Hades' Cursed Luna novel Chapter 353

Chapter 353: The Council, Exposed

Eve

The war room was colder than usual.

Not from temperature. From tension.

The air crackled with it, thick and bristling, as if even the walls of the Obsidian Council Tower could sense that the next move might break more than alliances—it might unravel the realm itself.

The obsidian conference table was ringed with shadows and sleepless men. Kael stood stiff, Silas and Gallinti flanking him like dark pillars. Cain leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, face unreadable. And Hades—

Hades hadn’t looked away from the screen since it started.

I hadn’t either.

The live feed continued to play across the council chamber’s curved projection wall. Governor Morrison sat smugly in his tailored grays, broadcasting to every device in the realm.

"—The people deserve to know what really goes on in that castle," Morrison’s voice echoed, low and solemn. "What happens behind the marble columns and reinforced labs. What kind of king strikes his mate—what kind of mate stays."

The video flicked.

Footage of Hades—half-feral, blood in his eyes, shoving me into the wall.

I didn’t move.

Neither did Hades.

But I felt his hand twitch under the table. Like a soldier resisting the urge to draw a blade.

Morrison’s voice returned. "The only reason she’s still alive is because she carries the cure—the Fenrir Marker. You see, the Blood Moon is no myth. It’s a ticking curse. One that will tear through our people like a storm. And the king knew. He always knew. She is the beast that killed our king and his father as well as his late wife, it makes you think,"

The camera cut to another clip: A footage of Hades glaring at me as I begged in the white room. As he screamed obscenities against me, words that still make me flinch.

Hades seemed to feel the same, as she clenched his hand into a fist until it turned white.

Gallinti shifted. "Where the hell did he get this footage? This is post-expulsion."

Silas muttered, "Someone fed him. Someone still inside."

My fingers tightened in my lap.

Morrison’s voice cut clean again. "And here’s the twist, the part the crown doesn’t want you to know: Ellen Valmont—the so-called blessed twin—isn’t Ellen at all. She’s her sister. Eve. The cursed one. The one they claimed was executed."

A murmur rippled around the table.

Cain let out a long breath through his nose. "This isn’t a leak. It’s a stage play. A perfect one."

"He’s not even sweating," I murmured.

Hades turned to me slowly. "You feel it too."

I nodded. "It’s... too clean. Like we’re watching Act One of a longer script."

Morrison was still talking. Still unspooling truths. Or versions of them.

"He wasn’t chosen by the gods," Morrison continued. "He made himself king by taming Vassir’s corruption, he knew he could not take the pressure like our late humble king Leonard. But he couldn’t contain it, not even after injecting over a dozen subjects to test his tolerance. Not even after forcing the Flux into his own veins."

Lies, maybe not utterly lies but still lies all the same. It was a horrible misconstrued version of the truth, the time line was off but it was true many died before the vassir found a suitable a host, but Hades was his reincarnation that was why it worked to begin with, or else Hades would have joined the other husks that his father had mass produced all in the mission of finding the perfect weapon.

The video flared again.

More footage. Screaming children. Lab doors slamming. Kael cursed under his breath.

My heart rammed against my ribs, the wind getting knocked out of me as I the scene played out. Even I had not seen this and it was truly horrid.

Bile rushed up my throat, a cold chill seizing my spine.

Cain leaned forward. "We block the satellites now, we halt the infection."

Gallinti snapped, "And prove him right? If we jam the feed now, the people won’t question—they’ll believe."

Kael looked to Hades. "You can cut it. Just one command. You have five seconds before rebroadcast."

My voice sliced through the debate. "Don’t."

They turned.

I stood, my chair scraping against the stone.

"We can’t silence him. Not yet. If we do, we lose more than our narrative. We lose our soul."

Kael blinked. "Eve, he’s lying—"

"But with just enough truth to bleed us dry. And if we shut him down, it won’t matter if we’re innocent. People don’t remember silence. They remember who pulled the plug."

Silas scrubbed a hand over his face. "She’s right. The people need to see us, not a polished statement."

Cain scoffed. "Then we sit here and let him fillet us live?"

"No," I said. "We let him finish. And then we fight back—with fact, with transparency. We tell them everything. Not some fairy tale. The real story."

Hades finally looked away from the screen.

His eyes locked onto mine—haunted, heavy with the kind of exhaustion that didn’t come from lack of sleep. This was the weight of a world cracking beneath his boots.

"He’s not just trying to destroy me," he murmured. "He’s trying to unravel everything."

He was right.

Because this wasn’t just political slander. It wasn’t just bad optics.

It was a strategic detonation.

"It’s worse," I said, stepping forward. "It’s belief built on pain. And pain like that spreads faster than truth." ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

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