Snow's breath hitched as she stared at the sharp, predatory gleam of my exposed fangs, her eyes quickly darting up to the thick cloth wrap binding my gouged right eye and the cold, unblinking intensity of my remaining green one. The domestic warmth of the dining room evaporated, replaced by an unsettling, heavy silence.
"Roxy… Why did you come here? We... we truly thought you were dead. White and I visited your grave just a few months ago in Town Allure. We wept for you, Roxy, and we eventually decided we had to move on. The Yellow Flower Guild has completely collapsed, and now... White is retiring from adventuring altogether. She's starting fresh, working as a Capital Knight under Roman's jurisdiction."
I sat perfectly rigid across from them, the light blue fabric of my thoughts tracking her words with mechanical precision. So White was retiring too, trading the lawless chaos of the frontier for the structured safety of the Capital Knights. It made sense. But I couldn't tell Snow that her daughter's peace depended entirely on me putting a bullet through the brain of her biological father.
I opened my mouth slightly, the elongated fangs catching the chandelier light, but no sound came out. The vocal cords that had been violently ruined during my descent into hell remained completely useless. I let a few heavy, agonizing seconds tick by in absolute silence, my gaze locked onto Snow's face without making a single gesture.
Cassius watched me from his side of the table, his usual smug arrogance entirely absent as he noticed the tight, scarred line of my throat.
Snow's eyes widened with a sudden, horrifying realization. She clutched her hands to her chest, her maternal instincts overriding her fear of my monstrous features.
"Roxy... why are you silent? You... you can't speak? Did they do that to you back at the castle?"
I offered her a single, slow, and deliberate nod.
The silence in the room grew thicker. I reached into my tattered crimson trench coat, my pale right hand pulling out my charcoal pencil and the notepad Sydney had given me. If I was going to squeeze the location of Laulif Flower out of his former wife before the chaotic siblings returned from the Bureau, I had to start writing.
I pressed the tip of my charcoal pencil to the notepad, writing with sharp, heavy strokes that nearly tore through the paper. Ripping the page out with a crisp snap, I slid it across the dark mahogany table directly to Snow Flower.
The note was brief, blunt, and devoid of any nostalgic warmth:
"GIVE ME ANSWERS."
Before she could even look up to question the cold demand, I reached into the deep inner pocket of my crimson trench coat with my pale right hand. I pulled out the dusty, wax-sealed file Sydney had handed me at the Bureau and dropped it onto the table with a dull thud, sliding it alongside the note.
Snow's fingers trembled as she picked up the documents. Her green eye scanned the ancestral records, her face instantly draining of whatever remaining color it had. She gasped, clutching the papers tightly against her chest.
"Wait… This... this is Laulif? That's my husband..." Snow whispered, her voice cracking as she stared at the official Bureau registry text.
Seeing that she had officially connected the dots, I didn't let her stall. I reached back into my leather purse and pulled out the heavy, leather-bound Registry of the Condemned. I flipped past the crossed-out, blood-stained profiles of Oksana, Don Anthony, and Cameron Gal, stopping at the very back page. I slammed my thumb down directly onto the inked portrait of Laulif Flower, pointing straight at his aristocratic, silver-haired face. Below his image, the bold, crimson stamp of the S-Rank designation and the 3-gold bounty glowed ominously under the chandelier light.
Cassius leaned forward from his side of the table, his eyes narrowing to slits as he stared at the black blacklist of the continent's apex targets.
Snow looked from the brutal registry to my single, cold green eye. The horrifying truth hit her like a physical blow… the girl she had loved like a daughter hadn't come to Manor 12 for a tearful family reunion. She had come as an executioner.
"Roxy… You're... you're going after my husband's head, right? You're going to kill him."
I didn't blink. I didn't flinch. I offered her a single, slow, and absolute nod of my head.
