[Episode 19]
Roxanne stared fixedly at my pin with bewildered eyes. With her suddenly quieted gaze directed at me, the eyes of everyone in the student council room naturally gathered on me as well. The room, which had been filled with the sound of people chattering, had gone silent before I knew it.
The situation was flowing in a strange direction.
*Wow, getting branded as a thief while just standing still feels really weird.*
It was a situation I had never experienced once in my life. Feeling the barrage of gazes, I calmly opened my mouth, repeating to myself that if I just spoke calmly, it was something I could explain well enough.
“The hairpin you said you lost, by any chance, the jewel attached to it....”
Before my words could even finish, someone roughly opened the student council room door. Feeling something in my chest grow cold, I slowly turned my head toward the source of the sound.
Silver hair with a hue colder than a well-honed blade—it was Cedric.
He was roughly pulling Yuri along by the hand. *He’s still got that habit of grabbing other people’s hands and dragging them around,* I thought.
He seemed to notice that the people’s gazes, which had been pouring onto him as he entered with a loud noise, were soon directed at me. And Cedric’s eyes, swirling with a fury like raging waves, were on me—or, more precisely....
Before that thought could even finish, Cedric let go of Yuri’s hand and strode over, roughly yanking me as if by the collar. From that force, I lost my balance and fell backward.
“Have you still not been able to throw away that vulgar habit?”
Without paying any attention to me having fallen, Cedric whispered in a low, growling voice near my ear. Then he roughly pulled out the hairpin attached to my hair.
“Why do you have this?”
Common sense dictated that no one would bring something they had just stolen to the very place where the owner was. However, from our few encounters, I already knew that Cedric was not someone to whom common sense applied.
It was the moment Cedric tried to pull me up roughly. Before I could open my mouth to say anything through the pain in my legs and bottom from the fall, someone blocked his hand reaching toward me.
“What do you think you’re doing right now?”
The Second Prince, whom I hadn’t noticed entering, was blocking him. Cedric flinched for a moment at the unexpected appearance of the Second Prince, then barely suppressed his anger and greeted him. The Second Prince frowned, looking back and forth between me on the floor and Cedric. It was a daze, wondering why he was here.
When I showed signs of trying to get up, the Second Prince silently reached out a hand to me as if to help. But I could get up on my own. I quietly shook my head. I couldn’t see the Second Prince’s expression, but I could tell his gaze was clinging stubbornly to me.
I steadied myself on the table beside me and barely managed to stand. Unlike when it had been broken, a stinging pain traveled up my ankle. I barely composed myself and looked at Cedric, opening my mouth to offer the explanation I hadn’t been able to finish earlier.
“I was about to tell you, but the jewel on the hairpin that Roxanne lost....”
Cedric cut me off in a dumbfounded tone.
“Are you saying that a family on the level of Baron Degove could make a hairpin with a jewel used in a Grand Duchess’s ornaments?”
Just when I was about to patiently ask again what the name of that jewel was.
“Even if you begged your father and sold your estate, you couldn’t obtain a single sapphire attached to that hairpin.”
...As expected. It seemed the explanation would be easier than I had thought. The problem was Cedric’s mouth that wouldn’t stop. Perhaps thinking that my keeping quiet was a tacit admission of theft, he seemed to keep stoking the anger that had subsided slightly with the Second Prince’s appearance.
“There are more than one or two people who have seen you and that rat-like maid meeting in secret.”
*Did he commission a maid to steal the ducal family’s goods?* Saying that, Cedric pointed at Yuri. It was a tone that seemed to barely calm his anger. When Cedric’s gaze reached her, Yuri trembled even more violently and couldn’t say a word.
*He just finished saying I’m from a family that can’t even buy a single cheap jewel, and now he’s asking if I bribed a maid with money.*
Cedric didn’t seem to know what he was saying. He was pouring out anger incessantly without giving me a chance to speak. In the frozen student council room, only Cedric was burning with a fiery rage.
I decided to wait until Cedric’s mouth stopped—or, more precisely, until he had poured out all the anger he had and could listen to what I had to say.
*Come to think of it, he really... reminds me of someone.*
Cedric reminded me of the crazy old man—no, the old man I had met while working part-time at a convenience store. He always used to give money as if throwing it, displeased about something or other. *Let’s just enjoy it thinking it’s a rain of money falling from the sky*—picturing a flower garden in my mind like that was only good for a day or two; putting up with his fuss when he came by the convenience store every single day was no easy task.
