Episode 5
She tried to avoid it, but their eyes met.
The man stared intently at Rose.
His eyes were a pale blue, close to sky-blue. In general, his coloring was light. Even his black hair had faded-looking strands mixed in here and there, giving it an ashen cast. A calm, handsome face drew close—so composed it was impossible to believe he had just demanded that his own brother be killed. Perhaps he rarely saw the sun, for his skin was pale. The beauty mark at the corner of his right eye stood out clearly.
Rose hurriedly shut her eyes. She was afraid that if she met his gaze too clearly, he might find some fault with her.
Akenaus turned her face this way and that, observing her, then suddenly said,
“Looking at you like this, you’re very pretty. I didn’t notice because you had your head bowed so low.”
For an instant, a chill ran down her back. Goosebumps prickled over her skin.
“Pretty enough that it feels a shame to simply send you back.”
His thumb pressed into the center of her tightly closed lips. Rose forced herself to stop breathing and endured his touch. For now, it would be wise not to offend Akenaus.
He slowly traced the soft, tender flesh inside her lips.
“Have you done it?”
“……Pardon?”
“I’m asking if you’re a virgin.”
A terrible sense of humiliation surged over her. Even so, Rose could not let down her guard. With a single word from Akenaus, she could be dragged off to his bedroom right this instant.
How should she answer to escape this man’s interest?
She did not know. And so she did not answer. Of course, in situations like this, silence often became the clearest answer, regardless of one’s own intentions.
“What a pity. I’ll have to put that off until later. Virgins are stiff and boring, so it takes a lot of time to teach them. If it weren’t only a week away, I would have taken you to my bedroom right now.”
She had guessed right. Rose was visibly relieved. Even if it was nothing but luck, relief was still relief.
“Ah, and don’t forget that your parents’ lives are in my hands.”
Even as he coveted her body and promised himself a later date, Akenaus reminded her until the very end of that chilling warning, delivered in a frivolous tone.
One week later, Ezekail Valdemaera returned to Cleris as scheduled, accompanied by a grand triumphal procession. That day, Rose took the pass Akenaus had issued her and knocked on the mansion door. The Valdemaera residence was a vast mansion with dozens of employees and all manner of merchants and guests constantly coming and going. Blending naturally into it was exceedingly simple.
Carrying a tray with a teacup on it, she slipped soundlessly into Ezekail’s bedroom, which Akenaus had told her about in advance.
She deliberately did not knock. She had already overheard the servants whispering that he was asleep, apparently exhausted from the triumphal ceremony.
The door was open.
The moment she crossed the threshold, her gaze was fixed in place. The tall man who came into view at a glance was lying sideways on a long chair, eyes closed. Though there was a comfortable bed beside him, he had not even changed out of his uniform, which was covered in medals.
Hair as black as raven feathers lay carelessly disheveled over his straight forehead. Unlike his thin, light brother, everything about Ezekail was dark. His coloring, his lines, his atmosphere.
He was a man whose face bore especially deep shadows. They said that among the countless faces a person possessed, the face one wore in sleep resembled childhood and was therefore the purest and most harmless. But his sleeping face was neither pure nor harmless at all.
There was no way a pure and harmless face could make her breath catch like this.
Eeeee. A ringing sounded in her ears.
Only later did she realize it. Perhaps that ringing had been a signal sent by her instincts sensing danger.
Rose set the tray down on a nearby table and opened the lid of the glass bottle. Its contents were a colorless, odorless liquid. She quietly looked into it. She did not know what it tasted like, but mixed into tea, it would likely be impossible to notice from the outside.
It was probably not a drug that would be easily detected by sight or by taste. However, the man had never told her exactly what kind of effect it had. She could only guess.
Her fingertips began to tremble. Ezekail remained quietly asleep, not knowing that a woman who might harm him was right in front of him.
If only he would open his eyes now.
No, if only he would keep them closed.
Her mind was in chaos. After standing frozen like a stone statue and staring at him for a long while, Rose hesitantly took a step.
A faint smell of gunpowder came from the man, whose eyes were slanted closed. It was a trace of war.
Ezekail was a soldier famous as a marksman. In particular, the tale of how, when outnumbered, he had climbed a tree and brought down one enemy after another with a single bullet each, thereby breaking the enemy forces, was well known.
A unit that plunged into the most dangerous rough terrain and held out until the very end. Such rumors followed the company led by Ezekail of the 37th Regiment. For instance, the legendary story that after one battle, their flag had been stained with such an enormous amount of blood that it was impossible to tell friend from foe, then had dried pitch-black, became a kind of symbol; his company even carried a black flag of its own.