The silence in the dining room became suffocating. The man who had abandoned her and White Flower to build a subterranean flesh trade across the forbidden dimensional currents of the Milky Way Continent was officially my final target. To secure my own child's future and fund my retirement before the Bureau's three-month countdown ignited, I needed his blood… and I needed Snow to tell me exactly where to find him.
The candle flame atop the chandelier flickered, casting a sharp, elongated shadow of my bone mask across the polished mahogany table. Snow's hands were visibly shaking now, the parchment of the Bureau files crinkling under the desperate, tight grip of her fingers. For a woman who had meticulously rebuilt her life in the glitz and glamour of the Royal Sector… marrying the Chief of the Capital Knights to secure safety for her remaining family… the sudden apparition of a mute, scarred, fang-bearing Roxy holding a death warrant for her first husband was a psychological wrecking ball.
Cassius sat perfectly still, his lazy, teasing persona completely evaporated. His gaze shifted from the prominent S-Rank stamp on the ledger to the subtle, almost imperceptible way my right hand kept hovering near the waistline of my trench coat… a instinctual, protective positioning over my lower abdomen that his sharp, noble-trained eyes seemed to track with lingering suspicion. But he remained silent, letting his mother speak.
Snow let out a ragged, trembling breath, her eyes locked onto the inked portrait of the silver-haired man who had abandoned her. The dread in her expression slowly gave way to a deeply buried, bitter resignation. She looked up, her gaze meeting my solitary green eye.
"If you are going after him, Roxy... if you are truly going to end the Bloom Syndicate, then you cannot do it with the sparse notes the Bureau keeps, the Bureau thinks they know his reach, but they only see the ripples on the surface. They don't know how he anchors his ships to the dimensional currents. They don't know how he slips past the cosmic barriers into the Milky Way Continent without the beast-kin executioners ripping his skin off."
She paused, swallowing hard as a wave of painful memories from our ruined hometown washed over her features.
"Go back to Town Allure," Snow commanded softly, the steel of her former days as a provincial ruler temporarily returning to her tone.
"At our old estate… the one that was burned to ash and cinders during the siege… there is a subterranean vault hidden beneath the scorched foundation of the master wine cellar. When the Bureau came to evacuate the survivors and log the damages, they officially confiscated the property and sealed the entrance, labeling it restricted state property. They believe it contains nothing but ruined ledgers and melted silver."
She reached out, her fingers lightly brushing against the cold leather of my Registry of the Condemned.
"But they missed the structural bypass. Inside that vault, locked within a heavy, iron-reinforced lockbox that requires the Flower family seal, is a collection of private, coded letters. Laulif sent them to me during the early years of his absence, right when he was laying the groundwork for his human trafficking networks. He thought he could buy my silence, or perhaps he wanted me to join him in the dark. I couldn't bear to destroy them, but I couldn't let White see them either. I locked them away in that vault so my daughter would never have to look upon the absolute monstrosity of her biological father's work. She thinks he simply died or ran away; she doesn't know he trades in living souls."
Snow looked at me with a profound, pleading intensity.
"Those letters contain his private ledger keys, his secret maritime routes through the coastal docks, and the names of the corrupt officials within Andromeda who take his bribes to let the demi-human cargo pass. If you want to find him, Roxy... if you want to survive the Milky Way Continent... you must break into that confiscated vault and take those letters."
I sat in absolute silence, absorbing the tactical data with cold, mechanical efficiency. The puzzle pieces were finally aligning. The Bureau's three-month summoning ritual was ticking down in the background, White was settling into her new life as a Capital Knight, and the keys to my ultimate three-gold retirement fund were buried beneath the ashes of the very town where my childhood had been violently shattered.
I gave Snow a single, firm nod, pulling the Registry of the Condemned back into my purse. I slid the Leech's Hollow Mask back over my scarred face, the calcified bone clicking into place and locking my green eye behind the dark, hollow slit. I stood up from the table, my tattered crimson trench coat billowing slightly around my ankles as my hidden blood wings flared with a tense, lethal readiness. The Crimson Phantom was going back to where it all began.