Don’t Be Holy! - Chapter 139

“Why that expression? Don’t tell me you’ve neglected her all this time?”

“Well, the maids were too afraid to approach her…… I was pondering whom to send, but…….”

The butler closed his mouth with a distant expression. His face clearly showed the embarrassment of having forgotten about it after merely pondering. Abel was dumbfounded by the more serious situation than he had anticipated.

“Then how has that woman been living all this time? Hasn’t it been over a week since she started staying in this mansion?”

“I don’t really know. The head of the household instructed us to make sure that woman doesn’t leave that floor, using the artifact for control. I was only thinking about that…….”

The situation was more serious than he had thought.

He realized that the woman Rubel had brought might have starved to death in this short time.

While Rubel had undergone the purity rite and gone through all sorts of trouble to save the woman, if she had died due to the household’s negligence, if she had starved to death, Abel couldn’t imagine how much more his brother would become twisted here.

As if they had reached the same conclusion simultaneously, both Abel and the butler’s faces turned as white as paper. Without anyone saying a word, they immediately rushed upstairs.

Due to the divine power of the artifact in control, when they reached the final staircase leading upstairs, the butler was blocked as if pushed back and couldn’t enter.

He had manipulated the artifact as Duke Andreas had ordered, but confirming that it was working so well, so very well, the butler stood still with a hopelessly bewildered expression.

Abel, being a priest, could naturally climb the last staircase and enter the living room on the floor where Rubel stayed.

“Madam Witch? Madam Witch, are you alive?”

Since everyone had only referred to the witch as “the witch” or “that woman,” Abel couldn’t find a proper title even when searching for the woman who might be dead or collapsed, and eventually added an honorific out of guilt to the end of the word “witch.”

Abel ran around the spacious mansion searching for the woman. For a while, only his fearful voice, anticipating he might encounter a dead woman, and his desperate voice, hoping she was alive, echoed through the wide and magnificent mansion.

Then, while scanning a small reception room, Abel discovered a foot protruding from behind a large sofa. He inhaled sharply as if encountering a corpse and hesitated, stopping in his tracks.

Various thoughts and concerns flashed through his mind.

No, to be honest, not various things. Abel, who knew Rubel better than anyone, was more terrified than anyone by the single thought of how Rubel would grasp this house like catching a mouse after learning this fact.

‘Please just be alive. If so, I’ll use all my divine energy to save you!’

Abel approached slowly.

He could then see a woman lying neatly on the floor between the sofa and the side table. How the woman looked, how strangely leisurely her expression seemed, or the book that appeared to have been read until just recently lying open next to someone who seemed to have starved to death—none of these registered in the panicked mind of Abel.

Abel hurriedly went to the woman’s side and infused divine power.

He was too scared to properly check if she was breathing or not.

“Please wake up! Madam Witch!”

Abel called out desperately, and only then did Eir’s eyes, deeply asleep, furrow slightly.

Her eyes opened hazardously. But Eir, having been in such a deep sleep, opened her eyes to immediately meet a bright blonde-haired man extending his pale hand toward her, and she could only misunderstand that he was trying to kill her.

“Ahhh!”

The screams erupted almost simultaneously.

When the woman, whom he thought was unmistakably dead, suddenly jerked her upper body up, Abel was also terribly startled. Abel fell backward as if collapsing, and when Eir, feeling a threat to her life, pushed the man’s chest without hesitation, he staggered backward and his head hit the edge of the side table on his right.

Thanks to this, without even letting out a scream, Abel fainted from the impact.

Eir, having woken from a deep sleep only to find she had apparently killed a man, remained still in shock and confusion before suddenly recognizing something familiar in the man’s face and murmured blankly.

“Abel?”