation passed along at a formal dinner.

Alexander said nothing at first, but his smirk widened, teeth just barely visible as he straightened from the doorframe with the kind of grace that belonged to the Lyons by blood and the Shadows by nature. He knew exactly what that meant. And more importantly, what she didn’t yet understand.

Gabriel was going to serve Rosaline the same poison Hadeon had slipped into Damian’s cup. A subtle destroyer. An ether-reactive cocktail designed to break a mind from the inside out, carefully dosed, agony without the grace of death.

For someone like Rosaline, it would be hell before it ended.

"Oh," Gabriel added, pausing at the doorway, his profile lit by the sterile white glow of containment. "And keep her alive a month after it."

Rosaline tried to speak, tried to summon venom or rage or anything that sounded like control, but the words lodged in her throat like the echo of his fingers still there.

And then he was gone, leaving silence, the scent of cold tea and burned paper in his wake.

—

For a long moment after the door closed, Alexander didn’t move.

The silence in the containment chamber felt thicker now, oppressive even. Not because of Rosaline’s wheezing breaths or the faint scuff of her boot on polished stone as she staggered upright again but because of what had just passed through. Gabriel wasn’t a soldier, hadn’t trained in the Shadow barracks, and hadn’t clawed his way through the hierarchy of dominance and command. And yet—

Alexander had seen trained killers blink when Damian entered a room.

But they flinched when Gabriel smiled.

He tilted his head slightly, watching Rosaline with the detached curiosity of a man trained to read death before it landed. Her hands were still at her throat, bruises already blooming in violent shades across pale skin, not from brute strength, though there was that too, but from precision. Gabriel hadn’t lost control. He’d chosen to pin her like that. And then walked away without so much as a shift in his coat.

Alexander exhaled once through his nose. Quiet, impressed.

"Tell me," he said mildly, stepping into the room now that it had grown still again. "Do you know how many people get to see that side of him?"

Rosaline didn’t answer. She was trembling, more in disbelief than fear, and it made her look fragile in a way that was almost funny, if one had no sense of morality left.

Alexander’s smile never reached his eyes.

"Three," he said softly. "Maybe four, if you count that failed assassin from the northern border." He crouched just enough to meet her eye, voice still calm. "But none of them got a second chance." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ

He stood again, rolling his sleeves back with the precision of a man who preferred order, even in vengeance.

"Oh, and Rosaline?" he added as he opened the small steel case near the wall and removed a sealed silver ampoule, the coffee. "He was being polite. That’s why you’re still breathing."

He didn’t wait for a reply.

The preparation would take time. But Alexander, like Gabriel, had no intention of rushing. After all, poison was only ever as effective as the patience of the man who administered it.

And Gabriel had just ordered thirty days of patience.

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