My Useless Mute Beta Wife Is A Big Shot!

—Two Years Ago —

The room is a cathedral of light and longing.

Floor-to-ceiling windows open onto a garden where colorful roses climb toward the sky. Sunlight pours through in golden rivers, warming the polished marble floors, catching the edges of crystal vases, setting the dust motes adrift in lazy spirals.

The air smells of paint and jasmine—of creation and memory intertwined. Every wall, every surface, every corner of this room holds him.

Ellis.

His face watches from everywhere.

Some are photographs—captured moments stolen by someone with a careful eye. Ellis in his high school uniform, blazer unbuttoned, tie pulled loose, sitting on the street patting a puppy. Ellis in a café, steam rising from a cup between his fingers, his gaze lost somewhere beyond the café window. Ellis in a park, autumn leaves caught mid-fall around him like a curtain of gold and rust, his smile soft, unguarded, almost shy.

Others are paintings.

Handmade. Painstaking. The work of hours and days and weeks—of someone who has learned the shape of Ellis’s jaw by heart, who knows the exact curve of his lips, the way his hair falls across his forehead after he runs his fingers through it absentmindedly.

The paintings capture something the photographs cannot—the essence of him. The sharpness of his gaze. The warmth beneath his coldness.

Silas sits in the center of the room, surrounded by the face of the man he has never met.

A chair. An easel. A canvas.

He holds a paintbrush like a conductor holds a baton—not gripping, not clutching, but balanced, light, an extension of his own hand. His fingers are stained with color: cobalt blooming beneath his nails, cerulean tracing the lines of his palms, ultramarine smeared across his knuckles like bruised twilight.

Before him, on the canvas, Ellis’s face is almost complete.

Almost.

The eyes remain unfinished.

Two pools of empty white stare back at him, waiting. Patient. Accusing.

Silas dips the brush into the paint—blue, deep and endless, the color of the sky just before the first star appears, the color of deep water hiding secrets.

He lifts the brush toward the waiting eyes. His hand does not tremble.

He has been preparing for this moment for weeks. Months, perhaps. Longer.

He has mixed the shade again and again, searching for the exact hue, the precise depth. He has studied photographs until they blurred, until Ellis’s eyes appeared behind his own closed lids every night.

This is the final stroke.

He touches the brush to the canvas.

Gently.

Carefully.

As if handling something precious—something that could shatter with too much force.

The color blooms beneath his touch, spreading across the white, filling the emptiness. He works slowly, deliberately, each movement a prayer, each stroke a confession.

The blue deepens as he layers it, shade upon shade, building something that looks like light, like life, like a soul peering out from behind glass. When he finishes, the eyes stare back at him.

They are beautiful.

They are him.

A smile spreads across Silas’s lips—soft, private, almost reverent.

So beautiful.

The door opens.

No knock. No warning.

The sound is sharp, violent, splintering the silence like a stone through stained glass.

Silas doesn’t move.

Doesn’t flinch.

His eyes stay on the painting. His fingers continue their work—adjusting a shadow here, softening a highlight there. The world outside the canvas does not exist.

Soren Stoneheart enters the room like a storm.

He wears black—funeral black, tailored and severe. A white flower is tucked into his breast pocket, its petals already beginning to wilt, darkening at the edges like bruising fruit.

Grief has hollowed his face into something sharp and colorless. His jaw is tight with restrained fury, his eyes rimmed red from tears he will never admit to shedding.

A black file rests in his hand, his knuckles white around its edges. He stops in the center of the room.

Stares at Silas.

Still painting.

Still calm.

His voice cuts through the silence like broken glass. "It’s only been two hours."

Silas’s brush moves across the canvas—a soft stroke, a gentle blend.

"Two hours since Father’s funeral ended." Soren’s voice rises, cracks at the edges. "And you’re here. Painting him."

A pause thick with bitterness.

"How heartless are you?"

Silas doesn’t react. Doesn’t turn. The brush continues its work, patient and unhurried, as if Soren’s words are nothing more than wind rattling against a window.

Soren’s fists clench at his sides. His knuckles go white.

"I came here to settle something." His voice drops lower, harder, each word forced through a jaw clenched too tight. "Listen to me carefully. I don’t know why Father gave the chairman position to you."

He spits the word like poison.

"You."

A step forward. His shadow falls across the floor, long and dark.

"I am his eldest son. The perfect heir for the Stoneheart family. The one who worked. Who sacrificed. Who deserved it."

His voice cracks.

"But he still chose you."

Silence.

"Why?"

The word hangs in the air, unanswered.

Soren looks down at the floor—at the marble, cold and flawless, reflecting his own shattered expression back at him. His voice drops to something almost broken.

"That old man..."

He swallows.

"He chose you because you’re his first love’s child. I knew from the beginning I would never be the one he chose." His hands tremble. "He never loved me. Never loved my mother. We were just... burdens. Responsibilities. Mistakes he couldn’t take back."

His jaw tightens until the muscles tremble beneath his skin.

"But no matter what happens—" His voice rises again, sharp and bitter. "You are not better than me."

He steps closer.

"A disabled person cannot be chairman. The board already doubts you. How do you expect them to accept a mute chairman?"

Another step.

"Don’t fool yourself."

He is standing behind Silas now, looming over him, his shadow swallowing the light falling on the canvas.

"The chairman’s seat is mine." His voice drops to a whisper, venomous and low. "Remember this."

Silas does not move. Does not turn.

His brush continues its work—gentle strokes, soft blends, building light from shadow. His eyes remain fixed on Ellis’s face, on the blue eyes that stare back at him, patient and knowing.

Soren waits.

The silence stretches between them, thick and suffocating, filling every corner of the room like smoke.

"Are you even listening to me?"

Nothing.

Soren’s fury burns hotter. He throws the file onto the table—a sharp, violent sound that echoes off the walls.

"Sign the papers."

His voice is cold now. Controlled. The voice of someone already convinced victory belongs to him.

"You cannot handle the Stoneheart business. I will give you some shares—enough to live peacefully. Do not try to compete with me."

Silas does not respond.

His brush moves across the canvas, adding light to the eyes, depth to the gaze. He looks like he is alone in the room. Like Soren does not exist. Like the funeral, the rage, the grief—none of it touches him.

A smile touches his lips. He completes the painting.

Beautiful.

So beautiful.