“You’re the one who drove out Madame Lauren.”

Anblyn, lost for words, turned red from her eyes to her cheeks.

“Surely. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

The contempt was clearly felt in his eyes, which held a faint smile.

Anblyn’s snow-white nape turned bright red.

“Is there anything else? I’m a bit busy.”

The sunset that painted the world crimson also colored the face of the man smiling neatly. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

“I, ……I was all wrong. Ed. So forgive me just once. ……You loved me.”

Ha, Edgar let out a low sneer that was like a sigh. He felt disgusted.

It wasn’t something a woman who had broken off the relationship out of greed for the title of princess, no, precisely crown princess, would say.

At least if she had something called a conscience.

“I admit your body wasn’t bad.”

Edgar rose from his seat. Fatigue was setting in. The princess’s play today felt unusually long.

“How can you say such a thing……”

Anblyn’s voice trembled, pale as death.

How.

It was the moment when the fever of first love had coldly cooled.

There was a sound of something blindly obstructing her vision like an illusion shattering like thin glass.

At last, the world felt clear.

It wasn’t love to begin with.

The heart that had been beating passionately, the head that had been numb with emotion, cooled down.

Anblyn slowly closed her eyes and opened them again, shaking off the tears that had formed at the corners.

Her small face, wet with moisture, burned red in the intensifying sunlight.

I won’t forgive you. Never.

She dabbed her face with a cream-colored handkerchief pulled from her handbag.

The way she slowly raised her half-lowered eyelids was the epitome of elegance.

Anblyn had already returned to being the graceful princess.

“You. I’ll make you regret it.”

“If you wish.”

Edgar gave a fresh smile to the woman who was audacious to the end.

“By all means.”

The sunset spread over the face of the woman who had once given him satisfaction.

The red twilight flowed like a river between the two, crossing like a river that could never return.

The cell, where the only light came through a small window the size of a palm, was dark even during the day.

The deeply inhaled breath was very humid.

How did it come to this?

Diane lay on the worn mattress, staring blankly at the sunlight falling on the stone floor.

The rusty spring that poked through the torn cloth stabbed her side, but she was numb to it.

She no longer counted the days. She had given up on all attempts to bribe the guard. She realized it was a meaningless act,

Without Johan Leopold’s mercy, no matter what she did, she couldn’t escape this pit.

“Diane Brook. Come forward.”

The guard shouted as he unlocked the door with a jingling bunch of keys.

Diane lay motionless as if dead. The guard who entered grabbed Diane’s arm roughly and pulled her.

Her skinny legs flailed inside her ash-gray pants.

It seemed they were about to start the interrogation again, which had been going on without even letting her sleep. It was no different from torture.

The guard knocked and the interrogation room door opened.

Diane stood trembling like an animal being dragged to the slaughterhouse. The guard pushed her back roughly.

Pushed in, Diane steadied her staggering body with her head bowed low.

It was then that black shoes entered her field of vision. Along with a familiar scent touching her nose.

“!”

Diane’s gaze lingered on the shoe tips gleaming in the light of the bulb hanging from the low ceiling.

Her heart began to race. She slowly raised her face.

Johan Leopold.

The man she was seeing for the first time since that day still looked perfect.

Seeing Johan with his arms folded and eyes closed intently with a composed face made her feel as if this was the office in Greathill.

If only she could turn back time…….

“I’ve brought her, Your Excellency.”

At the guard’s report, gray eyes slowly revealed themselves under the light.

Johan gave a brief nod, and the guard pulled Diane to sit in front of him. The sound of the chair dragging was loud in the quiet.

“……Lord, Duke.”

The fresh scent of Johan’s skin floating in the damp air broke Diane’s composure.

A shrill sound squeezed out of her dry mouth.

“Except for tampering with the report…… there’s nothing else. Really.”

She didn’t hope for forgiveness. She knew he was a man for whom such a word didn’t exist.

She just wanted it to be enough punishment for the crime she had committed.

“I can swear on the honor of the Brook family. That’s all I passed on to the fence. Please believe me.”

She knew this moment was her last chance. So she willingly confessed her crimes. She couldn’t hang herself for mere embezzlement after all.

“No more, you say.”

Diane’s lips reflexively closed. It felt like his chilling gaze was gripping her nape tightly.

“I just made a wrong choice because the family fortunes declined, ……there’s nothing else.”

She still wore an expression of resentment and pitiful innocence.

It was a misstep from the beginning. A cliff in front, a precipice behind. There was nowhere else to run.

