“Hah, after how I raised her! That insolent girl…!”
To be honest, she had expected that if she said she was having a hard time, a lifeline would be thrown her way.
‘To think I raised such a heartless creature so carefully as my daughter!’
Helga, who remembered the days of raising Veronica through a heavily beautified distortion, felt a sudden sense of betrayal send heat rushing to her head.
“Ugh…”
She clutched the back of her neck and staggered. Though they hadn’t been in frequent contact lately, she had thought that at least when things were difficult, her daughter wouldn’t turn a blind eye. It was a complete miscalculation. She stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed onto it.
But a short while later.
“Madam, Madam!”
Helga startled awake, eyes flying open. Realizing it was a maid who had burst in through the door, she was about to fly into a rage.
“You ill-mannered… what on earth…?!”
But before Helga could finish her words, the maid, panting for breath, delivered the news.
“M-Miss Dona has had a miscarriage…!”
“What?”
This time, even Helga couldn’t help but be genuinely shocked.
She ran together with the maid to Dona’s room. Throwing the door open without even knocking, the pale face of Dona lying in bed came into view.
“What on earth happened?!”
At that, the physician who had been by Dona’s bedside turned around.
It was the very same physician who had come not long ago to confirm her pregnancy. Holding up a towel soaked in blood, he answered.
“The baby has been miscarried.”
Dona turned toward Helga, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I think I have been under a lot of shock lately, and the stress was too much…”
Helga approached unsteadily with her eyes wide open, staring only at the bloodstained towel.
“Ha… This child was the last one.”
Now that there was no longer any chance of seeing a child from Gerald, it meant that this baby had been the last child that could have been born into House Lansval.
“There is no hope left for Lansval anymore…! Oh dear, oh dear!”
Helga collapsed to the floor, wailing loudly as she cried. Dona still looked weak, but she said everything she had to say while looking at Helga.
“That’s right, what are we supposed to do with House Lansval now… If only you had treated me a bit better…”
“Hah, you couldn’t even carry a single child to term, and you think you have the right to say anything?!”
Helga sprang to her feet and pointed an accusing finger at Dona lying in bed.
Gerald, who had arrived in the room limping slightly, likely because the surgical site still hurt, scratched his head roughly as he took in the scene with irritation.
After glancing at the bloodstained towel the physician was holding, he instead snapped at Helga.
“Damn it, you know I cannot stand the sight of other people’s blood, so why did you even call me?”
To him, his own situation these days was the most painful thing of all, and he himself was the most pitiful.
He was in no state to take much interest in things happening around him, even if it was the miscarriage of his own mistress.
“I’m suffering to death like this, so what’s the big deal if she miscarried a single baby?”
At that, Helga strode up and slapped Gerald hard on the back.
“Ah! Mother! That hurts!”
“It’s a big deal, a big deal!”
Gerald’s eyes widened in shock, unaccustomed to his mother’s physical blow.
“What do you mean, ‘just a baby’? It was the last heir of House Lansval!”
She could turn a blind eye and roughly let it pass when her son struck or belittled another woman.
However, the matter of the family line being cut off was a major issue even for her, and it made her furious.
“Ah, seriously! If you cared that much, you should have treated her well from the start! Why are you taking it out on me?!”
“You are the one who brought her here!”
Even as they blamed each other and argued like this, there wasn’t a single person who offered words of comfort to Dona, who had lost her baby.
After a while, when everyone had left and the room fell quiet, a sharp glint appeared in Dona’s eyes as she lay there weakly, different from just moments before. Recalling the dogfight she had just witnessed made her shudder in disgust.
‘Ending it here was really the right choice. I need to leave today.’
She sprang up from the bed and began putting on her clothes. In the first place, she had never been pregnant, let alone miscarried, so there was no reason for her body to hurt.
‘Hah, seriously. I at least thought I would get to live comfortably on their money after coming here, but what is this? Instead of being treated like a pregnant woman, my perfectly fine ear got ruined, and those people aren’t even sorry!’
