Chapter 34
At the sight of that utterly horrific scene, Venya’s mind instantly grew dizzy with confusion.
She couldn’t understand how the situation had come to this, or why the person who had clearly promised to meet her was hanging in the air like a ghost.
She couldn’t even begin to gauge how she was supposed to report this absurd situation to Raven.
“……”
She stood there blankly, sunk in a great shock, but only for a moment. Venya soon quickly regained her composure. Belatedly, she thought that this was not the time to be standing here like this.
Her thoughts moved in only a few seconds.
She immediately cut the rope pressing against Giselle’s neck and caught the body that fell below. Thankfully, the slender body that landed precisely in her arms was still warm. Her chest was also rising and falling regularly, shallow though her breathing was.
Along with deep relief, she felt the blood that had gone cold begin to circulate once more. But she couldn’t feel relieved with just this. She had to see Giselle open her eyes before she could fully set her heart at ease.
“Miss! Please open your eyes.”
“Ugh…”
Venya carefully shook Giselle’s body. Then a faint groan flowed from her mouth, as though she were in pain.
Soon after, as if she had regained consciousness, her closed eyes faintly crumpled. Then, at last, the eyelids that had been twitching as if they might open at any moment were opened with difficulty.
“Are you coming to your senses, Miss? Is your body alright? Does anywhere hurt?”
“My neck… My neck hurts…”
Giselle, who had choked off her own breath with that noble face, wearily pressed and parted her lips as she answered in broken words.
Around her neck hung a noose made of rope, large enough for a human head to pass through and still have room left. Beneath it, the dark blue bruise clearly left along the rope was vivid even in the darkness.
“Of course your neck hurts when you were hanging by the neck from such a high place. You were the one who told me to meet you here. So why were you hanging by the neck up there?!”
For an instant, emotion surged up. Venya questioned Giselle without weighing her words.
It was not a situation where she should be getting angry at the other person, but when she recalled the moment she had discovered Giselle hanging from the willow tree, anger she had not even had before rose within her.
But Giselle herself only smiled brightly despite hearing Venya’s rebuke fired off like a machine gun.
“You said it, didn’t you? That you are His Highness’s person, and so you couldn’t help me.”
“……”
“So that’s why.”
It was far too bland a reason for having carried out such an enormous attempt as trying to take her own life.
Venya was dumbfounded. As far as she was concerned, she simply couldn’t understand Giselle’s way of thinking.
“I don’t understand what me, as Grand Duke Barietsch’s person, not helping you has to do with you hanging yourself from a tree, Miss.”
“Why wouldn’t it have anything to do with it?”
This time as well, a faint smile hung around Giselle’s lips. Her blue eyes shone brightly in the darkness, to an extent that was hard to believe they belonged to someone who had gone right up to the brink of death and survived.
“You are His Highness’s loyal servant. Then what do you think would happen if His Highness, to whom you devote such loyalty, heard that I had died?”
“……”
Venya firmly closed her mouth. It was because a vivid picture drew itself in her mind even without Giselle needing to say it.
After confirming Venya’s shaken face, the smile on Giselle’s lips deepened even further.
“He would be terribly sad, wouldn’t he? His Highness still loves me… No, even though I brought up breaking off the engagement, he still loves me even now.”
“……”
“You wouldn’t want to see His Highness, to whom you spare no loyalty, embrace my ice-cold corpse and spend the rest of his life with regret, liquor, and tears before dying, would you, Venya?”
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