Chapter 37
“Mother!”
The very moment the Countess wiped the ring on her finger and ordered the servants to pull Tina to her feet, Sophianne cried out.
“I’ll— I’ll talk to her myself.”
Sophianne rushed forward, her voice desperate and urgent. From where she lay crumpled on the floor, Tina could see Sophianne now standing before her, arms trembling as she placed herself between Tina and her mother.
“Sister…”
Sophianne knelt and met Tina’s eyes. Her wide brown eyes shook, brimming with fear.
“Sister, Do you really not know? Where Danian is?”
Sophianne’s large eyes were welling with tears, whether from fear or worry, it was impossible to tell.
“I…”
Tina’s lips opened and closed uselessly, over and over. She didn’t know what to say.
Did she even have anything she could answer?
“Please, anything at all—just tell me what you know. You have to. It’s the only way you’ll be safe.”
Sophianne added in a voice thin and small enough for only Tina to hear. Her already-pale face had gone even whiter.
“……”
Tina steadied her breathing where she lay on the floor.
The ropes that had bound her body into a tangled mess. The contorted face screaming at her. And Danian’s hands shoving her off the cliff’s edge.
Memories tangled in a violent jumble inside her head, and a splitting headache descended like an icy gale tearing through every corner of her brain.
[‘You did nothing wrong.’]
Then, quite suddenly, Cain’s voice rippled through Tina’s mind, like a stone dropped into still water.
[‘No one can harm you.’]
In that instant, the crushing pressure on her consciousness began to lift. The chest that had been constricting as though starved of oxygen slowly loosened, and her fingertips and toes frozen stiff with terror, gradually began to thaw.
[‘It’s all right. Think of it all as nothing more than a terrible dream.’]
Everything she remembered had been a dream. Cain had told her so. Which meant she truly knew nothing. After all, unlike the scenes in her nightmare, the annex where she had stayed had been perfectly clean.
“I don’t know where he is, either.”
Tina felt as though she had drifted somewhere far from reality as she pressed a hand to the floor and pushed herself up. Every word that left her lips was dry and brittle.
“I twisted my ankle somewhere around the middle of the mountain. I couldn’t move. So he said he would go back to the estate and bring people to help.”
Her arms had no strength to properly support her weight, but at the very least, the gaze she lifted was utterly unwavering.
“So I kept waiting… but he never came back. In the end, I just came back on my own.”
Tina rose to her feet and held the Countess’s stare.
“……”
Confronted by an energy Tina had never once displayed before, the Countess furrowed her brows, but took a step backward.
And then, when Tina shifted her gaze, she spotted a letter lying on the table.
House Gillion. A letter stamped clearly with the crest of the family to which her betrothed belonged.
The Marquess had sent it to Danian. Yustina’s name appeared in it repeatedly.
The final line read: ‘If your sister truly is damaged somewhere, as you’ve promised, it will be most convenient for me to personally correct that insolence of hers every night. But what you’ve asked for comes after I’ve had a look at the goods.’
So it was only natural that by the time Tina had read to the very end, she felt the blood in her entire body running cold.
If Danian had been the one to return to the estate alone instead of Tina, no one would have come looking for her. Not until she had been crippled in that frozen pit would a single soul have appeared.
Of course not.
And even if she had died there, Sophianne, who now stood before her with a hand clapped over her mouth, unable to do a thing; the Countess, clutching the back of her neck as servants helped her to her seat; even her father, who was away from home. Not one of them would have batted an eye.
She had always been that kind of existence. From the very beginning.
Having confirmed with perfect clarity that she was a person of no consequence whatsoever, Tina listened to the Countess who was now weeping, and to Sophianne’s anxious voice trying to soothe her, and then left the room.
This time, no one stopped her.
Tina walked down the corridor where only the howl of the biting wind echoed, trying to sort through the wreckage of her thoughts.
Her brother might really have disappeared. What if everything that happened had not been confined to her nightmare? What if it had truly occurred? The metallic scent of blood that had grazed her nostrils, the eyes whose light had been fading, perhaps all of it had been real.
‘But maybe that would be better.’
Tina quickened her steps toward the annex, murmuring to herself.
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