Chapter 1282. First Revenge Served... The Mother Sees Her Family Broken.

Chapter 1282: 1282. First Revenge Served... The Mother Sees Her Family Broken.

Helena threw open the great oak front doors with such force they slammed against the interior walls with a sound like thunder. She stumbled into the entrance hall, her lungs burning, her heart a frantic animal trapped behind her ribs.

Then she stopped.

She stopped so violently, so abruptly, that Leonidas nearly plowed into her back, his own breath coming in ragged gasps. But Leonidas didn’t collide with her.

He froze mid stride, his entire body locking up as if he had been turned to stone. A strangled, horrified noise died in his throat.

The entrance hall of the Starlight household once a place of dignified elegance and sacred family tradition had been transformed into something obscene.

Something profane.

Rex Rexilion was sitting in one of the massive velvet armchairs by the long window. He wasn’t just lounging; he was sprawled in a display of casual, predatory ownership.

He wore only a plain white linen shirt, half unbuttoned, hanging open to expose a chest slick with sweat. One sleeve was rolled back haphazardly, and in his hand, he held a porcelain teacup.

A thin, mocking curl of steam rose from it. His hair was a wild mess, his feet bare, looking for all the world like a man who had spent a night of absolute, unrestrained indulgence and had no intention of apologizing for it.

But it was the floor that made Helena’s stomach turn.

The polished marble of the hall was no longer pristine. It glistened under the morning light with a sickly, translucent sheen.

Streaks of pearlescent fluid thick, sticky, and unmistakable were splattered across the stone, pooling in the grooves between the tiles. The unmistakable musk of spent passion and raw, animalistic sex hung in the air like a physical fog, cloying and sweet.

And scattered across this tableau of debauchery, like broken dolls discarded after a feast, were the women Helena had been running to save.

They were all naked.

Completely, devastatingly naked.

Lily stood near the foot of the staircase, her pale skin flushed and mottled with fresh bite marks and red handprints. She tried to cover herself with arms that trembled violently, but there was no hiding the evidence of what had been done to her; her thighs were streaked with drying fluids.

Her hair was a matted nest, and her eyes were swollen, red rimmed from crying.

Diana stood a few paces behind her, huddled in a corner. Her skin was a deep, humiliated crimson that spread from her chest up to her hairline.

She stood shivering on the cold marble, her bare legs slick with the evidence of Rex’s climax, unable to meet anyone’s gaze.

Elizabeth sat at the bottom of the stairs, slumped in a state of exhausted surrender. Her hair was tangled across one shoulder, her body limp, her skin bearing the fresh bruises of rough handling.

She didn’t even try to cover herself; she simply stared at the floor with hollow, dead eyes.

And Valentina. Helena’s own mother.

Valentina stood against the wall, her magnificent silver hair hanging loose and wild around her shoulders like a shroud. She stood exposed and shameless in her nakedness, her arms folded tight across her chest as if trying to contain the shame, her face turned toward the floor.

The sight of her the matriarch, the symbol of dignity covered in the marks of a man’s lust, was a blade through Helena’s heart.

The pieces clicked together in Helena’s mind with the cold, sickening clarity of a guillotine blade falling. There was no violence here not the kind that breaks bones or spills blood but there was a different kind of slaughter.

A desecration of everything they stood for.

Leonidas let out a sound that was half groan, half sob. His face twisted in pure, unadulterated shock, his eyes bulging as he took in the carnage of flesh and fluid.

"By the gods..." he whispered, his voice cracking with revulsion. "What... what has happened here?"

Helena couldn’t speak. Her mouth worked soundlessly.

Her mind screamed: ’Not them. Not my daughters. Not my sister... and my mother...’

Lily gave a small, broken cry and jumped to her feet, the movement sending fresh droplets of dried semen skittering across the marble. Diana went rigid as a corpse, her blush deepening until she looked like she might combust from shame.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and let out a long, weary sigh the sound of someone who had stopped fighting the inevitable. Valentina said nothing; she simply remained there, a fallen goddess in a room reeking of sin.

Helena did not move. She could not.

Her body had become a monument to horror, frozen in the doorway. Her eyes, wide and glassy, darted frantically across the room as if searching for a flaw in the reality before her.

She scanned the glistening marble, the pools of pearlescent fluid, the flushed skin of her daughters, and finally, the obscene nonchalance of Rex. Her pupils dilated until the irises were mere rings of color, her brain refusing to translate the sensory data into anything coherent.

’This is a dream,’ her mind shrieked in a silent, looping panic. ’This is a trick of the Underlayer.’

’A demon’s illusion... A hallucination born of grief.’ But the smell, the cloying, undeniable musk of sex and sweat, was too real.

The wet slap of a droplet hitting the marble as Diana shifted was too real.

The silence that followed her entrance was not empty; it was a living, breathing thing, heavy and suffocating. It was a silence so absolute that the only sounds were the involuntary reactions of the broken women.

A low, keening moan escaped Lily’s lips, a sound of pure, unadulterated exhaustion and trauma. Then came a wet, shuddering whimper from Elizabeth, whose breathing was uneven and broken.

From Diana, a soft, rhythmic sob that sounded almost like a moan of pain. And Valentina, her mother, let out a long, shuddering exhale that carried the weight of a thousand humiliations.

These weren’t sounds of pleasure; they were the sounds of creatures who had been thoroughly, systematically broken down.

The silence was suddenly shattered, not by words, but by the violent sounds of a body rejecting its own reality.

Leonidas collapsed to one knee. His hands clawed at the marble, his fingernails scraping against the stone as he lurched forward.

A wet, convulsive retch tore from his throat as he began to vomit violently. The sound of his stomach emptying echoed off the high ceilings, raw and guttural.

Tears streaked down his face, mixing with the bile dripping from his lips.

"No..." he choked out between spasms, his voice thick with agony. "No, no, no... this isn’t real...!"

"Helena, tell me this isn’t real!"

"God help us, this can’t be happening!"

His convulsions were so violent his entire frame shook, his forehead nearly touching the contaminated floor. He was weeping openly now, great, heaving sobs that matched the rhythmic heaving of his stomach.

He looked like a man who had watched his entire world burn to ash, only to find that the ash was made of something far more revolting.

Helena remained motionless beside him. Her tears did not fall; they seemed to burn behind her eyelids.

Her inner monologue was a cacophony of screams: ’My daughters... my sweet girls... what did he do to them?’

’How could he?’

’How could he touch them like that?’

’How could they let him?’ The thought of Rex, the man who had apparently claimed them all, one by one, with the casual brutality of a conqueror, made her vision swim with crimson spots.

Rex merely took another sip of his tea. The delicate clink of porcelain against his teeth was the most insulting sound Helena had ever heard.

"You’re late," he said, his voice smooth, utterly devoid of remorse. "But don’t worry... There’s plenty of me left."

The casual cruelty of his words acted like a physical blow. Helena felt something inside her snap—not a clean break, but a splintering of her very soul.

Her gaze locked onto his, not with anger yet, but with a hollow, terrifying emptiness. She looked at him as one might look at a plague, at an inevitability, at the end of all things.

The room reeked of the aftermath: the salt of tears, the copper of blood from where teeth had bitten too hard into flesh, and the overwhelming, sticky sweetness of spent seed. It was a battlefield where no one had died, yet everyone had been slaughtered.