I Became the Villain Saintess's Slave

"Don’t tell me you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing here." Cecilia’s voice cut sharp through the air.

Lucian answered with nothing but a small, honest shake of his head, making clear he had no idea what this event was actually for, let alone why that strange rumor had latched onto his name in the first place.

Alicia jumped back in immediately.

"Sister, where exactly did you hear that rumor from?"

As it turned out, Alicia herself knew almost nothing about where the story had come from.

In the days leading up to her own Awakening, she’d been locked away in closed-door training within her family’s estate, working to push her Core higher, and that isolation had cut her off from most of what was happening in the wider world.

Whatever gossip the nobility had been trading lately, she’d only started catching wind of it recently, through Cecilia.

That included the strange rumor about Lucian, which had apparently already spread through nearly every noble house in the Bravenheart Empire, the annulment among them, common knowledge by now to almost everyone but him.

At her sister’s question, Cecilia opened her mouth to answer, though her expression made it clear even she didn’t have much to go on.

"Don’t look at me like that, Alicia. I don’t know who started spreading rumors about him first."

"But I do know one thing. The family that talks about it more than anyone else is House Kayden."

House Kayden.

The name pulled Boien straight into Lucian’s mind, the Marquis’s eldest son, someone he’d crossed paths with not long ago.

The memory sharpened as it settled in, Boien making trouble for him throughout the entire Awakening ceremony, needling him at every opportunity. Even his attendant, Arlo, had barely bothered hiding his contempt that day at the cathedral.

If House Kayden really did sit at the root of this, it wouldn’t be hard to believe, not given how openly hostile Boien had already shown himself to be.

But would they have gone as far as spreading the engagement annulment too?

Lucian turned the question over privately, wondering whether House Kayden could really be behind that particular leak.

It raised an immediate problem, though. How could they have learned about the annulment so quickly, when something that recent should have stayed contained within House Sarnel and the imperial family alone?

And even if they had learned it somehow, what would House Kayden actually gain from trying to drag his name through the mud?

Maybe this isn’t something they did on their own, Lucian thought, slowly stitching together every strange detail that had piled up around him lately.

While he sat with that suspicion, Alicia offered a different angle entirely.

"Lucian, are you sure you’ve never had any personal conflict with House Kayden before?"

Lucian answered plainly that he barely knew the family at all, let alone had any history bad enough to invite something like this.

"Then this really is strange. Why would House Kayden suddenly start spreading rumors about you if there’s no bad blood between you? Unless someone else is behind it."

That last part caught Lucian’s attention hard. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that someone else entirely was using House Kayden as a convenient weapon against him.

And the more he dug into his own memory, one detail surfaced clearly: Boien had been present, watching, the day Kaelyn defeated him in that duel.

Kaelyn and Boien were close, close enough, and cut from similar cloth in more ways than one. That closeness meant Boien could easily have become a channel, feeding information straight out of House Sarnel and into Kayden hands.

If this really is Kaelyn’s doing, it would explain everything. How fast the rumors spread, how quickly word of my annulment got out. All of it would finally make sense.

Suspecting Kaelyn wasn’t something Lucian did lightly. He’d grown up on the receiving end of quiet contempt from most of his family, sure, but Kaelyn had always stood out even among them, one of the siblings who’d made his dislike for Lucian the least subtle of all.

That dislike had sharpened further the moment Lucian announced he intended to sit for the Orvis Academy entrance exam.

Kaelyn had been the loudest voice telling him not to bother, warning that if Lucian somehow managed to secure a seat, he’d only end up embarrassing the entire Sarnel name in front of the empire.

The rest of the family had mostly waved the whole thing off as an empty boast anyway, certain that a blind boy with none of his siblings’ talent had no real chance of earning a spot at all.

Kaelyn hadn’t settled for dismissal, though. He’d pushed to make sure Lucian never got the chance in the first place, going so far as to demand a sudden duel right before Lucian’s Awakening at the cathedral.

That duel had left Lucian with a wound across his back, the result of a cheap trick, a relic Kaelyn had used to scramble his hearing mid-fight, a device explicitly against the rules.

And yet nobody had called it out at the time. Rumelia had protested loudly enough on his behalf, but the officiating adults simply waved it away, calling it a tactic Lucian should have been prepared to counter.

Kaelyn, did you really have to go this far just to keep me out of Orvis?

A quiet ache settled in Lucian’s chest at the memory, grief more than anger, watching his own brother work that hard just to keep him from something as simple as sitting an exam.

Are you that afraid of losing to me, Kaelyn?

It wasn’t an idle jab either. This year, Lucian, Adrian, and Kaelyn were all set to sit the Orvis entrance exam together.

The two older brothers running a couple of years behind schedule wasn’t unusual among the nobility, families often held their sons back deliberately, taking the extra time to prepare them properly for a school as demanding as Orvis.

But there was something Lucian hadn’t fully connected until now, something that ran deeper than simple rivalry over an exam seat.

Kaelyn still remembered, clear as day, what had happened during the Sword Calling ceremony twelve years earlier.

That moment in the Sword Tomb, when all three ancestral blades had responded to Lucian at once, a sign that marked him as genuinely, undeniably gifted within House Sarnel’s own bloodline.

How do I find out more, if this really is Kaelyn’s doing after all?

Lost in that thought, Lucian tried to steady himself, and it was right then that a male attendant happened to pass by, carrying a drink in a beautiful white glass, its contents a deep, rich purple.

Lucian reached for it politely, asking if he might take one, his hand already extending toward the glass. Before his fingers could close around it, the attendant dropped into a sudden, deep bow toward the floor.

The abruptness of it startled him.

But the attendant wasn’t the only one bowing. Every noble in the hall, every member of the Seven Pillar families included, had lowered themselves in the same instant, heads bent, bodies folding toward the floor in perfect unison.

Alicia and Cecilia bowed with everyone else, every gaze in the room turning as one toward the Emperor, offering him the same silent reverence.

A fully armored knight’s voice rang out across the hall, announcing that the Emperor himself wished to deliver a proclamation to everyone present.

The Emperor wants to make an announcement?

Startled, Lucian lowered his head and bent his own body toward the floor along with everyone else. A moment later, the Emperor’s voice rolled out over the hall, deep, commanding, heavy enough that it seemed to echo off every wall in the room at once.

"Thank you, all of you, for gracing this occasion with your presence. Beyond the festivities tonight, there is a matter of some weight I wish to share."

"I have chosen this moment, fitting as it is, to make an announcement before you all. As of today, Kaelyn and Helia are formally, officially betrothed."

The glass slipped from Lucian’s fingers the instant those words landed, shattering against the floor. His former fiancée, engaged now to his own brother.

Purple liquid spread across the marble in a widening pool, keeping perfect time with the tremor running through Lucian’s hand.

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