Chapter 38
‘If he really has disappeared, maybe the rest of the family will finally understand what I’ve been feeling. Maybe they’ll realize how lonely I’ve been. How much I’ve suffered.’
Thanks to Danian, she might finally see a crack in her family’s fortress of ice. If that were so, then… it was better if her brother simply stayed gone.
Just as her thoughts went hurtling toward that extreme, Tina stopped dead in her tracks.
“……”
She turned her head where she stood. There was the window, reflecting the darkened world outside. The clean glass mirrored her back without mercy, like a looking glass.
“What am I.. what am I even—”
Tina staggered backward, seized by a terror that crashed over her all at once. A chill like ice forming along her nape spread through her entire body.
The thoughts that had dominated her mind mere moments ago remained, horribly vivid and clear.
How could she have entertained such monstrous ideas?
Even after her mother had left her behind, it was this family that had continued to give her food and a place to close her eyes. Even though they had locked her in the cellar, even though they had beaten her, in the end, they had never cast her out. That was what this family had done for her.
And yet, how could she have harbored such ungrateful thoughts?
Her family was the last fence she had left. Her mother had told her to understand and love her family.
The realization that she had wished a curse upon them made bile rise in her throat. A wave of revulsion crashed over her, as though she had defied the very order of the world.
“This is why… this is why my own Mother left me, too.”
Tina murmured, staring at her own warped reflection in the glass like someone who had lost her mind.
Her mother must have known, even when Tina was small. What a horrific, ungrateful monster she truly was.
Tina trembled, wept, and broke into a run toward the annex. The sobs would not stop, and the only sounds that escaped her throat were choked and strangled.
And then, the moment Tina set foot in the annex corridor—
“Why are you crying?”
A cool voice cut across the hallway and reached her.
“…Cain.”
She lifted her head sharply at the voice that halted her steps. Her tear-flooded vision began to clear, little by little, and through it she could see Cain, eyes glinting cold and bright.
How long had he been here? Tina paused for a moment, caught in that brief wonder, her body angled as though she might collapse into him at any second. How did Cain always appear at exactly the right moment? Every time she broke down, he materialized as if on cue. It felt like magic.
“Don’t tell me, did those humans again—”
Before Cain could finish his fury-laden words, Tina rose on her tiptoes and clumsily pressed her lips to his. How he had come to be here did not matter to her in the slightest. She simply wanted to calm the frantic pounding of her heart with the heat she felt against his lips.
“Haah— mm.”
Tina clumsily slipped her tongue past Cain’s lips and exhaled a strangled breath. Her movements were desperate, unrefined, as though the only oxygen remaining for her existed inside him alone.
Cain did not push her away. As though he would let her lead him wherever she pleased, he accepted the gentle pressure she gave, pinned her against the wall, and buried his lips deeply into hers.
Their tongues tangled in a slow, clinging knot, pouring breath into each other’s mouths.
“Not here… not here…”
And when Cain’s hand had crept slowly beneath the front of her blouse, Tina pushed against him with her thin arms and spoke through fractured breathing.
“Not here…”
If she did this with Cain right next to her room, Rus might find out. Tina did not want to stain that pure creature with her own filth.
Rus was perceptive. He paid attention to her every move. If she wept in the corridor, he would surely come to lick her tears away.
Tina did not want that. She wanted that small one, at least, to remain ignorant of her sins. To stay pure, never knowing her ugliness.
Tina grasped Cain’s thick wrist and led him to the maid’s quarters beside her room. The room, unused for a long time, smelled of stale dust and damp.
“Hah, mm…”
The moment the door closed behind them, Tina lunged for his lips again. Before she knew it, their lower bodies were pressed together without a gap, and her head tilted slowly to a comfortable angle for the kiss.
“Hah… why— why did you leave me behind?”
After a long while of grinding against each other and tangling tongues to the other’s rhythm, Tina suddenly broke the kiss and asked. The eyes she turned up at him were thoroughly drenched.
“You said you’d stay by my side. Then… then you should have been there when I opened my eyes in the morning.”
Tina spoke through a half-formed sob. Her reddened eyes were pitifully swollen.
“…I’m sorry.”
After a long pause, Cain brushed back the hair plastered stubbornly to Tina’s forehead and spoke
“Cain.”
“Yes. Tell me. My lady.”
“Punish me.”
Through the dark window behind Cain, Tina could still see herself still wearing that monstrous shape. The monster that had wished for her own family to vanish was still there, inside her.
And so, she had to be punished.
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