The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

Chapter 817: 817. Honesty Is The Most Lethal Material In Existence, According To Me

Rex stood in the garden, his hands steady at his sides. He listened to the speech, a masterpiece of sincere, brutal honesty, and realized he was the one who had provided the conditions for this very moment.

He had been the catalyst for the carnage, the hand that had redirected the meteor, the force that had turned a massacre into a sacrifice. He kept his face a mask of respectful solemnity, refusing to dwell on the cold, mathematical truth beneath the ceremony’s weight: that the death of Veylor was a calculated outcome of a high-stakes engagement.

He glanced at Iris. She stood three meters to his left, her eyes fixed on Valentina.

She was listening to the words about cost and value, but her spirit seemed to be miles away, standing on those western cliffs, feeling a wind that actually meant something.

Rex watched her, and a dry, clinical thought drifted through his mind: ’Grief is the most honest thing a human being produces.’

’And honesty, when handled with precision, is the most lethal and useful material in existence.’

He filed that away, too.

Then, he turned his attention back to the speaker, letting the weight of the fallen settle over the garden like a shroud.

...

The afternoon drifted by in that heavy, suspended way that follows a public tragedy: the city was simultaneously frantic with the administrative machinery of cleanup and eerily quiet with the collective emotional hangover of the mourners. The gears of Aethelgard were turning, but they felt sluggish, grinding through the dust of the morning’s grief.

Rex was making his way from the garden toward the Academy’s residential district, his mind already beginning to categorize the day’s data, when Iris fell into step beside him.

She had been crying again since the ceremony. The evidence was etched into her face: the slight puffiness of her eyelids and the telltale redness of the waterline, but her body refused to betray her.

She walked with that lethal, assassin-class posture, a spine of iron and a stride of predatory grace that served as her baseline regardless of the internal wreckage. The contradiction was jarring: her eyes were the eyes of a grieving woman, but her silhouette was that of a weapon.

It was the specific look of someone caught in a silent war between her humanity and her training, a woman who had not yet decided which of the two would ultimately claim her.

They walked in a silence that wasn’t empty but dense. The manicured garden paths eventually gave way to the cold, unyielding stone of the residential corridors, and Rex allowed the silence to sit between them, treating it like a tool, something to be used for its utility rather than something to be filled with nervous chatter.

"The cliffs," Iris said suddenly. Her voice was low, cutting through the ambient noise of the city like a sharp blade.

"Yes," Rex replied.

"It was quieter than I expected," she said, her gaze fixed on the horizon beyond the stone walls. "The wind... he always said it was there."

"He said it was always there..."

"For a long time, I wasn’t sure if he meant that literally or if he was just using one of those vague, poetic metaphors people use when they lack the precise language to describe a feeling." She turned her head slightly, her eyes catching the dying light. "He meant it literally..."

"The wind is a constant... It doesn’t care who is standing in it."

Rex watched the way the light played across her features, noting the subtle tension in her jaw.

"You went," he said. It wasn’t a question; it was an observation of her movement through the day.

"Before the ceremony," she clarified. "At the fifth hour."

"The sun was just starting to burn through the haze..."

"I needed to go somewhere that was his... before I had to stand in a place where he belonged to everyone."

Rex remained quiet, allowing the weight of her sentiment to settle. He was calculating the psychological necessity of her pilgrimage, the need to claim a private piece of the dead before the public swallowed the memory whole.

"What was it like?" he asked.

Iris took a breath, a deep, measured inhalation, the kind a soldier takes before a high-stakes engagement. She was deciding how much of the truth to reveal, weighing the precision of her answer against the vulnerability it required.

"Loud," she said finally. "But not the kind of loud that demands your attention."

"Not the roar of a battlefield or the screaming of a crowd that wants something from you..."

"It was loud in the way the world is loud when it isn’t asking for anything at all..."

"Just a massive, indifferent, roaring presence." She paused, her gaze dropping to the stone beneath her feet. "I stood there for a long time..."

"The ceremony almost started without me... I nearly let it."

"But you came back," Rex said.

"He would have been angry if I had missed it," she said.

As she spoke, the flat, hollowed-out tone she had worn at the graveside shifted. It wasn’t a total break in her composure, but something more complex emerged: a flicker of warmth, a ghost of a smile that was more painful than a sob.

"He had a very specific, very stubborn relationship with obligation..."

"He loathed them... He hated the structure, the rules, the ’shoulds’ of life."

"But he believed they mattered. That contradiction made him a man who showed up to every single thing he would rather not attend... and complained about the whole damn time."

Rex turned his head, his gaze catching the subtle, almost imperceptible softening of her features.

"You are smiling," he said. It wasn’t a question of surprise but a clinical observation of a phenomenon, a sudden, unexpected shift in her emotional weather.

And she was. It was a fragile thing, a microscopic fracture in her stoicism.

It was the kind of smile that only appears when a memory arrives with such sudden, sharp clarity that it manages to outpace the crushing weight of the grief attached to it. It was a smile born of a ghost.

"He would not have approved of the ceremony’s speaker selection," she said, her voice regaining its strength, though it was laced with a bittersweet warmth. "He had opinions about oratory. Very specific, very stubborn ones."

"He used to say that most people who spoke at funerals were just performing loss, putting on a costume of sorrow to satisfy the crowd rather than actually describing the jagged, ugly reality of it."

"And Valentina?" Rex asked, testing the boundary of the memory.

"Lady Valentina was the exception," Iris said.

She fell silent for a moment, her eyes tracing the lines of the corridor as if she could see Veylor standing there, leaning against the stone with a scowl and a wry comment. "He would have said she actually understood what she was talking about."

"He respected that above almost everything else: the ability to look at a tragedy without blinking and to speak of it without lying."

They took a few more steps, the rhythmic sound of their boots against the stone the only thing breaking the heavy air between them.

"Thank you," she said.

The words were delivered with her trademark precision: flat, direct, and stripped of all the social fluff that usually accompanied gratitude. It was a heavy, unadorned truth, a declaration of meaning that required no softening to be felt.

"Yes," Rex replied.

He didn’t offer a platitude; he simply acknowledged the weight of the sentiment.

"For the cliffs," she added, her voice dropping an octave. "For coming."

"You asked," Rex said.

He was reminding her of the causality, the simple logic of the interaction. He had not acted out of a sense of duty, but in response to her specific, unvarnished request.

Iris stopped walking for a fraction of a second, her gaze meeting his with an intensity that felt like a physical pressure.

"People ask for things they do not expect to receive," she said, her eyes searching his, looking for the man behind the mask of the observer. "I asked because it seemed right to ask... not because I had any confidence that you would actually show up."