Chapter 98

“Y-Your Majesty, spare me!”

Aglia pressed her trembling hands together, begging Etias.
Every gaze in the hall was fixed on her.

Once dressed in gowns more splendid and lavish than even before the Rebel Emperor’s death, adorned with precious jewels—
the greedy woman now threw away all dignity to plead for her life.

“I was afraid. So terribly afraid.”

The cold blades leveled at her seemed ready to pierce her throat at any moment.
Those swords had already been dyed many times with the blood of those who had dared oppose their liege.
Now, Aglia was tasting the same fear the Rebel Emperor had once known.

“I feared that, if my corruption were exposed, I would lose everything… that’s why I wrote the letter. But Luciano Elemore never replied, and it ended there.”

“So it was only a moment of impulsive betrayal?”

At Etias’s low voice, Aglia nodded furiously, as if he had thrown her a lifeline.

“Yes. Merely a mistake.”

“Then I suppose the order you gave the assassins to attack the carriage I rode in was also just a mistake?”

“Th-that too, I was terrified that, when Katrin and Your Majesty returned, everything would be revealed…”

Her voice shrank to a pitiful whisper.
Kamel clicked his tongue, and Caron shook his head with a sigh.

To watch her excuse everything as a “mistake” was pitiful, disgraceful.
That such a person had pretended all this time to protect Etias as Speaker—it was shameful to recall.

Yet even under those cold stares, Aglia clung to hope of survival, gazing at Etias with desperate eyes.

“Hear me, Imperial Guard.”

Etias’s stern command rang through the chamber.

The commander of the Imperial Guard—once revolutionaries, now sworn to Etias’s side—stepped forward, momentarily lowering his sword in salute.

“Imprison this traitor in the deepest cell. Duke Kamel Beatrice will conduct her interrogation.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

At his booming response, Imperial soldiers seized Aglia’s arms roughly.

“Your Majesty! Etias!”

She reached out with a devastated face, but her hand could never reach him.
Struggling, she turned her frantic gaze toward me.

“Lady Katrin! Wait—please! I’ll apologize, I was wrong! Just persuade His Majesty once, I beg you!”

I gave a bored expression and jerked my chin at the guards, as if to say, take her away already.

“Aaagh! Let go! Let me go!”

They dragged the flailing Aglia away.
Soon after, the assassins and Lucia, bound in ropes, were also led out.

“K-Katrin…!”

Lucia cast me a terrified, pleading look.
I twisted my lips coldly.

“Goodbye, Lucia.”

Until she truly repented and changed, she would not be leaving that prison.
Impersonation was crime enough—but had I not gone to Quaidon, she would have continued exploiting and threatening those innocent villagers.

“….”

The nobles exchanged uneasy glances, murmuring among themselves.
Those from the Council faction—who had raised their voices alongside Aglia to demand my removal—now looked drained, sighing in defeat.

“Unbelievable.”

“We followed such a woman?”

“Shameful. Damn it.”

The hollow despair of those who had once supported her filled the chamber.

“…Katrin.”

Etias’s voice, low and quiet, called my name.
I met his gaze head-on.

In his hand was a dagger, its sheath shattered.
From the hilt alone, I knew—it was the one Aglia had once shown me, bearing Elemore’s crest.

Etias slowly extended it to me.
My eyes trembled as I received it, reading the words etched into the blade.
They carried the wish to protect someone.

“…To protect Lara.”

The weight that had pressed on me since my meeting with Aglia lifted like a feather.

If Luciano had truly been loyal to the late Emperor,
he could never have been the one who let Etias’s mother die in Cambute Palace.

Lara—that must have been the Empress Leila’s pet name.
This dagger was likely a gift he had given her.

In my mind’s eye, I saw the burning palace, the Empress trapped with no way out, pulling out the dagger in her final moments.
The late Emperor already gone, and she herself facing death.

What had she thought, in that desperate moment, as she drew this blade?

I closed my eyes slightly, imagining it.
Amid the searing flames, what would a mother with a child think of?
Surely, of her son, Etias, who would be left alone.

Then the reason she drew it was…

“…No way!”

The realization struck me.
I dropped the dagger in shock, covering my mouth with trembling hands.
My throat burned suddenly.
With eyes shimmering, I turned to Etias.

“It was a message. From Her Majesty, the late Empress.”

Etias’s blue eyes wavered faintly.

“A message to Duke Elemore. Just as she had given him the dagger to protect herself—asking him to protect you, Etias… Your Majesty.”

A mother’s desperate wish to shield her child.
Though Aglia had intercepted it, preventing the message from ever reaching Elemore,
he had still protected Etias to the end.

After a long, heavy silence, Etias exhaled a ragged breath.

“Ha…”

His blue eyes churned with stormy waves.
Even Kamel, hearing my words, looked stunned, lips trembling.

“That… Elemore…”

He touched his forehead with a shaking hand.

“Now that I recall… because of the Rebel Emperor’s schemes, I did not even attend the late Emperor’s funeral. But the Empress… she sent me a letter. Asking me, together with Luchi, to protect the Prince—now His Majesty.”

This was the first I’d heard of it.

“I thought she had called him by that pet name only because grief had shattered her reason… but if it was her true will…”

Voices spread among the nobles.

“If she truly trusted in Luciano Elemore’s loyalty… then Lady Elemore speaks the truth. Gods…”

Luciano Elemore.
The Rebel Emperor’s right hand, the pillar of the Imperial faction that tormented Etias.

And yet, hidden within him, a truth utterly reversed.

“….”

Even Etias, who had realized from the diary that Elemore had been his protector, had never guessed why the dagger had been found with the Empress.
His shocked expression said as much.

He bent to pick up the dagger I had dropped, the one his mother had left behind.

My vision blurred with tears—I could hardly see him.

I had thought him an outcast, a soul with nowhere to lean.
A pitiful man, thrown into the world with nothing.

All through The Star of Revolution, the thought had ached in me.
That his only happy memories ended at age five—
and even then, his parents too busy with state affairs to ever let him truly be a child.
He had grown up never knowing love.
It had been agony to watch, as if it were my own pain.

But thank the heavens… Etias was, in truth, a child who had been truly loved.

In the midst of the flames, the Empress leaving a message for a friend, thinking of her son’s face.
And Duke Elemore, keeping his promise to the late Emperor, protecting Etias like a cloak hidden in the dark.

I wiped my falling tears with my hand.

Etias stood motionless, blue eyes stormy with indescribable emotion, staring at me.

“Today again…”

“….”

His gaze held only me, heavy with meaning.

“I am saved by you.”