Chapter 002
Rosetta Coco Bennetra (2)
* * *
“I was wrong, Father.”
Much like the knight who had been negligent in his guard duty, my father’s expression was twisted strangely, as if he were facing something bizarre.
While walking to the office, I had debated whether I should first kneel and then apologize. However, reaching the conclusion that becoming this wreck wasn’t entirely my fault, I decided to settle for just the apology.
‘That ghost fellow. I’ll grant him one thing: he certainly has talent.’
I thought I had met my end in the backyard of the Marquis’s estate.
There was a moment when I felt my body floating, feeling a sense of peace for a brief second.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in my bed in a room that was no better than a garbage dump, several years in the past.
Through the newspapers scattered on the floor, I realized my current age was sixteen.
‘To think I’ve returned to three years ago…’
If he was going to turn back time anyway, I felt a lingering regret that he hadn’t sent me back to before my father remarried.
The moment I realized I had returned to the past, my intent was to immediately storm into Odette’s room while she was in a deep sleep and kill her, but I ultimately held back.
Doing so might have been cathartic, but I wouldn’t be able to drag the reputations of that damn Odette and Chesia through the mud. It was obvious the newspapers would have a field day with headlines like: ⟫ The Ultimate Fallen Lady Murdering Her Own Sister! The Tragic End of the Bennetra Princess… ⟪
For these reasons, I took the withdrawal of my confinement order as the first step.
To be precise, it was to preserve my own reputation, which had sunk as low as the Arcanis dungeons.
“…You were the one who asked to be locked up. To come seeking me so senselessly now.”
My father, rubbing the corners of his eyes as if they stung, spoke with a voice thick with emotion.
It’s a bit awkward to say it myself, but my father was a famous “daughter-fool” in social circles.
The Duke of Bennetra, who cherished his newborn daughter, had embroidered the estate with roses simply because they matched the color of her hair.
Not stopping there, there wasn’t a soul who didn’t know the story of how he grandly bought the ownership rights to rose cultivation and gifted them to his daughter.
At the time of receiving those rights, I was a mere eighteen-month-old infant.
‘In the first place, you even remarried because of me…’
A large reason Father remarried so quickly was that I had struggled greatly due to my mother’s absence.
He had informed me of every step in the process of seeking a new mistress of the house… It was a different tale from the typical dramas where a father, bewitched by a stepmother, neglects his biological child.
— “Just lock me up, Father!”
I was raised only with love, and I was meant to grow up that way.
To imagine my father’s heart when such a daughter, unable to control her own temper, pleaded in tears for her own confinement… it was something I couldn’t even fathom.
“Shall we have some tea?”
“…What kind of tea is it?”
“Let’s see, it’s Berkiss. Is there something else you’d prefer?”
“No. Any tea you give me is fine, Father.”
In the quiet stillness, only the occasional sound of a teacup being handled could be heard.
From Father’s perspective, it must have been awkward to think of what conversation to have with a daughter who had stepped out of her room for the first time in a year and a half.
Feeling the weight of the long time we hadn’t faced each other—from the moment I entered the Montague Marquisate until Father’s funeral—I secretly clenched my fists.
“Rianna and Bonita have also worried about you a lot.”
“As if.”
“Hm?”
“No. I meant to say, ‘Of course they did,’ ahaha.”
As if those damn women would ever worry about me.
I gripped my throbbing head and forced a smile.
Rianna and Bonita Odette.
They once bore the surname of Baron Epsilon, but now they moved with the name of Bennetra at their backs.
Moreover, Odette had even received the lovely name “Bonita” from my father to commemorate becoming part of the family; my past self, who had called her by nicknames like “Bonnie” to welcome her, felt utterly ridiculous and miserable.
Hearing the names of those dreadful former Epsilons, the scene of Odette and Chesia’s tryst vividly surfaced once more.
— “Haha! Even the impenetrable Duke Bennetra was nothing before you, Bonita.”
— “Oh, stop. What did I even do? It’s all thanks to my mother doing her part so well.”
— “There won’t be any suspicion that the Duke died suddenly, right?”
— “Don’t worry, Lord Chesia. She said she used a lethal poison that leaves no trace. All that’s left for us is to live gloriously while grasping the wealth of the Ducal House.”
— “Hoo… Finally, the time has come to stop looking at that woman’s filthy face.”
Chesia, who had kissed Odette while badmouthing me, wore an expression of sheer ecstasy.
It was a look I had never seen before.
They mingled their bodies and spoke as if they were the only two people in the world, then mingled again.
What I discovered while spying on that room was that my stepmother, Rianna, had poisoned my father.
And that they planned to disguise my death as a suicide and forge a fake will.
A will stating that I wished to follow my father, and hoped the Montague Marquisate would take Odette in on my behalf…
Truly absurd content.
— “Lovely Bonita. It would be a disaster to get on your bad side.”
Chesia was right.
Both Father and I had gotten on her bad side, and it had indeed been a disaster.
