Chapter 592: Chapter-592
There was absolutely nothing left. His three most elite assassins—men who had been trained since childhood to move like ghosts and kill without making a sound—had completely vanished. There was no blood trail leading out of the window. There were no bodies hidden beneath the wooden slats.
It was as if they had simply evaporated into the night air.
"Master," the Third Wife sobbed into his chest, her small fists gripping his dark silk robes. "I was so scared... he was covered in blood... I thought I was going to die..."
The Prime Minister patted her tangled, dirty hair with a slow, mechanical rhythm.
"You are safe now," he murmured, his voice smooth and dripping with fabricated warmth. "I will not let anything happen to you."
Internally, he didn’t care about her terror. He looked at her bruised, tear-streaked face and felt nothing but absolute contempt. She was weak, pathetic, and entirely useless. He fully believed her story because it fit perfectly into the narrow, pitiful box he had built for her. In his arrogant mind, there was absolutely no mathematical possibility that this frail, broken doll could have outsmarted him.
He had completely overlooked the venomous snake coiled against his own chest.
"Guards!" the Prime Minister called out, his voice echoing with righteous, scholarly anger.
Two Imperial Guards immediately rushed forward, bowing deeply.
"My wife has been brutally attacked in the Emperor’s own guest quarters," the Prime Minister declared, his face a mask of furious grief. "I am taking her back to my manor immediately so she can be treated by my personal physicians. Seal this pavilion. Find the man in black who did this!"
"Yes, Prime Minister!" the guards shouted in unison.
The Prime Minister stood up, gently helping his weeping wife to her feet. He draped his own heavy outer cloak over her trembling shoulders, playing the role of the protective patriarch flawlessly.
As his servants rushed forward to carefully escort the Third Wife toward their waiting carriage, she kept her head bowed, hiding her face entirely. She continued to violently tremble, playing the traumatized victim to perfection.
But beneath the heavy fabric of the cloak, her right hand was tucked securely against her chest. Her bruised fingers were tightly curled around the tiny, waterproof wooden pillbox Heena had given her.
The Prime Minister was personally escorting his own executioner straight back into his home.
Once his wife was safely out of earshot, the Prime Minister dropped the benevolent facade entirely.
He stepped out of the ruined pavilion and walked into the shadows of a large stone pillar, away from the prying eyes of the Imperial Guards.
A moment later, a figure dressed in the dark, unassuming robes of a palace eunuch materialized from the darkness. It was one of the Prime Minister’s top spies embedded within the inner court. The man dropped to one knee, trembling so violently his teeth were audibly chattering.
"Report," the Prime Minister hissed, his voice dropping into a deadly whisper. "Where is the Vanguard Madam? And where are my men?"
The spy looked up, his face completely drained of color.
"Master..." the spy stammered, his eyes wide with sheer terror. "They are gone."
The Prime Minister’s eyes narrowed into terrifying slits. "What do you mean, gone? Be specific."
"All of them, Master," the spy swallowed hard, his voice cracking. "Not just the three you sent to the Cold Palace. The five stationed by the eastern gates. The snipers on the southern roofs. The scouts hidden in the imperial gardens... They have all gone completely silent."
The Prime Minister froze.
"I found... I found pieces, Master," the spy continued, his voice dropping to an absolute whisper of horror. "A severed hand behind the lotus pond. A pool of blood on the high eaves. The Vanguard shadow guards... they are here. And they are completely wiping our network out. They aren’t just killing them; they are butchering them like livestock."
A suffocating, icy dread finally clawed its way up the Prime Minister’s throat.
He had deeply underestimated the Vanguard. He thought they were just brute-force military generals who only knew how to fight on open battlefields. He had assumed that inside the complex, treacherous political web of the capital, they would be blind and clumsy.
But tonight, they had proven him entirely, catastrophically wrong.
Heena had not only survived a lethal neurotoxin and an aphrodisiac, but she had vanished without leaving a single trace of evidence. And now, her family’s shadow guards were silently executing his most elite men right under the Emperor’s nose, dismantling a spy network that had taken the Prime Minister a decade to build.
And then there was Samuel. The "foolish" son-in-law who had completely humiliated the entire civil court with a flawless, devastating seven-step poem.
The Vanguard wasn’t just a military house. They were apex predators, and he had just willingly walked right into their hunting grounds.
The Prime Minister closed his eyes, taking a deep, ragged breath. The sheer fury burning in his chest was threatening to completely overwhelm his rationality. He wanted to scream. He wanted to burn the Vanguard estate to the ground.
But he was the most powerful civil official in the empire. He did not survive this long by throwing tantrums.
If he couldn’t kill them in the shadows, he would have to destroy them in the light.
"Recall the remaining agents immediately," the Prime Minister ordered, his voice returning to a cold, calculating cadence. "Tell them to burn their uniforms and blend back into the servant population. Do not engage the Vanguard shadows under any circumstances."
"Yes, Master," the spy nodded frantically.
"And tomorrow morning," the Prime Minister continued, a dark, venomous smirk finally returning to his face, "prepare a memorial for the Emperor. Draft it with the utmost urgency."
The spy looked confused. "A memorial, Master? About what?"
The Prime Minister looked out toward the towering walls of the Forbidden City.
"The Vanguard survived tonight, but they made a fatal error," the Prime Minister sneered. "They deployed their personal shadow guards inside the Emperor’s forbidden palace. They committed mass murder within the Imperial Harem. The Emperor is a paranoid man. He fears the Vanguard’s military might more than he fears my political power."
The Prime Minister turned back to the spy, his dark eyes gleaming with malicious intent.
"We will not accuse them of surviving an assassination," the Prime Minister commanded softly. "We will accuse the Vanguard of mobilizing unauthorized military forces inside the Emperor’s home. We will accuse them of treason."
The spy’s eyes widened in realization, and he bowed deeply. "Brilliant, Master. The Emperor will have no choice but to strip them of their military seals."
"Go," the Prime Minister ordered.
As the spy vanished back into the darkness, the Prime Minister smoothed out the wrinkles in his dark silk robes. He had lost the battle tonight, suffering heavy casualties and utter humiliation. But the political war was far from over.
He turned and walked toward his carriage, completely unaware that the true harbinger of his destruction was already sitting inside it, quietly waiting to serve him his morning tea.
On the otherside his wife was lowering her eyes fires in her eyes.
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