Johan nodded briefly. Morris, standing beside him, placed a document from his bag on the table.

“If you see this, you won’t have any objections to accepting your death.”

“…”

Even in any situation, not changing a single facial expression was her specialty.

But now, the muscles on Diane’s face were stiffening.

Her heart sank. She barely held back the trembling all over her body.

“…What is this?”

There was no courage to meet eyes, but Diane’s lips moved slightly without taking her gaze off the document.

“I want to ask.”

A quiet silence followed the low pitch.

Between slightly wrinkled brows, the light from the lamp flickered.

The sight was too cruel, so Diane closed her eyes.
He purchased the family physician of the duke.

The plan was perfect.

The intention was to turn Olivia Blanchett into a patient with hypersensitivity, then into a nervous breakdown patient, and ultimately, into a patient with schizophrenia. The plan was to admit her to a mental hospital, not much different from prison.

The problem was that Olivia herself was no pushover.

After enduring such humiliation, scorn, and persecution, most would have given up, but Olivia’s spirit tenaciously clung to the position of the duchess.

Stubborn.

And on that day, the lakeside incident ruined all the plans.

“I… don’t know about it. Your Grace.”

On the paper Morris handed over, a list of medications prescribed to the duchess until now was densely written.

Evidence showed that various drugs causing mental confusion, headaches, and infertility as a side effect were dangerously mixed and flowed into Olivia’s body.

“Why.”

Diane raised her head, meeting the gaze of Johan.

“Why would you do such a thing.”

“Did you covet the position of the duchess?”

Diane took a breath. In the freezing cold, she felt a shiver down her spine, as if the blazing sun was burning her entire body.

The anger embedded in his eyes silently flared up.

‘You were ruining the young lady. That woman.’

On the day Edgar sneaked in, Johan summoned the maid who served his wife.

‘Why didn’t you tell me.’
‘You threatened to frame me and drive me away. If that happened, it would be difficult for the young lady…’

The maid cried. As if she had been carrying a grudge all this time, she confessed the truth.

‘If I wasn’t here, the young lady would… Pity our young lady…’

Thinking of the woman brought into the house by my own hands, I couldn’t control my emotions.

I felt like I could twist her neck right away.

“You meddled with it.”

Johan, with narrowed eyes, stared directly at Diane.

“My pride. Diane Brook.”

His gaze, looking at the woman for a long time, was sharp. That was when Diane began to laugh hysterically.

Diane, standing at the edge of the cliff, felt like she was finally falling.

Now, only the descent into hell remained.

Even if she hadn’t been born into a poor marquis family, Diane found that fact deeply regrettable.

“Hey, Your Grace. You’re really too much.”

Diane seemed like a desperate person.

“I didn’t want the medicine. That bastard did. I didn’t force it on her. I begged her to take it. She begged for more when the medicine didn’t work. That woman!”

She shouted.

“Why do you think?”
With her torn and twisted lips, Diane glared at Johan.

“It was so easy to provoke that bastard. Why do you think it was easy?”

Like a sobbing woman, shaking her disheveled hair, Diane, who had been laughing, stared at Johan with a face that lost its laughter.

“Because you made her that way. Just to see what it’s like to receive your pathetic affection. Because you forced that bastard to go crazy. Do you understand now?”
Crazy laughter echoed through the interrogation room.

The handsome man’s face started to turn pale. Perhaps feeling stifled, he roughly pulled at his dark gray tie.

He was a man who even made one’s heart race. Johan.

On his straight wrist, a Patek Philippe ‘New Watch’ sparkled under the light.

Although he owned many expensive wristwatches, he remembered a time when he mocked a foolish maid for ordering a watch as a gift for a man who insisted on only using his late mother’s heirloom.

The man who betrayed that vile woman first is you, so if you want to punish me, shouldn’t you pay the penalty first?

“If there’s someone who should fall into hell for this, it’s not me, but you, Your Grace.”

Diane laughed heartily. That chilling laughter was her final smile.

A few days later, it was a day when rain poured all day long. The missing maid’s lifeless body was found on the hillside.

“I saw Diane Brook push the madam into the lake. I saw it clearly. I swear by my honor. If I die, please clear my unjust death.”

The contents of the will hidden in the inner pocket of her petticoat.

The maid had blackmailed Diane.

It was a common story where the maid’s greed, fueled by a taste of money, ultimately ended in death.

Even on the day of Diane Brook’s private trial, the tedious rain continued to fall.

The escorting jailer found Diane, hanging with a noose around her neck. By the time he, lost in thought, opened the iron door and entered, everything had already come to an end.

Diane Brook was dead.

That was enough. Johan quietly brought the case to a close.