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Joffrey's empty eyes stared straight at his mother.
There was no love in that gaze, nor hatred, only a desolate wasteland of deathly stillness.
Cersei looked at her son, covered in blood as if he had crawled out of hell, and felt an unprecedented fear.
Her gaze flickered towards the only man still standing in the room.
Lynn.
He was like an outsider, quietly watching this tragedy belonging to House Lannister.
But Cersei knew, the mastermind behind all this was him!
"Lynn..."
Cersei's voice was choked with tears.
"Please, could you leave first?"
"This is our family matter, I... I want to talk to my son alone."
She wanted Lynn to leave.
This man standing here was like a mountain, crushing her, making it hard to breathe.
Joffrey didn't speak, just stared at Lynn with those empty eyes.
Lynn's gaze shifted from Cersei's tear-streaked face and landed on Joffrey.
Lynn smiled.
"Of course," he said, walking towards the door, as relaxed as if strolling in his own backyard.
Lynn pulled the door open and walked out.
The heavy wooden door slowly closed behind them with a dull, heavy thud.
That sound struck Cersei's heart.
In the Small Council Chamber, only the mother and son remained.
And a corpse slowly growing cold.
The smell of blood grew even stronger.
"Now, you can speak."
Joffrey remained in the same posture, only his voice had grown colder.
"Why?"
Cersei struggled to get up from the ground, staggering to stand before Joffrey.
"Joffrey, my son..."
She reached out, wanting to touch her son's cheek.
"Don't touch me!"
Joffrey stepped back as if stung by a scorpion.
His look at Cersei was filled with disgust.
Cersei's hand froze in mid-air.
Her heart felt as if it had been brutally stabbed.
All pretense, all strength, crumbled at this moment.
"Why?"
Cersei suddenly laughed, a shrill and sorrowful laugh.
"You ask me why?!"
Her voice rose in pitch.
That beautiful face was etched with years of accumulated venomous resentment.
"Because he wasn't worthy! Robert Baratheon! That pig whose head was full of alcohol and women!"
"He wasn't worthy to be my husband! Even less worthy to be your father!"
Joffrey was stunned.
"You think he was some hero?"
Cersei pointed at Joffrey, screaming hysterically.
"He wasn't! He was a drunk! A bastard!"
"He got blind drunk every night, then lay beside me, calling out another woman's name!"
"Do you know who that woman was? Lyanna Stark! A ghost long dead!"
"I bore him children, I maintained the dignity of the kingdom for him, yet in his eyes, I was worth less than a dead woman who had long left this world!"
Joffrey stared at her dumbly, his mouth slightly agape.
He had never seen his mother like this.
"I hated him! I wished he would drop dead immediately!"
"When he wanted to bed me, I drugged him, letting him wallow in his own perverse fantasies, thinking he had taken me."
"I felt sick just touching him!"
Joffrey didn't know why, but his heart suddenly gave a lurch, yet he couldn't pinpoint what was wrong.
He saw two clear streams of tears flow from Cersei's eyes.
But there was no sorrow in these tears, only bone-deep hatred.
"So, when Tywin told me he was going to deal with Robert, I said nothing."
"I just watched."
"I wished they would hurry up!"
"A man who didn't love me, a king who saw me only as a breeding tool, his death was good for me, for you, for our House Lannister!"
"Shut up!"
Joffrey finally reacted, letting out an angry roar.
"I won't allow you to speak of him like that!"
"My father is the King of the Seven Kingdoms! The warrior who conquered the Stormlands! The hero who overthrew the Mad King!"
"You vicious woman! It's you who weren't worthy of him!"
"I wasn't worthy of him?"
Cersei seemed to have heard the funniest joke in the world.
She stepped closer to Joffrey, those green eyes burning with a mad flame.
"You think you know him well? Joffrey?"
"You think you're really the son he was so proud of?"
Joffrey's heart contracted violently.
From his mother's eyes, he saw something that frightened him.
"You're wrong."
A cruel smile appeared on Cersei's face.
She leaned close to Joffrey's ear, and in a voice like a devil's murmur, spoke word by word.
"Robert Baratheon, he is not your father."
