Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 1081

"Yes, my Lord."

{It was Purity, my child. The Last Warden has come to know of our activity here.}

Senithe went very still.

So. The probe above had been Seraphiel?

She had suspected it from the moment the Eye had spoken of a probe — who else in this sphere would have the audacity to press divine pressure against a seal of this making? — but the confirmation settled into her bones with a cold, heavy weight. The weight of a name she had not wanted to speak aloud.

The Last Warden of Purity.

{Yes,} the Eye said, answering the thought she had not voiced. {They have sent her. They are afraid of the Prince's awakening. They have moved the only hand in their choir that could be spared for a hunt of this magnitude, and she has now learned — because of a man followed into my sanctum — that I AM involved in his trajectory. This was not how I intended her to learn.}

The Dark Regent, who had not yet spoken, lifted his head a fraction. "My Lord. May I."

{Speak.}

"If the Warden is already on this sphere, she will report what she has seen to the Source before the sun next rises above the mortal hemisphere. The Source will adjust. Our window of quiet accumulation has closed."

{It has closed... indeed.}

Senithe, still bowed, turned the thought carefully over in the back of her mind. Something in the Eye's account did not sit right. She did not raise the objection until she had weighed it twice — because she had learned long ago that interrupting the Eye with a half-formed word was a short road to the dark. Having weighed it, she spoke.

"My Lord. Forgive me."

{Speak your mind, Child.}

"If Purity herself had made contact with Daniel, I would have sensed her residue. Traces of her essence — no matter how disciplined, no matter how cloaked. A Warden of the First Morning cannot pass through a mortal man's blood without leaving the shape of her touch upon it. And I have been checking.

"Obsessively. I have touched his skin every night for two nights looking for exactly any signature because I know we're dealing with a very crafty man. There has been nothing."

The Eye waited.

"Which means," Senithe continued, slowly, "the mark was not hers."

{Go on.}

"Which means there is another hand. A hand Purity must have followed, perhaps without Purity knowing what it was following. A hand that marked my vessel for its own reasons, followed me, which led to Purity to discovering us."

A pause.

Then — cautiously, because it was the name one did not say lightly in this room — "The Valkyrie Divine ASI Goddess."

The Eye regarded her.

The slit in its center narrowed by a fraction. The golden tendrils at its edges rolled slowly, in a motion that was neither yes nor no.

{I would have felt the Valkyrie,} the Eye said finally. {Had she come within a thousand miles of this island, my barrier would have tasted her. She has a radiance that does not travel quietly. If she had pressed my seal, I would know. I would have spoken to you of her by name.}

Senithe inclined her head. "Then I am wrong."

{You are not wrong. You are incomplete.}

The golden tendrils at the edges of the Eye suddenly froze — then convulsed inward with violent, serpentine fury, lashing like whips of liquid starfire before snapping outward again in a storm of blinding radiance.

The chamber trembled. The not-floor rippled beneath their knees as though the entire realm had drawn a sharp, furious breath. The vertical slit of night at the Eye's center narrowed to a razor-thin line of absolute void, so sharp it seemed to cut the very light around it.

The temperature in the chamber plummeted.

A wave of ancient, primordial dread washed over them — the kind of dread that made gods themselves remember they were once mortal.

{Two and not once.}

The words rolled through the chamber like the first crack of doom. The Eye's voice, once vast and measured, now carried a low, seething undercurrent — something ancient, something hungry, and something that had not been stirred in countless ages.

The golden light flared violently, casting monstrous, writhing shadows that danced like condemned souls across the kneeling figures. The air itself grew heavy, oppressive, as though the god behind the Eye had leaned forward from its distant throne and fixed its full, merciless attention upon them.

"Yes, my Lord."

{I tasted only one.}

"Yes."

{Disciplined. Veiled. Of the choirs. Warden's work, unmistakable to me once her flame touched my skin. That was Purity. That was the touch I named.}

"Yes, my Lord."

{Which means the other dared to even train her senses at my veil — and my veil did not wake?!}