I Will Live for Your Death (20 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 193

“I’m sorry, but I wasn’t in my right mind. Merely looking at you wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy me.”

Since when had he known? Kaelum couldn’t move a muscle. Had he known all along yet still refused to remove him from his post as Captain of the Imperial Guard? Why on earth?

Claudius stood directly before Kaelum and tapped his own chest pointedly. His sardonic voice pierced Kaelum’s core.

“After seeing you, a man like you, clinging to my mother, how could I ever find peace here?”

His mother embracing a man who wasn’t his father—it was a horrifying sight for young Claudius.

Worse yet, that man had been his father’s most trusted officer. Amidst the suffocating silence surrounding Claudius, his mother’s voice rang out clearly: “I love you, Kaelum.”

The words “I love you,” spoken in his mother’s voice, felt utterly foreign.

It was something she had never once said to Claudius, never shown him with her gaze, never conveyed through tender touches brimming with warmth. It was a side of her completely unlike the cold, stern mother he’d always known.

“Do you have any idea how fortunate it is that I don’t resemble you at all? It’s practically a blessing to me. Otherwise, I’d have been strangled by my own mother the moment I was born.”

“…Your Imperial Majesty the Emperor.”

“Oh, curious how I found out, are you? There were hushed rumors circulating secretly through the palace—that I wasn’t the Late Emperor’s child, but the son of a ‘shadow.’”

Though young, he remembered it vividly. Claudius had etched their faces and names clearly into his memory.

Then, using the poison he’d learned from the Empress Dowager, he had them all poisoned. He thought it a fitting end for those who’d let their tongues run wild.

And then there was Kaelum Western.

He’d intended to deal with him the same way he’d dealt with the originators of those rumors. But after wavering several times, he ultimately couldn’t bring himself to act. Claudius smashed every vial of the poison he’d prepared and made a vow:

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