Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL) Chapter 270: Chapter 264: I Can Deal With Both

Damian didn’t blink. "Who designed the trigger?"

Callahan hesitated.

Gregoris stepped forward once. That was enough.

"Olivier," Callahan said, the na falling from his mouth like it burned. "It was him."

He didn’t look up; he couldn’t.

"He knew that Gabriel would kill him if it ant the Empire would be safe," he continued, his voice cracking now—not from remorse, but from the pressure of mory collapsing under truth. "So he made sure it would never co to that. He bound Gabriel’s soul to the wards of the Empire itself. Said it was poetic—that if Gabriel ever turned on the contract, if he ever tried to sever it by force, it wouldn’t be George or Hadeon or any of us that killed him..."

He drew a shallow, shuddering breath.

"It would be the Empire. The ether. The very thing he bled to protect."

The room didn’t move. Not a breath stirred.

Gregoris, silent at Damian’s side, didn’t speak—because he understood. The cruelty of it wasn’t the trigger. It was the design.

"That’s everything you know?" Damian said, his tone no longer sharp but hollowed with mockery, amusent drawn not from humor but from the sheer predictability of it all.

He crouched, slow and unhurried, one knee balanced with elegance, the hem of his coat brushing the stone as if even gravity itself knew better than to interrupt.

He looked at Callahan—not like a man, not like a traitor, but like an object, half-functioning, barely worth the effort it took to destroy.

"These are hardly news to ," Damian said, his voice dropping into sothing colder, crueler. "You’ve fed fragnts of a story I wrote the ending to a long ti ago. A seal. A trigger. Olivier’s poetry and your cowardice stitched together and tied to the spine of a boy you all thought would stay on his knees."

Callahan twitched, but didn’t move.

"You think I didn’t already suspect him?" Damian asked, head tilted slightly, like he was observing a faulty construct rather than a man. "That I didn’t question how my mate managed to survive a contract he should’ve never been bound by?"

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

"Gabriel told more in silence than you just managed with your entire mind bleeding open."

A pause.

"Try better."

Callahan was shaking now, his eyes unfocused, the weight of what he was saying pressing deeper into the space between breath and silence.

"I thought it was an anchor. I thought he was tied to the system—stabilizing it. But it wasn’t that." Callahan dragged a breath that sounded like it hurt. "It wasn’t the Empire he was bound to."

He looked up.

"It was Olivier; I’m not lying." Callahan repeated the na like it would save him.

The words should have sounded mad. They didn’t.

"They hid the frawork under a spell matrix—called it a failsafe. Said it would hold Gabriel’s mind intact while the contract settled. But it didn’t. It rewrote him. Piece by piece."

His voice dropped to sothing smaller.

"You can’t rewrite a soul unless you make space. So they took his mories. They cleared the room. Then they planted him inside."

"Olivier’s soul?" Damian asked. Not surprised. Just confirming.

Callahan nodded.

"He died during the rebellion. But not completely. Not cleanly," Callahan said, voice fraying at the edges. "The high-order casters warned it wouldn’t last—said the vessel wouldn’t hold him forever. They thought Gabriel’s body would reject him eventually..."

A pause.

"Or," he whispered, "if he had a mate and a child, Olivier’s soul could be reborn."

Gregoris didn’t move. Not even to breathe.

Damian straightened slowly, the shift of weight graceful and cold, as if the air around him had changed texture, thickening under sothing that had no na but all the gravity of divine judgnt.

"You built a womb for a dead man," Damian said, and the quiet that followed wasn’t silence—it was condemnation.

Callahan trembled. "I didn’t know—"

"So not only do you bind a young man—" Damian’s voice sharpened, but never rose, the rhythm controlled and surgical, "—not even of age, not even awakened—to the wards of the Empire like a living keystone you could bleed at will—"

He took a step closer, slow enough to make Callahan flinch.

"—but you hollowed him out to plant a ghost inside him. You turned Gabriel into a walking vessel for Olivier. Not out of strategy. Not out of loyalty. But because you were afraid of what he might beco if he was ever left intact."

He didn’t stop.

"Hadeon didn’t kill him because of the first bind," Damian said, voice tightening around the words like a wire. "Because as long as Gabriel lived, so did the wards. So did the leash on the capital. He couldn’t touch him—no one could."

He crouched again, just far enough to look Callahan in the eye without the illusion of rcy.

"And you," Damian said, "you wanted him bonded to Max for the second."

Callahan didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to.

"You would’ve secured the bloodline," Damian said. "You would’ve made Gabriel bear Olivier again—through a child not even his own."

A beat.

"No wonder you kept calling it duty," he said. "It sounds cleaner than possession."

Callahan broke then—not loudly, not violently, but in the quiet collapse of a man who had believed, right up until now, that there was still a way to crawl out alive.

Damian stood.

"Then it’s a good thing I’m his mate," he said, voice steady—too steady. Not hopeful. Not proud. Just certain, like the weight of mountains knowing they will not be moved.

"I can deal with both."

And then, quieter—sharp enough to flay:

"Gregoris, find the rest he’s hiding."

Gregoris nodded once, already moving before the breath of silence could settle—before the air rembered how to shift around what had just been said.

He didn’t look at Damian.

Instead, he looked at the man who had thought that offering a piece of the truth would be enough to spare him—that leaking poison in asured drops could cleanse five years of quiet treason.

Callahan had already died.

The mont Damian sent Alexander to recover him alive, the mont the order had been worded as retrieval instead of execution—that was the mont his fate was sealed.

All that was needed now was confirmation. A trace of sothing Damian had already uncovered.

And Gregoris was not here to weigh rcy.

He crouched beside the crumpled figure without hesitation, gloved fingers tilting Callahan’s chin with just enough pressure to remind him that cooperation was no longer a request—it was a technicality.

"Do not faint," Gregoris said simply. "You’ll want to be lucid for this."

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