100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 615 - 614- BackStory of Evriana Ktorian/Catorian

The sticks came down like rain.Three of them — boys, sons of the Ktorian household knights, their arms thick from the training yard and their mouths thick with the cruelty that boys learned from watching their fathers. They swung their practice sticks with the wild, uncontrolled enthusiasm of children who had discovered, for the first time, that hurting someone smaller was a kind of power.

Evriana was ten.

She was small for her age — the particular, inherited smallness of a half-blood child whose body had not received the full blessing of the bull-kin bloodline. Her hair was dark, but the amber eyes that marked the Ktorian blood were paler than they should have been, washed out, the color of weak tea instead of strong honey. Her frame was narrow, her arms thin, her legs the kind of skinny that made the other children call her ’chicken’.

She bled.

A cut above her eyebrow — the stick catching her, the skin splitting, the warm, wet trickle of blood running into her eye and blurring her vision. Her lip was split too. Her knees were scraped, the fabric of her training clothes torn at the shoulder.

She fought back.

Her fist connected with the first boy’s jaw — a wild, untrained, desperate punch that carried more heart than technique. The boy stumbled, surprised, and she used the moment to grab the stick from his hand. She swung it. The crack of wood on shin. The boy screamed, falling, clutching his leg.

The second boy came from the side.

She ducked. The stick sailed over her head. She drove her elbow into his stomach — a move she had learned from watching the guards spar, copied without instruction, executed with the raw, instinctive violence of a child who had been fighting her whole life.

The third boy hesitated.

That was his mistake.

She hit him in the throat with the flat of the stick. Not hard enough to crush. Hard enough to make him gasp, to make his eyes water, to make him stumble backward and trip over his own feet and fall on his ass in the dirt.

She stood over them.

Breathing hard. Blood on her face. Stick in her hand. The particular, fierce, unbroken stance of a girl who had won a fight she should have lost and was daring the world to send more.

"Aren’t you half-blood?" the first boy said.

He was on the ground, clutching his shin, his face twisted with pain and the particular, entitled rage of a boy who had never been hit back before.

"How dare you talk to Brother Rale like that?"

Brother Rale. The boy she had punched first. The boy who had called her mother a word that Evriana would not repeat, would not think, would not allow to exist in her mind beyond the red, blinding fury it had produced.

"How dare he call my mother with that dirty word?" Evriana said.

Her voice was shaking. Not with fear. With the particular, trembling, righteous, ten-year-old fury of a child whose mother had been insulted and whose fists were the only court available.

She raised the stick.

She would have hit him again.

"Evriana!"

The voice was adult. Female. Sharp. The kind of voice that cut through a child’s fury like a blade through smoke.

Evriana turned.

The woman was tall, heavy-set, her face round and red and carrying the particular, self-satisfied authority of a household knight’s wife who had birthed three sons and believed this gave her jurisdiction over every child in the compound.

She was the mother of the boys Evriana had just beaten.

"What have you done?" the woman shrieked.

She descended on Evriana like a hawk on a mouse. Her hand came up. The slap landed — hard, open-palmed, the crack of flesh on flesh echoing across the training yard. Evriana’s head rocked to the side. Her cheek burned. Her vision swam.

"You common-born wretch," the woman said. "Your mother was a commoner. That is why you have no teachings. No upbringing. No manners. You attack my sons? You — a half-blood bastard?"

Each word was a slap. Worse than the physical one. The words landed in places that hands couldn’t reach — the deep, soft, vulnerable places where a child kept her self-worth, her identity, her belief that she belonged somewhere.

Evriana’s eyes filled with tears.

Not the tears of pain. The tears of a child who had been told, by an adult, by a woman with authority, by a voice that carried the weight of the household’s opinion, that she was less. That her mother was less. That the blood in her veins was dirty.

She couldn’t speak.

The tears fell. The blood from her eyebrow ran into the tears, creating pink, wet trails on her cheek. She stood there, taking it, absorbing the words the way a sponge absorbs dirty water, and something inside her began to close.

A door.

A window.

A light.

"Shouldn’t you be mindful of your words, Miss Halga?"

The voice came from behind.

It was calm. Level. The kind of voice that did not need to be loud to silence a room — the voice of someone whose authority was not borrowed from a husband or a title but grew from the bones outward.

Miss Halga turned.

Her face went white.

The woman who stood at the edge of the training yard was tall — taller than Miss Halga by a full head, her frame carrying the dense, powerful, bull-kin build that marked a pure bloodline. Her hair was dark, falling past her shoulders, and her eyes were amber — the deep, warm, rich amber of mature honey, the color that the Ktorian family bred for and judged by.

A sword hung at her hip.

Not a training blade. A real sword — the steel gleaming, the hilt wrapped in leather, the kind of weapon that a woman carried when she expected to use it.

She was young. Twenty, perhaps. Twenty-two. But the way she stood — the weight settled in her hips, the shoulders back, the chin level — carried the authority of a woman twice her age.

"What did you just call this child?" the young woman said.

Miss Halga’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I — she attacked my sons—"

"I asked what you called her."

The young woman’s voice did not rise. It dropped. The lower it went, the more dangerous it became.

"You called her a bastard. You called her mother a commoner. In this household, in this compound, under the banner of the Ktorian family, you used those words against a child of this bloodline."

Miss Halga bowed.

The deep, immediate, involuntary bow of a woman who had just realized that the person she was speaking to carried a rank she could not challenge.

"My apologies," she said. "I did not realize—"

"You did not realize because you did not look," the young woman said. "You saw a small child with pale eyes and you decided she was less. That is not a mistake. That is a choice."

She looked at the boys on the ground.

"Your sons attacked a girl half their size with training sticks. She defended herself. If they lack the skill to defeat a ten-year-old half their weight, perhaps they should spend more time in the training yard and less time bullying those weaker than them."