Hades' Cursed Luna novel Chapter 293

Eve

Hades

"You have a son," Silas said almost breathlessly. "Danielle's child is Elliot."

He stared at me across the round table as though waiting for a punchline.

"Felicia was the facilitator," Gallinti finally found his voice since I dropped the bombshell. "She is a traitor."

He tried to keep his voice level, but from the slight increase in pitch, it was obvious the revelation had dropped like a bomb.

"All of it is true," I replied without much feeling. My mind had wandered elsewhere like it always did these days.

Eve.

Everything always returned to her.

Her torture in her eyes when I injected her. Her stare before she disappeared. Her silence in the wake of my truth. The letter with a single word—Goodbye. That damn word rang louder in my skull than war drums ever had.

"And where is the boy now?" Silas asked, leaning forward slowly.

His tone was cautious. Too cautious. As if he already feared the answer.

"Safe," I said. "I made sure of it." I couldn't even look at my own son. I couldn't dare not when my my lashing out had become more unpredictable. Without Eve, the flux had found its voice again and it's presence was lava in my searing through my insides.

"With all due respect," Silas started. "Shouldn't you have sensed it. I know my own child before I even see him."

"I didn't know," I snapped, sharper than I meant to. The room stilled. My hands curled into fists against the table. "I didn't know because she made sure I wouldn't." Passing the blame like a fucking coward again, unable to bare the brunt of it. I had no fucking excuse.

>"You just keep losing, don't you?"

The Flux's voice slithered through my skull like acid through silk—elegant, cruel, and utterly inescapable.

"Your mate. Your son. Your grip on power. The very leash you wrapped around your own emotions… snapped like the brittle thread it always was."

I clenched my teeth, blood throbbing behind my eyes.

"She ran from you, Hades. Just like everyone else. Even the boy flinched. You saw it—felt it."

My hands trembled beneath the table.

"You could have been a god," it hissed, almost gleeful now. "But you chose to love. And now look at you—just a broken beast choking on the ruins of his own empire."

A white-hot pulse of rage surged through my spine, and for one terrifying second, I wanted to destroy the entire chamber.

The council. The walls. Myself.

"Enough!"

My chair scraped violently as I stood, the legs screeching against the polished floor. Shadows reeled.

Then—

"She had her bases all covered," Montegue said.

The calm in his voice hit like a slap.

"She knew the risk of a royal paternity test. Bone marrow transplants—four of them. Each one weakening the trace markers just enough to skew the results."

I froze.

Montegue's eyes were steady on mine, unreadable as ever. "They altered the marrow signature each time. A living camouflage. No one would've caught it unless they knew exactly what to look for."

Montegue's fingers steepled on the polished table, his expression carved from the same stone as his reputation—measured, clinical, too old for surprises.

"This is why you never sensed it," he said, his voice a low current beneath the tension. "The transplants. They distorted the lineage trace in Elliot's blood. Each graft recalibrated his markers—especially the lunar-specific imprints we rely on for paternal alignment."

He leaned back slightly, eyes not accusing—but not kind, either.

"You weren't incompetent, Hades. You were outmaneuvered. Intentionally."

My jaw locked.

That word.

Intentionally.

A child born of blood and fate, stolen from me while I slept in the illusion that he was someone else's burden.

"He was your son the moment he took his first breath," Montegue continued. "And from that same moment, he was placed under layers of false truths and fabricated loyalties. All designed to keep you blind."

I didn't know what stung worse—the idea that I'd failed to recognize my own blood, or the knowledge that everyone else in that room now saw me as the king who'd needed a traitor to confess him he had a child.

>"What a failure you are. I could change that."

"You're telling me this to spare me the humiliation," I said, voice brittle.

Montegue's gaze didn't waver. "I'm telling you this to make sure you don't fall to it. I've already lost a daughter to ambition and one the first one's ambitions. I don't intend to lose a king to guilt."

His words were to appease the men we surrounded ourselves with at the meeting, not me. Because that didn't justify even a little of what I had done.

I ran my hand through my hair, searing hot pain blossoming through my skull as I made contact with the growing horn. I grimaced from the pain, whispering her name as a flash red locks crashed through my thoughts. A dull ache unfurled between my ribs.

>"Elysia." The name echoed instead of the name of woman that I loved.

What was that?

"I guess I see why she needed to clear her head. I can attest," Silas interrupted my thoughts. "This Tower can be suffocating, much less for a werewolf. But besides that, when will the extractions begin. The harvesting was to have started days ago if not for the unsettling revelations that the goddess graced us with. Still, the serum..."

My breath stalled as his words sunk in like anvil in quick sand, dissolving the rest of his rant.

Silence wrapped around me like a fuse seconds before detonation.

Montegue and Kael both stiffened as Silas kept speaking, but I didn't hear a word of it.

The Flux laughed low in the back of my mind, like a serpent coiled around a throne it knew I'd never reclaim.

I reached up, fingers brushing the horn sprouting from my scalp. Still small. Still subtle. But growing.

The pain flared like a branding iron.

>"She left you and still you bleed for her. How divine. How… pathetic."

Silas kept going, oblivious. "—with the sample harvested and matured, we'll finally be able to accelerate mass production of the serum. It's only a matter of how quickly we can replicate the—"

"My wife," I said, rising from my seat, voice low.

It wasn't a shout.

It didn't need to be.

It sliced through the room like a blade dipped in ice.

Silas's mouth froze mid-word.

"My wife," I repeated, slower now, each syllable like thunder rolling over still water, "will not be gutted like a pig."

The silence that followed was apocalyptic.

Montegue looked at me sharply.

Kael didn't breathe.

Even the Flux fell quiet.

Just then—

The door opened.

A hiss of hydraulics, a shaft of afternoon light bleeding across the floor.

Boots.