Such a soldier was about to lose his life abruptly because of his brother’s jealousy. It was a truly empty end for a war hero.
Her gaze quietly traced his face. Skin tanned by the heat of the battlefield added depth to the shadows of his prominent features. His eyes were still closed, but she could clearly imagine their sharp, upturned shape once they opened. Ironically, there was a mole near the man’s left eye. It looked as though the brothers had divided one each between them.
His impression both resembled and did not resemble his elder blood relative. If Akenaus had a pretty face, then this man was better described as beautiful rather than pretty. If one stripped away Akenaus’s levity and mischief and gave him color and weight, he might become this man.
Clatter. Something was caught under the heel she had stepped down without thinking. Her heart dropped.
The object that had caught her heel was a long rifle. The way it had been cunningly placed against a carpet of the same color seemed as if it had been set there to detect someone’s approach. Surely a habit from setting traps on the battlefield had unconsciously come into play.
It was then. The man who had been asleep until just now opened his eyes in a flash. His slightly furrowed blue eyes were a dark blue like the night sea. His cold gaze swiftly swept over her attire and down to her feet.
It happened in an instant. Kicking the rifle away with one foot, he snatched her wrist toward him.
The hands of a man who had been through countless battlefields were rough and hard. The history of pulling a gun’s trigger hundreds and thousands of times and swinging a bayonet was etched intact into wounds not yet drained of blood. They were the complete opposite of his brother’s soft, pale, slender hands.
Just as she was left dumbfounded by the situation that had unfolded in a flash, sparks burst from the muzzle of the gun that had spun half a turn after being kicked by his foot.
At the same time, bang, an ear-splitting roar exploded.
It was a gunshot loud enough to summon every person in the mansion to one place. The window struck by the bullet instantly collapsed with a crash.
It was a wonder she did not scream. Frozen white, Rose glanced sideways at the rifle. From the shock of firing, the rifle was still spinning round and round in place.
She remembered hearing somewhere in passing that rifles could suddenly misfire from even a slight impact. Sometimes, she had heard, bullets even went off during loading, injuring the person handling them or a nearby comrade.
Still, she had never expected that a gun brought back from a triumphal ceremony would still be loaded.
Above all.
Above all else…….
The man was still holding her wrist. The blood throughout her body went cold. She had been discovered. She had been caught. Cold sweat dampened her back.
Even if people did not check the face of every servant who passed them by, things changed once people began gathering at the site of an accident. They would have to explain how the gun had fired, and soon the servants would point to her and testify that she was a face they had never seen inside the mansion. As they questioned the full story, the identity of the glass bottle, the purpose for which she had entered, whose instigation she was acting under, and why she had no choice but to accept that instigation would all be revealed one after another.
Then everything would be over.
She had to escape from here somehow.
Instinct overpowered reason. Rose flung the drug into the man’s eyes.
“Ugh!”
The moment the ambushed man startled and covered his eyes, she twisted her wrist free and ran out of the bedroom in one breath.
She had been so flustered that her memories afterward were fragmentary and unclear. While the mansion was thrown into an uproar by the sudden gunshot, Rose escaped the Valdemaera residence and ran home in a frenzy. She shut herself in her dark room, pulled the blanket over her head, and trembled.
From that day on, Rose could not set a single foot outside the house. Afraid that the employees of the Valdemaera mansion might come around the neighborhood asking after a suspicious woman, she even latched all the windows and suppressed every sign of life, pretending the house was empty.
At times, she wondered if this was a dream. But the half-emptied glass bottle constantly reminded her of the terror she had committed. Even so, she did not dare to ignore the bottle or muster the courage to throw it away.
Being alone, her mind kept sinking back to that day. As she pieced together the fragments of memory that were missing here and there like an unfinished puzzle, Rose suddenly shuddered.
The sparks that had flashed up and the bullet that had struck the window.
If he had not kicked the rifle to change its direction and snatched her away, whom would that loaded muzzle have shot?
It had been only a brief instant, less than a second. Yet in that short moment, he had chosen to save her, and she had chosen to harm him.
Opposite choices brought opposite results. Perhaps because she had been trapped in a single thought all day, unable to escape it, Rose suffered through nightmares for several nights. In her dreams, she was struck down by the misfired bullet, and at other times she was dragged away after the glass bottle was discovered.
It was around then that her parents returned. They said they had been imprisoned the entire time in some unfamiliar place they did not know. Though somewhat thinner, they seemed to have no major health problems. Rather, Rose, who had spent her days crouched and hiding inside the house, had become far more haggard and pale, looking no different from an invalid.
“They say he went blind.”
Her parents already knew everything their daughter had done to save them. Rose froze at the news Akenaus had sent through her parents.