“It wasn’t like that…… Earlier, I was trying to help her because I was afraid Deina would die, Your Highness doesn’t know but Rilke is very strange.”
Haltingly, he explained how Rilke had tried to make him take medicine and had pushed Deina into his room. But the only evidence was his word. Benedict had even seen him wake up in the same bed with Deina, hadn’t he?
He felt like he would suffocate from fear. He became sad because it seemed stranger to believe a story that sounded like a novel even to his own ears.
“I didn’t give my heart. Nothing happened that would make a child…… I only did everything with Your Highness.”
Benedict removed his hands and faced him.
He urgently grabbed just a little of the edge of his sleeve. The moment he separated from him, it felt like sudden righteous punishment would fall. His fingertips holding him were trembling. Looking at about Benedict’s chest level, he hastily said the most important words.
“Thank you for saying you believe me.”
Before he knew it, he was panting.
“Thank you,”
“Joachim.”
“It really is my heart, but,”
The words “I love you”
“I’m afraid it sounded like an excuse.”
He was really so afraid.
His entire tense body belatedly complained of pain. When he tried to forcibly hold back his panting, his throat was pressed and his heart beat painfully. When he kept failing to meet his eyes, Benedict tried to check his condition. His heart ached even more.
“I wanted to say it preciously, but I’m sorry for saying it like that.”
Even now he wanted to say he loved him.
Like wanting to pour water on parched land to soak it, even now he wanted to pour out his love. He barely managed to hold back, hoping the weight of his emotions contained in those words would feel even a little lighter. Because he had said he believed him.
“Joachim.”
At his call, he barely raised his head. When his eyes met Benedict’s, his heart broke.
He had such a painfully confused face, not knowing where it might have originated from.
“Can I hug you once?”
Benedict asked. His voice had sunk very low.
Yes. At the same time as his answer, he just hugged him. Benedict hugged him back firmly. They embraced each other tightly, breathlessly. His heart beat madly with tension, sadness, anxiety, and a little warmth. He felt him exhale a thread-like sigh.
After a while, Benedict buried his lips on his forehead. Mischievously rubbing his nose, he said his hair was ticklish. Though his heart ached, those words made him feel dazzlingly relieved.
Benedict seemed lost in thought, saying nothing.
Together they passed through the deserted corridor and came out through the back door of the mansion. Sir Lifros was waiting with a worried face together with House Meyer’s coachman. His eyes met his briefly and he sent an encouraging smile. He was grateful.
He got into the carriage first.
As he sat blankly in the empty carriage, Count Leroy soon entered.
Just as the carriage was about to depart, the door suddenly opened again.
“Your Highness?”
“There was something I forgot to say.”
His breathing was slightly rough as if he had run all the way.
“Joachim, I love you too.”
He pressed down and held back the tears that were about to come out again and nodded. He answered that he loved him. His voice came out trembling, but he wasn’t embarrassed at all.
The carriage departed.
“—Hah. Really.”
He belatedly realized that Count Leroy was looking at him as if he were the greatest philanderer, an incorrigible scoundrel, a shit-covered bad guy.
“I really love Prince Benedict.”
He opened his mouth incoherently in confusion.
“My love is only Benedict. Deina is—”
“It seemed more like you were cursing than confessing.”
There was nothing he could say but “really.” The Count still muttered with a displeased face.
“Well, if I were to sum up this situation in one word, there’s only that word.”
Count Leroy solemnly declared.
“Adultery.”
And at Count Leroy’s words that Deina was the official partner and Benedict was the adulterous partner, he jumped up and nearly rolled under the chair.
The distrust he received from Count Leroy, who already didn’t like him, was bone-piercing.
“You look like a choir boy, and yet, oh my. Anyone can easily say words. Anyone. What on earth was Our Highness thinking, whose heart was softened by such a confession.”
He raised his head.
“Do you know what he said? He said he would accept it even if it was really your child.”
He answered, still choked up.
“Yes, I would really be okay even if His Highness had an illegitimate child.”
“Ha! What great love you have… No, this isn’t it. Speak the truth quickly. It’ll be big trouble if it goes to trial like this.”
He laid out in detail what he had roughly said earlier.
What happened with Deina this spring, today’s events, even thinking that Deina seemed to be in danger.
“It’s like an acorn got caught while thinking of a pine cone. But I don’t understand. Why on earth would the small Prince Meyer do such a thing?”
He had no choice but to talk about Rilke too.
From recent events, to being dragged to the summer outer palace by Rilke, to meeting the Regent Duke before that.
“I heard from Prince Benedict. The evidence is only your word, but surprisingly he seems to believe it all. Well, since he considers it fact, making it fact is my job.”
Count Leroy seemed to think his words might be lies.
“We have to assume all situations and prepare thoroughly for such matters.”
