bookpub Chapter 371 --371
Chapter 371 --371
Samuel’s response was a low, vicious snarl of pure disgust.
"It is so incredibly unlucky. They are actively wishing for you to be dead, printing your face on mourning banners while you are standing right here. How *dare* they use your image for this ominous, disgusting farce?"
Heena’s eyes crinkled beneath her veil. A quiet chuckle caught in her throat.
"Relax, guard. Let them enjoy their performance while they still can." She tilted her head toward the stage, watching the Marquis dab at his eyes with practiced sorrow. "The curtains are about to come down."
---
Of course, at a dramatic moment like this, any typical protagonist worth their salt would have shoved their way to the front, ripped off their veil, and screamed their accusations for the entire world to hear.
Would Heena do that?
Absolutely not.
Had her head been kicked by a donkey that she would even consider such absolute nonsense? Come on. She couldn’t seriously just leap up and accuse her *lovely* biological parents of attempted murder in front of a crowd of high-society vipers with absolutely no groundwork laid. If she did that — if she went charging in half-cocked, dramatic and righteous and foolish — these people would have her spinning in the wind before she even finished her sentence. They would call her a lunatic. An impostor. A desperate, shameless creature who had crawled out of whatever gutter she’d been hiding in.
She wasn’t an idiot.
So Heena waited.
She stood perfectly still in the shadow of the crowd, her posture easy and unhurried, and watched with cold, detached amusement as the Marquis squeezed out a few more theatrical tears. The man had real talent for this. A pity he’d chosen villainy over the stage. He raised both hands toward the heavens, his voice cracking on perfect cue as he reached the climax of his speech — all grief, all devastation, all carefully orchestrated loss.
"If only you were here, my sweet daughter... you would have stepped forward, looked at us, and you would have said..."
"Happy anniversary, Maa."
The voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.
It was clear, smooth, and entirely unbothered — cutting through the heavy, mournful atmosphere of the courtyard like a razor drawn slowly through silk.
What followed was not noise. What followed was the complete and total *absence* of it. A silence so sudden and so absolute that it felt less like quiet and more like something physical — like the air itself had been snatched out of the space and hadn’t yet decided whether to return.
The Marquis’s script died somewhere in the back of his throat. The Marchioness froze mid-sob, her lace handkerchief still pressed to her cheek, suspended in an expression of grief that had abruptly forgotten its purpose. Hundreds of noble guests turned their heads in perfect, terrible unison — and the crowd parted. It parted the way crowds do when something happens that nobody has the language for yet, rippling outward like a stone dropped into still water, until every eye in that courtyard was locked on the black-veiled young woman standing in their midst, and the towering, lethal guard positioned directly behind her like a shadow with teeth.
With a slow, agonizingly deliberate motion of one hand, Heena reached up to the knot at the back of her head.
She pulled the black silk away and let it fall.
It dropped carelessly to the cobblestones, pooling like a small dark tide around the toe of her shoe. She lifted her chin. The afternoon light fell across her face in full, unobstructed, and merciless.
And she *smiled.*
It was soft. Breathtakingly gentle. The kind of smile that bloomed at the corners of her eyes before it reached her mouth — warm, luminous, and overflowing with a filial affection so pure, so perfectly calibrated, that it looked almost terrifyingly genuine. The kind of smile that made you want to believe it.
The Marquis and Marchioness stared at her.
The blood drained from their faces in real time.
Their mouths fell open — not in the practiced grief of an anniversary ceremony, but in the blank, gutted shock of people whose carefully constructed world had just detonated beneath their feet. Weeks of meticulous planning. Months of mourning campaigns. Tears wept on schedule, banners commissioned, guests carefully curated to witness the performance.
All of it — *all of it* — evaporating in the time it took a dead girl to smile.
Off to the side of the grand stage, the four adopted grooms froze in unison. They had been standing tall all afternoon with the polished ease of co-hosts who had rehearsed this event thoroughly — charming, composed, the picture of well-bred elegance. The sophisticated smiles they had been wearing shattered so completely that the pieces didn’t even scatter. They simply ceased to exist.
Their hands gripped their wine glasses. And kept gripping them. Crystal was not designed to withstand that particular variety of aristocratic dread, and several glasses came dangerously close to proving it.
Their eyes were locked on her. On the glowing, radiant woman standing at the center of the crowd like she had every right in the world to be there — like she had never left, like no blade had ever found her, like she was simply *late to a party* and found the whole thing mildly amusing.
To the entire Marquis household, it did not look like an estranged daughter had walked through the front gates.
It looked exactly like they had seen a ghost.
---
Heena stepped forward.
Her movements were fluid, unhurried, the pace of someone with nowhere to be and no one to fear. She walked directly to the Marchioness. Without a shred of hesitation, she stepped into the woman’s space and wrapped her arms around her, burying her face into the curve of her neck.
"Happy anniversary, Mom."
To the surrounding crowd, her tone sounded natural. Easy. The slightly imprecise vocal inflection of the original Seera — high-pitched, earnest, the cadence of a girl who had been away a long time and hadn’t quite found her footing yet — was close enough to ring true. The Marchioness was still rigid beneath her arms, body locked between two simultaneous, contradictory impulses: the instinct to pull away, and the high-society mask demanding she perform a mother’s joy.
Before either one could win, Heena leaned closer.
And whispered a single word directly into her ear.
*"Mama."*
The Marchioness trembled.
It was subtle — invisible to anyone watching — but Heena felt it clearly. A violent, involuntary shiver that moved through the older woman’s frame like a current. Because that word. That *specific* word, in that specific register, that childish high-pitched pitch that a twelve-year-old Seera had used when she was naive and trusting and completely attached to her mother — a word the real Seera had stopped using entirely after the age of fifteen —
Only someone who had genuinely *been* that girl would have known to say it that way.
And yet here she was, saying it. Delivered with flawless, surgical precision by a girl who should, by all accounts, be dead.
Heena released the hug smoothly before the woman could recover her composure or form a single coherent question. She turned her brilliant smile onto the assembled nobility — warm, radiant, the perfect image of a daughter overwhelmed by the joy of homecoming — and then stepped toward the Marquis.