These words, like a black bolt of lightning, instantly struck the crown of Joffrey's head.
His brain stopped functioning at that moment.
The entire world, all sound, all color, vanished in that instant.
Only his mother's words echoed endlessly in his ears.
He is not your father.
Not your father...
Not...
"You... what did you say?"
Joffrey felt his voice came from another world, strange and distant.
"I said, you are not Robert's son!"
Cersei looked at her son's face, which had instantly lost all color, and a sick sense of pleasure surged in her.
"You are the son of me and Jaime Lannister!"
"The blood flowing in your veins is Lannister blood! Pure lion's blood!"
"It has nothing to do with that Baratheon stag!"
Boom,—!
Joffrey felt his world had completely collapsed.
He was not Robert's son.
He was... he was the bastard born of his mother and Jaime?
Then his throne...
His identity as king...
Was it all a lie?
A joke?
A massive wave of dizziness hit him. He staggered back a few steps, his back slamming against the cold wall.
He slid down the wall, collapsing weakly to the floor.
He clutched his head, letting out a groan of pain.
No.
This wasn't true.
This must be a lie concocted by this vicious woman to get back at him!
"No... you're lying to me... you're lying to me!"
Joffrey raised his head, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Cersei.
"Whether I'm lying or not, you know best in your heart."
Cersei looked at him coldly.
"Look at your hair, it's Lannister gold."
"Then think of Robert's countless bastards, which one of them doesn't have black hair?"
"What part of you resembles that damned drunkard?!"
Joffrey was utterly dumbfounded.
Yes.
Why was his hair gold?
While all of Robert's bastards had black hair.
He had always thought he had inherited his mother's hair color.
But now...
A fact he had never dared to think about, had even deliberately ignored, was laid bare and bloody before him.
He really was a... bastard.
A bastard who had ascended the Iron Throne only through lies and deceit!
"Haha... hahahahaha!"
Joffrey suddenly laughed, laughing until tears and snot streamed down his face.
He laughed at himself, at his mother, at this absurd world.
The laughter stopped abruptly.
Joffrey slowly raised his head.
The grief and despair on his face faded rapidly within seconds.
Replaced by a heart-stopping calm.
A deathly stillness before the storm.
His eyes changed.
Those blue eyes no longer held any human emotion.
Only the madness and calculation of a beast remained.
The throne.
He could not lose the throne!
As long as he sat on that chair, he was the King of the Seven Kingdoms!
Whoever dared question it would die!
What the truth was, didn't matter!
What mattered was that no one could know the truth!
Then he would forever be the son of King Robert, the legitimate heir to the Seven Kingdoms!
"This matter..."
Joffrey slowly rose from the floor, his voice terrifyingly low.
"Who else knows?"
Cersei looked at the change in her son's eyes and felt an inexplicable chill.
She felt the Joffrey before her had become utterly unfamiliar.
"Tywin... he knows."
Cersei answered instinctively.
"And... and Jaime..."
She did not say Lynn's name.
She didn't dare.
She had an intuition that if she said it, Joffrey would do something even more terrible.
And that something would lead to the complete destruction of House Lannister.
"Tywin... Jaime..."
Joffrey chewed over these two names.
One far away in Casterly Rock, one whereabouts unknown.
Both were threats.
But the greatest threat was right before him.
His mother.
As long as she died, one less person in this world would know the greatest secret.
The killing intent in Joffrey's eyes surged!
He lunged forward like a hunting leopard, charging at his own mother!
He stretched out his hands and viciously clamped them around Cersei's slender neck!
Cersei's eyes flew wide in shock, her face filled with disbelief.
She wanted to scream, to call for help.
But those iron-vise-like hands let her make no sound.
She was just a frail woman; no matter how useless Joffrey was, he was not someone she could handle.
A sense of suffocation instantly enveloped her.
"As long as you die..."
Joffrey's twisted face leaned close to hers, his voice like it came from the seventh hell.
"No one else will know this secret!"
"Don't worry, I'll send Jaime down to keep you company."
"You slut, don't blame me for killing you, blame yourself for choosing to betray my father."
"This is what you deserve, Cersei."
➤ Next: The Panicked Joffrey
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