Unaware of the fact that he would be poisoned by his remarried wife in three years, Father went on about how much they had looked after me.
I wanted to flip the table right then and there, but I endured by clutching my thighs until my fingernails dug in.
“I want to come out of my room now.”
“Haven’t you already come out as you pleased?”
“I don’t want to come out as I please, so please withdraw the confinement order.”
“Hah! My!”
He scolded me the entire time he was drafting the documents to withdraw the order, saying things like how bold I was, and if I thought acting stubborn would solve everything…
He grumbled that I was still far from being ready for marriage since I acted like a child, and I helped him with the paperwork while muttering back about why he was even thinking of marrying me off when I had no intention of doing so yet.
‘Father. We died after being backstabbed by a pair of wandering swindlers and had our wealth and everything else taken.’
So, this Rosetta Coco intends to try sending your current wife and second daughter to prison first.
Asking for his fervent support in my heart, I proudly held the confinement withdrawal papers and fluttered back to my room.
I didn’t much like Father’s command to attend breakfast starting this very morning, but as the saying goes, if you receive one thing, you must give another.
I submissively accepted and withdrew.
It was a day that started earlier than others.
* * *
Click.
As soon as I confirmed the door was closed, I slid down to the floor and caught my breath.
The knight I had encountered earlier—how suspiciously he had looked at me as I walked from afar without a single attendant.
When I waved the withdrawal papers at him, the way his eyes widened in shock was quite funny.
I had quickly returned to my room after offering him some kind words about his hard work, partly to salvage my fallen dignity.
That was exactly my limit.
“Whew. Damn… I need to find an antidote, an antidote first.”
I hadn’t even been running, yet my breath was caught at the tip of my throat.
How long had it been since I’d had a proper conversation with someone else…?
My head still throbbed, and my skin felt gooseflesh just from moving.
Suppressing the urge to peel my own skin off, I swept up all the flowers decorating my headboard and windowsills and threw them into the fireplace to burn.
How hard had I struggled not to throw a teacup in front of Father?
I had to keep drinking tea just to shove the curses aimed at the Epsilon women back down my throat.
It would have been wonderful if I had realized sooner that this intense hypersensitivity I’d developed at some point was created intentionally by someone.
But at the time, I was too busy trying to manage my own wild temper to even think of looking at my surroundings.
— “Foolishly enough. Sister lived with them her whole life, saying they were flowers I gave her.”
The name of the flower, whose petals were tinged as if covered in white frost, was Panilnia.
In this household full of only roses, it was the only different flower—and the poisonous herb Odette had filled my room with.
The scent of Panilnia stimulated the five senses; the longer one smelled it, the more extremely sensitive their nerves became.
The problem was that almost no research had ever been conducted on the Panilnia flower, and because the species itself didn’t bloom commonly, no one knew the truth.
“Unless they’re insane, how dare they…”
Recalling the momentary pain that felt like my throat was burning, curses came out naturally.
Odette—day after day, month after month, year after year…
When I was fourteen, when I didn’t leave my room, and even after I entered the Montague house!
She had handed me those flowers with a smile until the day I died.
— “How could you do this, how could you!”
And so, the day I learned of Chesia and Odette’s atrocities. Enraged, I turned that room upside down.
I screamed, threw vases, and stamped my feet in a frenzy.
How could they do this to me, to Father?
And then, heavens.
— “Sister is hastening her own end.”
Chesia locked the door, and Odette shoved the extract of the Panilnia flower down my throat.
Vicious things. It sent shivers down my spine to realize they carried a lethal dose of poison with them at all times just for the purpose of killing me.
— “Give our regards to Father, Sister.”
Thinking that a withered wretch like me would writhe alone in that room and die, they locked the door and left.
My teeth ground together at the memory of them leaving the room so harmoniously.
I suppose the one bit of luck was that, perhaps because they were called the paragons of nobility, they couldn’t imagine a lady existed who would climb out a window.
That day, I escaped frantically from the second-floor guest room of the mansion while clutching my seething chest, and encountered a faceless ghost in the Marquis’s backyard.
And then I returned to the past.
“Since I’m sixteen now, hmm. I’ve been poisoned for at least two years…”
Crackle, crackle. I watched the Panilnia flowers burning so well.
Pondering how I could solve this hypersensitivity, I decided to ventilate the room first as the smoke began to rise.
Perhaps because I had put too much wood in at once, I started coughing and my eyes stung.
Naturally, I was going to call a maid, but realizing that only housemaids were left because I had chased away all the personal maids assigned to me, I opened the window with my own hands.
“Busy, busy. I have to hire new maids, find a way to detoxify, break the engagement with that bastard Chesia, and…”
【 And carry out my revenge, too. 】
“Ack!”
Startled by the voice that suddenly popped out, I backed away and hit the back of my head against the window frame.
Clutching my aching head, I glared at the owner of the voice.
The faceless ghost was still right there before my eyes.