The Count said that if they weren’t prepared and it was revealed in court, it would be big trouble, so tell him everything down to the smallest detail.
“Aren’t there more things you did wrong? To put it bluntly, if someone like Deina pops out as a witness in court and you go ‘Ah, that time…’ like earlier, it becomes very, very unfunny!”
“I’m really sorry about earlier. If it had been in court, I absolutely wouldn’t have done that. Because it would become testimony. Anyway, I’m really sorry.”
Count Leroy’s face softened a little.
He summarized the situation.
“They threw a small stone. A stone called Deina. It’s like a hint that they’ll use it in the trial, no, seeing that the Regent Duke used Deina as an advance notice, Duke Yorick seems to already regard her as a useless card.”
He acknowledged the possibility that the child in her belly might really not be his child.
“Rilke might present Deina as a witness, but first he’ll try to spread rumors.”
That was the method that child liked to use.
“I was planning to prepare for it. But since you say so, I’ll have to pay more attention. It would also be good to shamelessly counterattack. But about that maid called Deina.”
“……Yes.”
“You said she’s a lying pine cone. It keeps getting troublesome, but do you have to keep her?”
Recalling the conversation with Deina, he told him about the situation he speculated. Though he couldn’t know the facts yet, she too could be both perpetrator and victim. Count Leroy reluctantly nodded.
“Good imperial citizens deserve to be protected. Weak women and children even more so. I’ll try to use some power so she’s only punished as much as she sinned.”
Saying so, the Count raised his hand with a snap. Inadvertently, he clapped hands with that hand.
“Let’s move without rest. To greet a fulfilling dawn, don’t we have to stay up through a long night?”
“Are you insane!”
He had decided to keep the Deina incident secret for the time being because Mikhail might collapse again if he found out. But when he visited, Mikhail was already clutching the back of his neck over something else.
“A cursed earring!”
He had asked Mikhail to look into the earring’s origin and through what route it came to the Count’s house.
He had thought it wouldn’t be bad for him to know in advance rather than finding out in court since he seemed likely to get angry anyway.
“An object that reacts to omega pheromones! If you had been in a state where you couldn’t control your pheromones! No, the very fact of sending such an object to you, an omega, is viciously malicious!”
He was really angry.
“I’m so upset that I haven’t been able to sleep since yesterday! I wake up with a start while sleeping! I’ll kill them all! Bastards who should be beaten to death in hellfire!”
“It’s attempted murder! Murder!” He barely managed to calm down Mikhail who was shouting around.
Mikhail was angry to the end but wouldn’t tell him what kind of curse it was. Though he already knew.
“Calm down. Fortunately, it’s something that didn’t happen.”
He looked strangely at Mikhail who was fuming while he slid orchid tea over.
This was the hyung who hadn’t visited even once after he was burned. He didn’t even know what Mikhail had done during that period.
Seeing that appearance, he thought that even if it was Mikhail who hated him more than now, he couldn’t have been comfortable. Just like he had searched for medicine to treat Mikhail’s spots.
“That ungrateful crazy nompang-i definitely sent it!”
Mikhail gulped down the tea that helps with mental stability and said.
The earring was ultimately revealed to have been purchased by Rilke as the final buyer.
“He thoroughly hid the route! It’s only because I specified and investigated who the culprit was who sent it, otherwise I wouldn’t have found it in time!”
Saying they didn’t have a headache because they investigated after concluding it was Rilke, Mikhail assessed that this situation was at an impossible level for Rilke to conspire alone.
“Did Duke Yorick help?”
But in the past, Rilke was a person of House Meyer.
Well, Rilke always maintained friendly relations with Duke Yorick, so he could have received help even if not as an adopted son.
“That time was strange too. At the subjugation army return banquet.”
Rilke, who hadn’t prepared anything, pulled off an excellent banquet in just a few days. At the time he let it pass, but thinking about it, it was a banquet with a subtly seasoned, skilled composition.
“I’ll order a separate investigation.”
“Yes. First we have to focus on the trial.”
He looked at the sealed box containing the earring, stored even more safely with magic. Rilke had essentially given them one more noose to strangle him with.
And to grab another noose, he went to find Jake.
“I looked into it and they said she went down to her hometown saying she was sick since this spring?”
Jake informed him of what she had thoroughly asked and investigated from the mansion’s servants.
“She was that hustler’s maid, but the hustler didn’t particularly look for that child again and didn’t request another maid either.”
There was a high possibility that Rilke knew about Deina’s pregnancy and had smuggled her away.
‘Please save me.’
Deina, at that very moment repeatedly crying out that it was his child.
Sticking close and not separating from him, burying her face in his embrace. Between desperate cries, she frantically alternated whispering two words in between. Moving her parched white lips, she whispered desperately.
One was ‘please save me,’ and the other was—
He pulled over paper and a quill pen.
He carefully began to write a letter.