“I see.”

Johan nodded briefly. Morris, standing beside him, placed a document he had taken out of his bag on the table.

“If you see this, you’ll have no objection to accepting your death.”

“……”

It was her specialty to never be shaken and not change her expression in any situation.

But now Diane’s facial muscles were stiffening.

Her heart sank. She barely managed to suppress her whole body from trembling.

“……What is this?”

Unable to muster the courage to meet his gaze, she barely moved her lips while keeping her eyes fixed on the document.

“That’s what I’d like to ask.”

A quiet silence followed the low bass voice.

The light from the bulb flowed between his slightly furrowed brows.

The sight was so ruthless that Diane squeezed her eyes shut.

She had bribed the Duke’s personal physician.

The plan was perfect.

The plan was to turn Olivia Blanchet into a neurotic patient, a neurasthenic patient, and ultimately a schizophrenic patient, to be admitted to a mental hospital no different from a prison.

The problem was that Olivia was not to be underestimated either.

Even after enduring such humiliation, contempt, and scandal, Olivia’s mind stubbornly refused to let go of the Duchess position.

How tenacious.

And that day, the incident by the lake ruined all plans.

“I… don’t know anything about this, Duke.”

The paper Morris handed over was filled with the names of drugs that had been prescribed to the Duchess all this time.

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

“Why would I?”

Diane raised her head to meet Johan’s gaze.

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“Did you covet the position of Duchess?”

Diane inhaled. She felt a shiver throughout her body as if witnessing a blazing sun in the bitter cold.

The anger nestled in his eyes burned quietly.

‘She was ruining the young lady. That woman’

On the day Edgar sneaked in, Johan called in his wife’s maid.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘She threatened to frame me and drive me out. I couldn’t because it would trouble the young lady too…’

The maid cried. She spilled out the truth as if unburdening the resentment that had settled in layers over time.

‘If I was gone too, the young lady… our poor young lady…’

Thinking of the woman he had brought into the house with his own hands who had been destroyed, his emotions couldn’t be controlled.

He felt like he could wring her neck right then and there.

“What you’ve touched is.”

Johan narrowed his long eyes and looked directly at Diane.

“My pride, Diane Brook.”

His gaze as he looked at the woman for a long time was sharp. That’s when Diane started laughing hysterically.

Diane saw herself finally falling from the edge of the cliff she had been precariously standing on.

Now all that was left was to roll down into hell.

If only she hadn’t been born into a poor baron’s family. Diane found that fact very heartbreaking.

“Hey, Duke. You’re really too much.”

Diane seemed like a deranged person.

“It was that bastard who wanted the drugs. I didn’t force her to take them. She begged for them, I tell you. It was that wench who asked for more when the drugs didn’t work!”

She shouted.

“Why do you think?”

Diane glared at Johan, pulling up her chapped and rough lips.

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

Like a deranged woman, Diane looked at Johan with a face devoid of laughter after shaking her disheveled hair and laughing.

“Because you made her that way. For that little scrap of your affection. You drove that bastard to madness. Do you understand now?”

Hysterical laughter shook the interrogation room.

Cracks started to appear on the handsome man’s face. He roughly pulled at his dark gray tie as if feeling stifled.

Even this appearance made her pulse race. Johan.

The Patek ‘New Watch’ on his straight wrist glinted in the light.

She remembered sneering as she watched the stupid bastard ordering a watch as a gift for him, even though he had many expensive wristwatches but insisted only on his mother’s heirloom.

Since you were the first to deceive that lowly wench, if you want to punish me, shouldn’t you pay for your sins first?

“If there’s someone who should go to hell for this, it’s not me, but you. You yourself, Duke.”

Diane smiled broadly. That chilling smile was her last smile.

A few days later, it was raining all day. The dead body of the missing maid was found on the mountainside.

「Diane Brook pushed Madam by the lake. I saw it clearly. I swear to God on my honor. When I die, please resolve my unjust death.」

This was the content of the suicide note hidden in the inner pocket of her undergarments.

The maid had blackmailed Diane.

It was a common story of a maid’s greed growing after getting a taste of money, eventually ending in death.

On the day of Diane Brook’s closed trial, the tiresome rain continued to fall incessantly.

It was the escort guard who discovered Diane hanging limp with a noose around her neck. When he opened the cell door, pale as a sheet, everything had already ended.

Diane Brook was dead.

That was enough. Johan quietly concluded the case.