Chapter 153
For an instant, a dreadful silence fell.
In that brief moment, Isaac lifted his blue eyes gloomily and studied the man who had opened the door and come in. Isaac recognized him at once. It was raining, and everything around them was dim in more ways than one, but thanks to the lantern the man was holding, his face was easy enough to make out.
Cedric Osmond.
The man who had danced with Sasha on the day of her birthday party. The infuriating man who had conspired with Robert Bloom to lure Sasha out.
Compared to when Isaac had last seen him, Cedric looked quite wretched. Even leaving aside the fact that he was soaked through from the rain, his complexion alone was enough. His eyes were sunken, and perhaps he had grown gaunt in the meantime, for both cheeks were hollowed out.
But more pathetic than any of that was the gun the man was holding. With a gun in one hand and a lantern in the other, he was shining the light on them, but his stance was far too clumsy. He looked so awkward it was as though he had never held a gun in his life.
Yes. Very clumsy.
The muzzle was pointed downward to begin with.
After sweeping his gaze over it one last time, as if to confirm that fact, Isaac did not look away but stared straight at Cedric.
If it comes to it, I’ll twist his neck.
“No.”
Just as Isaac was about to reach out with that thought, Cedric, still looking straight at them, answered someone behind him.
“There is nothing here either.”
Still looking directly at Isaac, Cedric answered with a strangely detached expression.
Whoever had spoken to Cedric did not particularly respond to his words.
Instead, he abruptly fired his gun.
With a bang, Cedric’s body collapsed face-first onto the floor.
First the man’s body, and then the lantern he had been holding, rolled across the floor.
Isaac stared at him with an expressionless face. His sharp ears caught the conversation outside amid the sound of rain.
“What the hell was that all of a sudden?”
“He was someone we had to kill anyway. Don’t worry about it.”
The man who had shot Cedric answered as though it were nothing.
Another man’s voice, sounding as if he was a little farther away than the first, came through.
“The young duke ordered that? How the hell does he plan to deal with the aftermath?”
“Not the young duke. Someone higher than that bastard… sir, you idiot.”
“…Someone higher?”
The man did not immediately answer his companion. Instead, he came trudging toward them with wet, splashing footsteps. It seemed he intended to make absolutely sure Cedric was dead.
He approached the door and raised the muzzle again, but click. Only an empty sound rang out, and the gun misfired. The man rubbed the rain-soaked barrel against his sleeve and muttered, “…Shit.” Then he strode inside.
The instant the man’s head entered through the doorway, a large hand shot out and seized him by the throat.
With a crunch, the sound of bone breaking, the man went limp.
Isaac dragged him inside and threw him down as though discarding him.
“…Urgh….”
The groan did not come from the man whose breath had already stopped. Isaac, still standing pressed close to the door and on guard, rolled only his eyes toward the source of the sound. It had come from Cedric, who was soaking the filthy wooden floor in blood.
He’s managed to stay alive. As Isaac looked at him with that impression, Theodore, who had searched the corpse and gained nothing of note, was approaching Cedric. Isaac looked at him and shook his head.
The conversation outside had been cut off, so the man who had been speaking with the one just now might soon come over. But this time, another gunshot rang out from far away, bang, and the man turned from his path toward them and headed in that direction instead.
Only after confirming that did Isaac close the broken door again.
“Do not touch him.”
Despite the warning, when the old man approached Cedric again, Isaac spoke once more, spitting out the words.
Theodore looked at Isaac without any sign of shrinking back.
“Are you not acquainted with him?”
Just as Isaac had recognized Cedric, Cedric had recognized Isaac at once.
And in that brief instant, Theodore had noticed it with uncanny perception.
“The shot missed his vitals, so if we stop the bleeding well enough, he may survive.”
The old man spoke calmly, and as soon as Isaac heard that, he fell silent for a moment as though lost in thought, then approached Cedric.
“I know you are still in league with Bloom. I hear you attached yourself to the young duke. And as if that weren’t enough, you told him her true identity.”
Isaac crouched beside him and spoke in a grim, biting tone. Cedric looked up at Isaac, his face deathly pale.
Isaac wanted to strangle him to death on the spot, but this was someone worth interrogating. He took a bandage for stopping blood from his breast.
“I imagine you are curious what happened to Bloom. Aren’t you? I personally broke the joints of that bastard’s fingers. He had a tight mouth, despite his station.”
“…Kgh….”
“Bloom and you alike were nothing more than pieces of this level. The first to be killed to keep your mouths shut.”
Looking more closely, it was a penetrating wound. And as the old man had said, it had missed the vitals, so if they could only stop the blood pouring madly from the wound, there was some chance he would live. Lucky, too.
Isaac shoved the bandage in with no small amount of feeling, then paused and looked down at that beautiful man. Cedric was gritting his teeth hard enough to break them, holding back a scream.
Isaac stopped moving and stared at Cedric.
“Why did you help us?”
“….”
“Speak.”
Instead of answering, Cedric only shed tears. Of course, he had just been shot and had a hole blown through his body, but the face that shed tears while suppressing even the sound of sobbing clearly held far more than that.
My little sister. My only remaining blood kin in this world. That innocent little sister who looked up at him as though he were the greatest person in the world.
“You’ll have to work hard, Mr. Osmond.”
The moment he opened the door and saw Isaac, truly countless thoughts flashed through his mind, and yet—
“I was lying to you from the very beginning.”
“There are many people like that, Mr. Osmond.”
Perhaps because of who the other person was, quite naturally, he remembered the words once spoken to him by a woman with whom he had not even managed to form the slightest connection.
And then the face of his sister, whom he had barely managed to bury away, rose in his mind one after another, and at the same time a wave of self-loathing surged over him.