As she packed her things, fuming, Dona suddenly thought of something.
Even while snapping about having no money, Helga’s fingers were always laden with thick, sizable gemstone rings.
‘Fine. I will at least take those with me. These people aren’t the kind to compensate me for what they did to my ear.’
Dona waited for dinnertime, then left her room.
The fact that no one came to bring food for her, supposedly lying there after a miscarriage, made her let out a hollow laugh, but at least for now, that worked in her favor.
She stifled her footsteps and entered Helga’s room.
Because many servants had recently been dismissed under the excuse of lacking money, it wasn’t difficult to slip into Helga’s room without drawing attention.
She looked around the room, decorated in purple velvet, the color symbolic of the Imperial Family, and quickly found a small safe, her eyes lighting up.
‘Hmph, this much is nothing.’
She had played the role of a petty thief when she was young. Opening a small safe like this was nothing to Dona.
A short while later, she stuffed the jewelry from Helga’s room into her arms and slipped out through the mansion’s back door.
There were fewer pieces than she had expected, but it was still a relief to salvage at least this much before the household completely collapsed.
‘Before coming into this mansion, my money kept slipping away strangely until I was broke, but with this, I should at least be able to find a place to stay for now.’
Dona, who had been about to leave the Capital just like that, stopped in her tracks as a persistent ringing sounded in her left ear.
No matter how she thought about it, leaving so neatly like this did nothing to ease her anger.
‘My one ear is ruined forever, and I’m supposed to end it with just this?’
The fact that all the money she had painstakingly saved had vanished like sand slipping through her fingers, and that her dreams of a glamorous life had scattered like a mirage, all felt like Gerald’s fault alone.
‘You already look a bit ruined, but you need to suffer more. Because you turned my perfectly fine life into this.’
Grinding her teeth, Dona changed direction and headed back toward the center of the Capital.
***
After dinner, while we were drinking tea, Rastan opened his mouth.
“About the recent attempted kidnapping. When the investigators went to the scene, they found that the yard of that house had been completely burned. As a result, all the bodies there were burned beyond recognition.”
It was clear that he had deliberately waited until the meal was over to tell me, out of consideration for me.
No matter how evil they were, the fact that everyone who had been in the same space as me, even briefly, had died and that their bodies were now unrecognizable sent a chill down my spine.
“Usually, if a fire breaks out, would it not spread to the building? You are saying the fire was in the yard?”
“Someone likely burned only the bodies on purpose to destroy evidence. Thanks to that, the investigation has become more difficult, but we will not give up and will find them, so please do not worry too much.”
Rastan seemed to be speaking even more calmly on purpose, worried that I might feel anxious.
“Among the suspects you considered, House Lansval is currently completely tied hand and foot, and as for House Krone, I spoke to them properly last time, so they will not do anything reckless anymore.”
He had said before that he would persuade my father, but I had no idea just how far that conversation had gone.
It was also strange that he was so certain my father, who wasn’t exactly a rational man, would go along with it so obediently.
‘As expected, is Rastan’s ability something like hypnotizing or controlling people?’
At that moment, Sally, who had been serving the tea and listening to our conversation from the side, cautiously interjected.
“Could it have been something done by a criminal organization trying to cut off loose ends? My Lady, do you remember anything about their appearance?”
At her question, I carefully retraced my memories of that night.
“They were all wearing masks, so I do not know what they looked like. I only remember the masks themselves. They were full-face masks, covering the entire face, with only the eyes and nostrils cut out.”
I added gestures as I described the shape of the masks.
“They were made of somewhat loosely woven fabric, so even though they covered the mouth, they did not look uncomfortable for breathing or speaking. That part stuck with me. It felt like some kind of organizational uniform designed with mobility in mind.”
At that, Sally’s eyes widened.
“Oh? I think I have seen something like that before. Black, with the eye holes shaped like this, right?”
She asked while tracing long triangular shapes around her eyes with both fingers.
“Huh? How do you know that?”
