Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 670

Chapter 670: A Mother’s Regret

Vespera regarded him through the projection. The silence between them carried more than two decades of marriage, five children, a guild built from nothing, and the slow, steady erosion of everything that had once held those things together.

"Because I felt like it," she said.

Magnus’s jaw locked.

"You felt like it."

"Yes."

"Our daughter is operating as a strange something above that bastard’s head on a live broadcast. The secret you said would be kept is hanging by a thread, and your explanation is that you felt like it. Did it not occur to you," Magnus demanded, and the control in his voice was a physical thing now, a cage built syllable by syllable, "to ask my opinion before making this decision?"

"No."

"No," Magnus repeated.

"I already know your opinion."

The silence that followed was intense. Magnus sat in his dark room with crystal fragments on his desk and blood on his knuckles and stared at the face of the woman he’d married, and he understood with perfect, horrible clarity that she had not consulted him because his opinion was irrelevant to her.

"This can’t go on," he said. "You understand that. Our family is fracturing. Our children are acting against the interests of the household. Alice has sided with the boy you removed for the good of this family, and now you just.... Changed your mind? You signed off on it. You watched it happen and said nothing to me."

He leaned forward.

"The Ashborn name means something. It meant something before the apocalypse arrived and it will mean something long after we’re gone. What you’ve done is a disgrace to everything we’ve built. We can’t let our children keep failing us like this without repercussions."

"I disagree."

"What?"

"It was us who failed them." Vespera’s voice remained exactly where it had been since the call began, flat and cold and utterly beyond his reach. "They are innocent. We are the ones who broke this family. We are the ones who broke our children and made them act against the family’s interests."

"Not this crap again!" Magnus’s composure finally cracked. The cage he’d built syllable by syllable splintered, and what came through was raw. "Not this sentimental nonsense! I made the hard decisions that kept this family relevant. Everything I did was to protect what we built, and you want to sit there and tell me our children are innocent? Alice defied her guild. Kaiden became a pornstar while wearing the family name. These are not the actions of innocent kids."

"They are the actions of children who were not loved correctly."

"Loved." Magnus spat the word. "You want to talk about love. You, Vespera. The woman who didn’t hold her own children until they were three months. You want to lecture me about love."

"I have been riddled with guilt about the way I acted as a mother toward my children for a very long time."

"When did this happen?" Magnus demanded. "When did you decide that being their mother mattered more than being their leader? You were the one who acted before I had. You were the one who expelled Kaiden from the family."

"I haven’t forgotten."

"Then what changed?"

"I did."

Two words. No elaboration. No defense. No apology.

Magnus stared at her.

"You can’t tell me that you’re okay with his behavior!"

Vespera was quiet for a moment.

Then something happened that Magnus had not seen ever since he married the woman.

She smiled.

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