nucmednet Chapter 392 --392
Chapter 392 --392
Heena gave a slight, elegant shrug of her shoulders, her posture the very picture of aristocratic resignation. "Well," she murmured, her tone perfectly balanced between indifference and acceptance. "What can we say, Grandma? A fool is a fool, even if he holds the title of Marquis."
The old woman let out another heavy sigh. She stared at the dead cherry blossom tree for a long moment, her fingers curled loosely around the head of her cane, and then something in her face simply... closed. The fragile, grieving grandmother folded away like a letter being sealed, and the ruthless, iron-fisted ruler of the estate snapped back into place with the ease of a woman who had never truly let her guard down in the first place.
"Well," the matriarch said, her voice dropping an octave, returning to that cold, commanding register. "Anyway. It seems I need to take certain measures to bring your mother back under proper control. She has forgotten whose ground she walks upon."
Heena tilted her head, striking a wry, deliberately skeptical pose. She looked at the old woman with a raised eyebrow, her voice laced with a perfectly calculated edge of doubt. "Can you actually do it without raising her suspicion, Grandma? If she truly has the backing of outside forces, or if her network runs as deep as I suspect, striking too loudly might force her hand. A cornered snake bites the hardest."
A slow, chilling smile spread across the grandmother’s weathered face.
It was the kind of smile that didn’t belong on a grandmother at all. It belonged on a woman who had survived courts, purges, and political winters that had swallowed far younger, far more confident people whole. The wrinkles around her eyes deepened, not with age, but with absolute, lethal confidence.
She reached out and gently patted Heena’s cheek, her touch as light as a feather but carrying the weight of an executioner’s blade. "My dear granddaughter," the old woman purred, her eyes glinting with dark, predatory amusement. "It looks like your lost memories have made you forget exactly *who* your grandmother is."
Heena kept a perfectly awed, slightly submissive expression on the outside, letting her eyes widen in appropriate reverence.
Internally, however, she didn’t fall for the dramatic flair in the slightest. It wasn’t that she doubted the old woman’s ruthlessness — she had seen the matriarch practically paralyze a seasoned head maid with a single look — it was just that Heena *literally* didn’t know the specifics of her grandmother’s past glories. She wasn’t the original Seera. Her System hadn’t provided a neatly compiled dossier on the matriarch’s historical kill count, so the intimidation tactic fell entirely flat on her hyper-analytical mind.
*I haven’t forgotten anything, old lady,* Heena thought dryly, maintaining her sweet smile. *I just don’t have the data file.*
"To control a venomous snake, child, you do not immediately chop off its head," the grandmother continued, her voice a soothing, dangerous murmur. "If you do that, the body thrashes, and the venom spills everywhere. No — to control a snake, you first pin its tail. You slowly suffocate its resources. You blind its eyes. You deafen its ears. By the time it realizes it is trapped, it doesn’t even have the strength to bare its fangs."
The grandmother slowly stood up from the stone table, leaning on her cane. The tremor in her hands was completely gone, replaced by a terrifying, rejuvenated steadiness. Whatever frailty she had worn into this courtyard, she was leaving it behind with the dead tree.
"Your mother thinks she runs the internal affairs of this estate because I allowed her to hold the ledger," the matriarch sneered softly. "Today, I will remind her that a ledger is just a piece of paper, and paper burns easily. I will strip her authority piece by piece, starting with the servants she relies on most. We will see how long she can scheme when she is forced to spend all her energy just trying to keep her own head above water."
Heena stood up beside her, offering her arm to support the old woman. "That sounds like a brilliant plan, Grandma. But what about Kavien?"
The grandmother’s face darkened in disgust at the mere mention of the name, as though the word itself had left a bad taste on the air. "Leave that parasitic stray to me. I will ensure he does not take a single step near your courtyard. If he tries to leverage your mother’s favor, I will personally see to it that his legs are broken before sunset."
The matriarch looked at Heena, her expression softening just a fraction — that rare, almost reluctant warmth that surfaced only in these private moments between them. "You, my child, only need to focus on resting and playing your part. Smile for the nobility today. Show them that the golden bloodline of the Marquisate has returned unbroken. Let your grandmother handle the shadows."
"I will, Grandma," Heena said obediently.
But as they began to walk back toward the heavy wooden gates of the courtyard, Heena’s mind was already running miles ahead of her feet.
*Perfect.* Having the grandmother actively suppress the Marchioness was the ultimate distraction — and one the old woman had volunteered herself, out of pride and territorial fury, without Heena spending a single coin of her own influence. While the matriarch systematically dismantled her mother’s domestic power base, the Marchioness would be too panicked and overwhelmed to monitor Heena’s true movements. It gave her exactly the blind spot she needed to dig into the encrypted dark-channel array connecting her mother to the thirteenth-loop regressor in the north.
The heavy wooden gates creaked open.
Samuel was standing exactly where they had left him, his posture rigidly perfect, his hand resting casually on the hilt of his sword. As they approached, his dark eyes flicked toward Heena, silently asking for an update.
Heena met his gaze for a split second, the corner of her lips twitching upward into a microscopic, razor-sharp smirk that only he could see. His jaw shifted almost imperceptibly — the closest he ever came to an impressed expression while wearing full armor in public.
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The moment they were out of the matriarch’s line of sight, Heena’s leisurely, aristocratic stroll vanished entirely. She picked up her pace, her heavy silk skirts swishing sharply against the polished stone floors as she navigated the winding corridors with a terrifying, single-minded focus.
Samuel fell into step right behind her, long legs keeping pace easily, though beneath his visor his brow was furrowed. He had stood guard outside those wooden gates for nearly an hour. He hadn’t been able to hear the exact words, but he had felt the violent fluctuations in the grandmother’s aura — that suffocating pressure, the strange drop into grief, and then the chilling, deliberate calm that had settled over everything afterward like the first frost of winter. He didn’t know what psychological warfare his wife had just conducted in there. He only knew that she had walked in to manage an old woman and walked out looking like someone who had just quietly won a war.
As they rounded into Heena’s private courtyard, a cluster of eager estate servants materialized immediately — silver trays, warm towels, expressions carefully arranged between deference and desperation.