[BL]Reborn as the Empire's Most Desired Omega Chapter 54: Built to Be Broken

"Is it a myth?" Caelan asked.

"No," Lucius said. "Not anymore."

He paused.

"Agatha wasn’t just a clause. Misty negotiated with it. Ophelia rembers the language—’Lucas’s na written in ink.’ Misty said Lucas could do sothing her daughter couldn’t. That Agatha wanted him specifically."

Another silence followed. Not a pause—a decision being made.

"And Odin?"

"A broker. Possibly more. He was involved in transnational trafficking circuits out of Saha. Quiet. Clean. Disconnected from everything except results."

"I’ll contact the Black Archive," Caelan said. "Pull whatever na Odin used at the ti. If Misty’s kids are tied to it, we need to know how deep this goes."

Lucius opened the folder again, fingers resting on the corner of the page with Lucas’s contract.

"There’s more," he said. "Ophelia said Misty had expected a bid by now. She started preparing an ’expedited option’ if no offer ca through by twenty-five. She didn’t explain it—but it sounds like she planned a second sale. Or worse."

Caelan’s voice dropped, cold and final.

"Lucas is barely eighteen."

Lucius closed the folder slowly, his thumb brushing over the na at the bottom of the contract just once.

"How the fuck did she change to this?" Caelan asked, his voice low but sharp—cutting through the line like a knife pressed to glass. "This makes no sense. Misty was a social climber, not a strategist. She was greedy, short-sighted—she wouldn’t have been capable of building sothing this... layered."

Lucius didn’t answer imdiately.

Because Caelan was right—and wrong.

"Maybe she didn’t build it," Lucius said at last, quietly. "Maybe she inherited it."

He paused, his eyes fixed on the pale sky beyond the window, the spires of the palace now close enough to cast long shadows across the rear courtyard.

"We’re on the right path."

Caelan didn’t speak right away. The shift in his breathing said enough for Lucius to know how mad his father was about Misty.

"Who is going to tell Trevor?" Lucius asked.

"Because," Lucius continued, "he seems awfully interested in getting revenge after Lucas dissociated at the Gala. From what I’ve heard, he hasn’t left the boy’s side since. And Serathine’s estate is now locked tighter than half the imperial vaults."

Caelan exhaled slowly, but it wasn’t calm—it was restraint stretched to its limit, the kind that ca from holding back sothing far sharper than anger.

"I don’t want Trevor getting the full file," he said, asured. "But he knows everything until now, and he can be very creative when pushed."

Lucius said nothing, but he didn’t have to. The mont Caelan gave permission to leak, the next move beca obvious.

"Send him the news about Odin being implicated," Caelan continued. "Make it sound like we’re still piecing it together. Just enough to stir him. Not enough to make him act without us."

Lucius tilted his head slightly, the flicker of a smile—sharp, brief—crossing his features.

"Let him think he’s ahead of the curve."

Caelan didn’t respond.

Lucius tapped a finger once against the folder resting on his knee. "He’ll assu Odin’s connected to the sa people who tried to silence Lucas the first ti. He’ll want to retaliate. He’ll reach out to Serathine, lock down the estate, maybe even try to move Lucas under his own title."

"And if he does?"

Lucius shrugged. "We’ll let him. It buys us ti."

Caelan’s voice turned cold again.

"I don’t care how angry he gets. What I care about is keeping Lucas out of Agatha’s reach and his title and power do that well. Honestly, there is no better pair for Lucas than him."

"You think Trevor can protect him."

"I think Trevor already is," Caelan said. "And I think Lucas will let him."

Lucius looked up, reading more in his father’s tone than the words alone. "You’re not just making a tactical match."

"No."

Caelan didn’t offer anything else for a mont. Then, quieter—but not softer:

"I abandoned him before he even knew he existed. I can’t fix that. But I can make sure he’s not used again."

—

The office was quiet.

Too quiet for an afternoon like this.

Trevor sat behind the desk, though he hadn’t touched a pen in over fifteen minutes. The docunt from the palace had been opened and set aside.

Across from him, Serathine stood by the tall windows, arms crossed loosely over her chest, watching the cherry blossoms falling off the garden stonework like they might offer answers. Her coat still hung from her shoulders—she hadn’t even sat down.

"Ophelia confird that Faceless Agatha exists," Trevor said, his voice flat. "And gave Lucius another na: Odin."

"Too brief," Serathine replied, still not turning. "They’re hiding sothing."

She spoke it like a weather report. Absolute. Inevitable. Disdain buried just beneath the surface.

Trevor leaned back in the chair, eyes fixed on the half-read file on his desk. It didn’t take much to feel how incomplete it was. The tone was polished. The formatting imperial. But the content?

Curated.

"Their report gave exactly enough to be suspicious and not enough to act," he said. "It wasn’t ant to inform—it was ant to calm down."

Serathine humd, the kind of sound she used when sothing amused her in a deeply disappointing way.

Trevor ran a hand down his face. "They don’t trust ."

"They trust you," Serathine said mildly. "They just don’t think you’ll be obedient."

That landed.

Trevor’s mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile.

"I’ve already had to rewrite four staff contracts this week," he muttered. "Every ti Lucas’s na shows up in a sealed clause, soone panics. We can’t even get his dical files from before the estate transfer."

"And you won’t," Serathine said, finally turning. Her gaze was clear, cold, and familiar—the sa look she wore in war rooms and boardrooms alike. "Because they were sealed the mont Caelan realized whose son he was. Good thing I got them before Caelan had ti to act."

Trevor didn’t flinch.

He simply breathed once, slowly, before saying what had been sitting in the back of his throat for days.

"I think they knew about Agatha before we did."

Serathine sat down, finally.

And said, without hesitation: "Of course they did."

The silence that followed was taut.

Trevor spoke first.

"We keep the NDAs."

"Yes."

"And we keep the court out of the estate."

Serathine nodded.

"They can manage their throne," she said. "We’ll manage the boy."

Trevor looked down at the na scrawled in the margins of the sealed docunt—Faceless Agatha—and wondered if Lucas had ever heard it before.

He hoped not.

But a part of him suspected he had.