What remained now was whatever punishment would fall on him. A commission had been placed against him — but he had no regrets about what he’d done. He knew, himself, that even if time were turned back, he would bring the storage keeper to the same end any number of times over.
He rose from his seat and gathered his disheveled long hair loosely into one hand, as if it were a nuisance.
At that moment, Michael stepped forward with purpose, closing the distance between them.
His large frame swallowed the light in an instant, casting darkness across Achim’s field of vision. Just as Achim was instinctively moving to take a defensive stance, a scene flashed before his eyes without warning.
“……”
Achim shook his head quickly, pushing aside the memory from years ago.
The overwhelming breadth of his shoulders, the wide chest, the towering height and build more than capable of bearing another person down without effort. It must have been the uncommon physique that made him overlap with that man from back then.
Achim shook his head, then lifted his eyes.
“What will happen to Dora?”
At that, Michael tilted his head slightly. His expression was that of someone asking what does that have to do with anything?
“……The child from earlier.”
Ah. Michael let out a sound, as if he’d finally understood, and gave a careless tilt of his head.
Just as Achim’s expression was beginning to twist at that detached, bystander-like attitude, Michael spoke with an expressionless face.
“She can no longer work, so she’ll be leaving the mansion.”
His tone was as casual as if he were recounting what he’d had for dinner.
“What……”
At that, Achim immediately recoiled and opened his mouth as if throwing himself forward.
“But that child is from Maaconi……!”
“So what.”
The words cut him off — flat and decisive — and Achim was momentarily struck speechless. Michael, by contrast, still wore that unhurried expression.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“……”
“Go ahead and say it. Tell me what it has to do with me that she’s from Maaconi.”
Achim couldn’t get a single word out.
Because you are the head of the Maaconi organization. Because you are their protector. Because Dora admired you for that.
The answers to the question he’d thrown at him surfaced in his mind without pause — yet not a single letter made it out of his mouth. For some reason, Michael’s face was carrying a murderous edge unlike anything Achim had seen from him before.
Michael, who had been steadily watching Achim, closed the distance even further than before.
“When something loses its usefulness.”
“……”
“The trash heap is where it belongs.”
Achim’s eyes went wide, his own ears in disbelief, and Michael gave that same fresh, bright smile of his.
“I’m simply giving the appropriate treatment.”
He wore the face of a magnanimous noble granting tremendous mercy over the surface of his own.
Michael leaned his upper body slightly forward and pressed his lips to Achim’s ear, whispering in a low voice,
“Wouldn’t you say?”
“……”
Achim could not, in the end, push a single word out past his parted lips.
Every word that had just flowed into him was something he could never have imagined coming from the mouth of the current head and leading figure of Maaconi — an autonomous welfare organization with a long and storied history.
It was exactly as if a great boulder had come crashing down on top of his skull.
Achim, struck speechless with shock, was unable to bring himself to speak, when Michael once again whispered in that smooth, unhurried voice,
“Save the cheap sympathy for a stray dog passing by.”
It doesn’t pay, after all. Michael said it with a light smile.
It was in that moment that Achim understood.
That this beautiful man before him — Michael Bernhardt, the man the whole world looked up to and envied without exception — was like a devil wearing the mask of an angel.
Rain fell in a drizzle. Called out by the unwelcome visitor that had arrived since the early hours of morning, Achim, aching knees unfailing as ever, gripped them and pushed himself up.
Damn rain. Having cursed the falling rain, Achim soon shifted his gaze from the window to the other side of the room.
Where his eyes landed was Dora’s bed. More precisely — the one Dora had used.
Seeing the object left at the edge of the headboard, the events of yesterday suddenly felt real. As did the fact that it had not yet been a full day since it had happened.
The reason he’d woken early was not solely because of the weather. Had he grown accustomed, already, to falling asleep beside someone? He felt an emptiness he hadn’t expected, and Achim had spent a long while tossing and turning before sleep came.
Among it all, a thread of self-reproach had settled in one corner.
If only he had found her a little sooner.
If only he had picked up on Martina’s meaning a little sooner.
Pointless hypotheticals that would change nothing had circled his mind throughout the night.
Achim forcibly pushed aside the thoughts that would bring him no gain and picked up the pillow he’d been resting on until a moment ago.
He lifted the pillow up to eye level, pinched the zipper pull at the edge, and drew it down — and a small notebook that had been tucked inside the thick stuffing dropped out below.
Achim picked up the notebook from where it had fallen on the sheet and leaned his back against the headboard.
Seated cross-legged, he opened to the page he’d folded down in advance, and two pages filled with a mix of writing and diagrams came into view.
It was a rough map laying out the structure of the mansion.
On the off chance that someone found the notebook, he had replaced all the terminology with entirely meaningless words so that nothing could be recognized — and had even written those in an illegible scrawl, a security measure that was its own kind of double or triple layered protection.
Achim thought for a moment, then reached for the stubby pencil tucked between the pages.
In the blank space on the right-hand page, he wrote the two characters Dora, then traced a circle over it twice. Then, as if drawing a mind map, he drew two lines downward from it and wrote Wolfgang and Michael.
— Wolfgang.
— Yes, Michael.
Their strangely, unnervingly calm reactions had not left the back of his mind all night.
For an ordinary person — when faced with a scene like that, wouldn’t it be normal to react somehow? To be startled, for instance?
Yet they, upon seeing the storage keeper dying, had not so much as flinched — they had simply tidied up the scene as if erasing evidence. Quickly, quietly, and without effort. As if it were not their first time facing something like this. As if they were very much accustomed to it. Accustomed……
……Could it be?
Just as a thought came to him and his skin was beginning to prickle — there came a knock at the door, and Achim let his expression go completely blank as he quietly slipped the notebook under his pillow.
It was still a long way from the start of his shift, so he had no way of knowing who had come. Perhaps they were finally here to call him to account for yesterday. Holding that thought as a possibility, Achim answered with a short yes through the door.
But the nameless presence on the other side neither opened the door nor said a word.
— Shall I kill you?
The words he’d said last night suddenly surfaced in his mind, and Achim, keeping his eyes fixed on the door, slipped soundlessly out of bed.
He gave a small flick of his hand reaching downward, and an OTF knife — though he had no idea when he’d put it there — came sliding out from his sleeve. With the knife concealed in his palm, Achim pressed himself flat against the door and carefully turned the handle.
“Um……. Yvonne.”
At the arrival of a visitor even less welcome than the falling rain, Achim’s expression twisted immediately.
Through the gap of the opened door, Martina glanced up at Achim once — and then startled sharply, dropping her head down low.
Even as the silence continued and Achim said nothing, Martina — who had taken care to apply lipstick at this early hour of the morning — parted her lips. Perhaps lacking the courage to meet his eyes a second time, she kept her head bowed as she went on.