As he was in no state to draw out even a fragment of that complicated state of mind, Cedric merely jerked his body at the foreign sensation in his throat. Isaac looked down at Cedric. Just as he had at their first meeting, he looked gentle, a man utterly unsuited to this sort of affair. A man who seemed far more fit to study elegantly at a university and teach others had somehow endured for a long time in this underworld.
When Isaac took his hand away and tried to rise, Theodore continued stopping the bleeding in his place. Cedric’s trembling hand clutched Isaac’s sleeve.
“…Sasha….”
At the name that spilled from his mouth, Isaac’s head turned at once.
“Miss Sasha… is… in danger.”
Cedric forced the words out with difficulty.
“The D-Duke….”
Before Isaac could ask again with a hardened face, a knock sounded at the door.
As if it were a prearranged signal, the knocking was very faint, four taps at regular intervals.
Isaac, gripping a jackknife, approached the door and flung it open. A man with an unfamiliar, rain-drenched face came in. He was one of Wilson’s subordinates.
“We have cleared the surroundings to some extent, Captain. However, it is somewhat strange that the Hound himself is not here. They are all small fry.”
The instant Isaac heard the report, he strode fiercely back toward Cedric.
But before he could reach him, Theodore seized Isaac’s sleeve and pulled him back.
“The evidence is not with me, but with that woman. The governess.”
Though he knew it was already too late, the old man spoke urgently, his face gone white.
“Leave at once.”
＊＊＊
Again, a bang sounded from far away. Gunshots rang out in succession, as if they were exchanging fire.
Sasha quickly folded the paper Miss Iver had handed her and put it back into her bag. Click, click. After quickly turning the lock back into place, she ignored whatever Miss Iver was saying, lifted it up into the luggage rack above the seats, and pushed it into the corner.
Compared to the commotion of the gunfire, no screams could be heard. Only the sound of several crew members shouting and running toward the rear car came through. Sasha sat Miss Iver back down, who looked as though she naturally intended to protect her, and checked the window on the door.
All she could see was the blue uniform of a crew member passing by. Then, through it, she spotted something and opened the door she had locked.
A half-smoked cigar lay in one corner of the corridor, growing cold.
It was the spot where Wilson had been standing guard just a moment ago.
Before Sasha could pull herself back inside, the door of the neighboring compartment opened with a scrape.
“Don’t open it!”
Regardless of his companion’s horrified shout, the man who opened the door and stuck his head out called to Sasha as though shouting.
“Come over here!”
“Dear!”
Despite his wife’s attempt to stop him, the man shouted toward Sasha.
Though his face was as deeply shocked as everyone else’s, there was something about the man that made him seem familiar with this sort of situation.
As the man in the suit instructed, Sasha and Miss Iver placed their large luggage bags out toward the corridor as if leaving them there, then crossed into the neighboring compartment.
There was only the married couple in the neighboring compartment. The wife looked so startled she was nearly in tears, and unlike her husband, this sort of situation seemed to be a first for her.
“Let the robbers take the bags. Preserving your lives comes first.”
Miss Iver forced the reluctant Sasha into the inside seat and sat on the outside herself.
The man took a revolver from his breast and was wiping it in haste. Watching him, Sasha felt along her own side and confirmed the presence of the gun inside her pocket.
“Train robbers?”
“That’s right. It’s the perfect time, isn’t it? Everyone is going on summer holiday, so their wallets are full. That is what they are after. It is no different from carriage robbery. If you have a wallet or anything of the sort, take it out in advance and throw it down.”
The man was declaring it a train robbery as though it were obvious. Of course. Anyone would think it was a train robbery.
Sasha listened silently to the man, then raised the curtain and opened the train window. Regardless of the horrified gasp from the man’s wife sitting opposite, she stuck out her head and looked toward the rear.
At a glance, the cars seemed to stretch endlessly all the way to the very last one, but still. Somehow. Something was strange.
As she stared, a faint screeching sound came from afar, and one of the cars at the end separated, falling behind until it became a dot in the distance.
After confirming that, Sasha murmured with a dazed expression.
“…They rob trains that way?”
Soon, the surroundings became utter chaos. Like Sasha’s party and the married couple sitting across from them, the first-class passengers who had boarded the train, intending to go on holiday, were each sobbing and screaming in panic.
The gunshots that had been ringing out continuously from the other side had stopped.
That felt extremely unpleasant.
“…It seems they intend to isolate only the first-class passengers and extort a great deal from them.”
The man, who had followed Sasha in checking the situation behind them, spoke with less certainty than before. The train had now grown quite short.
One absurd situation followed another.
It felt as though she were dreaming.
“What do you think happened to the crew members who ran off earlier?”
The man’s wife asked, sniffling.
No one answered.
Amid the unbroken panic, Sasha felt herself becoming strangely calm. Miss Iver grasped her hand. As if in answer, Sasha interlaced her fingers with hers and held on.
Bang! From the other end, the sound of a door being thrown open roughly rang out.
Then came the sound of footsteps walking down the corridor.
It was not the frantic running from earlier, but the sound of boots walking at ease. Not several people, either. Just one.
A knock sounded on a compartment door. It was the sound of someone knocking on the door of a compartment farther down.
Scrape, the sound of a door opening and closing repeated.
“…Looks like they are sweeping through thoroughly.”
The man, now convinced again that they were robbers, muttered.
Sasha did not believe him.
The footsteps stopped in front of their compartment.
The transparent window set into the compartment door.
Sasha watched as someone thrust his face up to it and peered inside.
“…There you are.”
…It was Jeffrey Grayson.
Looking strange, with bruises here and there, he stared fixedly at her and beckoned.
“Come out here.”