Chapter 3
“I was trying to do this without waking you up as much as possible…”
When the Marquess bared his yellowed teeth once more, Tina gathered every ounce of strength in her body and sat upright. The abrupt motion dragged the blanket with her, and her upper body was barely concealed by the thin fabric.
“…Sensitive little thing, aren’t you?”
The Marquess raked his gaze lazily over her, then spoke with a laugh threaded through his words. His lips, buried in flesh and whiskers, curved along the deep creases of his face.
“Then again, that does make it better.”
“P-please stop.”
When the Marquess muttered something cryptic, Tina managed to pry her trembling lips apart.
“What am I doing that you want me to stop?”
The Marquess countered without a flicker of agitation. At some point, his gaze, which had lingered on her chest all this time, had traveled up to her face.
“That’s…”
But Tina couldn’t bring herself to answer.
She truly didn’t know. What was about to happen to her, what it was she wanted to beg him to stop. Having grown up neglected and abandoned, Tina understood none of it.
But her skin crawled. The sticky sensation against the leg he still held. The oily breath washing over her face. The raw, undisguised gaze roaming over her body.
All of it crashed over Tina as unspeakable terror.
“……”
And so it was pure instinct that made Tina, lost in the terror of the unknown, glance toward the door — her only escape.
“What? Going to run outside and scream?”
The Marquess exploded into a shout at that small movement. He had been privately marveling at his own patience, and in that instant, felt that Tina had dismissed his generosity.
“You could scream loud enough to shake every corridor and no one would come.”
He squeezed the ankle he held and spat the words. His voice cracked, rough with fury.
“I show you kindness, and you dare look down on me?”
Everything happened in an instant. The violent light that flared in the Marquess’s eyes. His lunge to close the distance between them. Tina’s instinctive swing of the bedside candlestick to defend herself.
“Aaagh!”
A dull thud rang out alongside the Marquess’s scream. Whether she had struck his eye, he pressed both hands over the left side of his face, and Tina did not waste the opening.
“Hk—”
She bolted from the room and ran down the corridor as if possessed. She didn’t know what she was fleeing, or where she was trying to go, but the warning bells shrieking inside her skull told her to run.
“You crazy b***h! Get back here this instant!”
A door slammed open behind her and the shouting followed. She didn’t need to look back. She could feel the furious footsteps closing in right behind her.
‘I’m scared. Someone… someone, please—’
Tina ran and ran, feeling tears slowly blurring her vision. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to cry out for help.
‘Please, anyone at all…’
The words kept catching in her throat. She was afraid no one would hear her voice. No, she was afraid that, just as the Marquess had said, they would hear and still refuse to help.
“Hk— hk—”
Even outside the annex, she couldn’t shake the Marquess. He chased after her, snarling curses too garbled to make out, and his rage-driven form only grew sharper and more vivid against the falling snow of the winter night.
‘No, at this rate he’ll catch me soon.’
Listening to the curses growing closer, Tina tried to force strength into her legs. But she was someone who had never so much as taken a proper stroll in the garden, let alone run. Her legs betrayed her will, the strength draining from them again and again. To make matters worse, her bare feet on the frozen ground were swelling an angry red.
“You crazy woman!?”
And then, the moment her legs could carry her no farther, a furious curse and a dark shadow lunged from right behind her.
It was all over.
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