Then one day, my sullen expression must have been quite displeasing to him. Like a surveyor who had come out to conduct a population and housing census, he began asking whether my parents were still alive and well, or if they had already passed away. Also, worrying about me working the night shift like this, he incessantly spewed out words asking if our family was a family of good-for-nothing bastards, or if not, how they could let their daughter work night jobs like this.
While the old man was saying all that, I counted the black strands within his roughly trimmed beard that hadn’t yet turned white. When I had counted about fifty strands, he let out a rough breath. Not missing that opening, I told him it was 6,300 won in total, and the old man scattered money in my face as if firing a money gun, then disappeared leisurely.
While recalling that memory and letting Cedric’s insults flow in one ear and out the other, silently enduring the gazes pouring in from all directions, it was then that he seemed to notice I was spacing out, lost in other thoughts.
*You crazy bastard, if you noticed, then give me some time to speak too.*
I was composing my expression to avoid revealing my bored feelings. Cedric looked at me like that and scoffed, curling up the corner of his mouth in a sneer. Was he trying to change his strategy for insults? Not knowing what he was trying to pull, I was looking at him when—
“You solved the academy’s embezzlement case?”
It seemed he had heard the story from Roxanne. With a cold expression, he continued.
“Since coveting others’ things is your specialty, I suppose you were born with an eye for recognizing your own kind too, weren’t you?”
Stop strutting around without knowing your place—why don’t you take a look at yourself instead? Saying that, he approached me. As I flinched and stepped back slightly at the sudden approach, he placed a hand on my shoulder and pressed down hard so I couldn’t move.
“Is that vulgarity of always having to live as a parasite on someone innate? You truly know no moderation.”
Cedric whispered that and, removing his hand, immediately pushed my shoulder. Unlike before, I felt my chest grow cold. Of course, the temperature of the student council room seemed to plummet far colder than my heart. Only their eyes were excited, as if watching an entertaining show.
As I was choosing words to reply to Cedric, such a thought suddenly came to me.
*How long do I have to keep doing this?*
Every time even a slightly suspicious pretext arose like today, did I have to be torn into like this and desperately rack my brains to prove my innocence? Thinking that, I loosened the tie around my neck slightly.
To be honest, the difficult situations I had experienced since becoming Dietrich were bewildering, but not truly unbearable. Each time I faced such things, what I felt was not some grand emotion like indignation or misery. It was just the same irritation you feel when you see fruit flies that keep appearing from god knows where.
Honestly, though today’s events were humiliating, I could have let it slide thinking I had just met one of those crazy customers at a part-time job. I could have quit the student council right there on the grounds of having caused a scandal. I hadn’t had friends to begin with, and the people at the academy hadn’t been favorable from the start. So I could have cursed inwardly as usual to relieve all this humiliation and unpleasantness, or gotten through it by imagining Cedric’s head as a target and shooting arrows all day long.
But I thought that such things wouldn’t end until Dietrich graduated from the academy and no longer had to face them—no, until he disappeared from this world. Like today. Continuously. Thinking like that, Cedric’s anger that I had let slide until now, this atmosphere, those sharp words—they all made my chest feel unbearably stifled.
Today, with a few words, Cedric had turned all the achievements I had built up until now into scraps of tissue. And I could be certain that he would do the same to all the achievements I—or rather, Dietrich—would accomplish going forward. Every time Dietrich tried to build a life of his own bit by bit, Cedric would sweep away all that effort like a wave, until that child eventually died, submerged in helplessness. More than any violent action or tone of voice, it was difficult to simply endure and overlook Cedric’s attitude.
“Answer me. Why did you have my mother’s keepsake? What plot were you and that maid scheming?”
Now Cedric’s gaze was directed at Yuri. She was trembling violently, pale as a sheet. Before Cedric’s anger shifted to Yuri, I had to open my mouth. I put strength into my stomach so my voice wouldn’t tremble and looked straight at Cedric.
“Are you asking because you truly do not know?”
“...What?”
Cedric now had eyes that looked as though he would lunge at me.
“Why I know Yuri, a maid of the ducal family, and why I possess a hairpin made with a jewel befitting a young lady of the ducal family.”
But this was something that would inevitably clash sooner or later. Thinking so, I continued speaking without regard for Cedric’s expression, which was contorting with anger.
“I asked whether you truly do not know.”