161.

Johannes’ tower seemed to be smoothly imprisoning Inette.

He no longer asked about his identity. He didn’t ruminate on anxiety out of habit. There was no hatefully dwelling on past women, no uncontrollable boiling of monstrous blood. Only the unstable soul’s childhood, which could be neither youth nor boyhood, was comfortable thereafter, always secretly longing for his sister.

On nights when Valdemar’s consort was summoned to the duke’s quarters with a corpse-like face, as if the slaughterhouse doors were creaking open, Griselda invariably visited Johannes’ bedroom with Inette in tow, and the tiny footsteps that crept into the boy’s place, which was once her own bedroom, took on a strange fever as days went by. Inette’s fever. It was something no longer innocent excitement. It was the symptom Johannes had long hoped for.

A closeness that made even his own breath catch. At times, the girl’s cheeks withered pale as bone as she panted heavily with moist breaths, her eyes wide open as if to suck in all the dark outside, but to the boy who gently grasped the spine of the sickly plant, that appearance was only a heartbreaking allure.

“Johan. I. I… can’t breathe.”

In the center of the dark bedroom. Inette’s shoulders trembled finely as she turned, stepping on a broken bowl with a crunch. Inette raised her quivering hands to her chin, as if voluntarily strangling herself. Johannes, who had been arranging the chess pieces Inette had scattered, jumped up and approached her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I can’t… breathe. I can’t breathe.”

“Come here. Quickly.”

Johannes held out both hands, standing beyond the bowl fragments. Inette, staring at Johannes while clutching her neck in an awkward posture, looked very perplexed by her condition. She hesitantly stretched out one frightened hand to grasp his. Every time her bare feet flinched, the porcelain pieces crushed underneath let out sharp, single-syllable screams. That sound. It seemed like death.

“This is what happens when you recklessly throw a tantrum.”

The end of his voice, which inevitably scolded Inette, was ridiculously trembling. Johannes’ gaze naturally fell downward after firmly grasping Inette’s remaining hand. The momentum with which it plunged to the floor was like a crash. In his view, mixed with anxiety and worry, Inette’s narrow instep was caught. Below it, even the soft ivory carpet.

Everywhere Inette had stepped was a hot, bruised bloodstain. The bloodstains dotting the carpet, black in the darkness, were so red they were almost black, like flower petals. Inette’s bare feet were bleeding so darkly.

“I’m… going crazy.”

Johannes’ complexion, mottled in the candlelight, was miserable. It hurt. He felt as if his own feet had been butchered instead. His insides burned unbearably, as if molten iron had been poured in. Ridiculously, it was truly so. Because he now knew the solidity of the wall imprisoning his sister.

He lifted Inette, who was gasping and panting while constantly blinking tears from her glass-like corneas. He sat down, almost falling backward, and seated her sideways on his thigh. Inette buried her lips, which were constantly exhaling rough breaths, under Johannes’ shoulder.

“Do you really have to destroy everything to feel at ease?”

“……”

“Isn’t there any other way?”

“……”

“I know you feel stifled. I’m not trying to scold you. It’s just that you keep getting hurt every time. How do you think I feel watching?”

He bites his lip, ashamed of his pettiness in habitually blaming Inette out of nervousness and then acting meanly. Inette only shrugged her shoulders as if sobbing, without a word. She still seemed too out of breath to have the leisure to argue or counter.

Johannes soon shifted his gaze to one end of Inette’s ankle. Without a moment’s hesitation, he lifted her nightgown up to her knees, then grabbed one ankle, bent it up, and looked at the sole of her foot. The concave white background was covered in blood.

Meanwhile, the nightgown flowed down naturally, fully exposing Inette’s bare thighs in the dim moonlight. However, Inette showed no hesitation or resistance. She didn’t even pretend to adjust her nightgown for a moment. She merely gazed distantly at Johannes’ profile as he examined her wound in her stead, with a precarious appearance.

“How is it? Is the condition serious?”

She asked pitifully with wet eyes, her breathing somewhat calmed. With one leg bent inward, even the inside of her thigh was exposed, yet all her nerves were on edge about the wound she couldn’t bring herself to check with her own eyes. After all, there was never any sense of shame between the two from the beginning. The unrestrained touch and gaze of her brother, absorbed in tending to her, were rightfully hers.

Johannes also wasn’t particularly interested in her bare skin. He only felt his hamstrings burning up at the thought that this wound couldn’t be treated with just a simple application of ointment. As they say, those who have experienced pain understand pain, and even shallow wounds that bled seemed like terrible gashes to his eyes.

He felt like he would go mad from the pain of seeing it. He took a deep breath to try to calm his trembling heart full of worry. He was burning with the wicked urge to immediately put her down and press his whole face against the soles of her feet, licking her wounds like a beast.

Shouldn’t the monster be useful at times like this? The hateful tentacles in these veins, though disgusting, would surely be gentler than needles to stitch her flesh. If only I could feel your pain in your stead, lick and caress your wounds, and without your knowledge… gently open them. And transplant my own into that opened space….

Is this a crazy desire?

Johannes squeezed his eyes shut. He swallowed once dryly. He swiftly pulled out a deeply embedded fragment before Inette could even feel the pain, then immediately looked down at her.

“You can endure it, you.”

He urged her somewhat fiercely, so that she couldn’t scream or cry out from the stinging sensation.

“Wh-what?”

“Confinement.”

Johannes answered Inette, who asked dazedly after almost groaning, as if nailing it down. Thanks to his urgency, his unfiltered inner thoughts burst out on their own. Then, suddenly realizing his verbal mistake, he watched Inette with a somewhat anxious and miserable feeling. That wasn’t what he had meant to answer.

As expected….

He had not been able to crush even the seeds of anxiety all this time. She was supposed to endure until he came of age and took the position of the lord of this fortress. If she could just do that, her desire, what she had clearly wanted and would surely want for the rest of her life, he could willingly dedicate all of it to her. I can give it to you. If it’s me, I can give it to you. I’m the only man who can.

The one man who can give you everything to possess all of you. So….

“Johan.”

“……”

“You….”

Inette in his arms seemed surprised by his strange inner thoughts. And she seemed to have read every bit of the worry he hadn’t quite erased from his unusual urging face. At once.

“What are you so worried about?”

A highly displeased look settled in Inette’s eyes.

“You’re stating the obvious. Don’t… misunderstand. Do you think I can’t handle what every precious young lady typically goes through? Do you think I would act like this just because it’s unfair and hard? Who do you think I am? I am Valdemar. Your sister, I mean. It’s just that the illness… I don’t know. For a moment, the room was too dark. I just… felt suffocated, that’s all.”

Her tone was unstable. In normal circumstances, she would have laughed it off as ridiculous. But this time, it sounded particularly like deeply suppressed passion. It was clearly an unusual reaction, but Johannes had long been blind and deaf. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to notice.

“As expected, right?”

He, who couldn’t give any answer for a moment, slowly smiled painfully with a relieved look. Inette under his chin slightly lowered her head as if avoiding his gaze. Her cheeks were flushed beneath her confusedly furrowed brows.

“Don’t look down on me….”

“I guess I worried unnecessarily?”

“Why bother answering. Stop asking.”

“You’ll endure it sufficiently.”

Johannes, who had regained his composure by now, finally became affectionate and began to tease Inette as if urging her. Inette, unable to bear it anymore, expressed her irritation.

“I said that’s enough, didn’t I? Really, it’s, annoying….”

“You’re that kind of person.”

He pressed his lips to the crown of her head, not even thinking to tidy Inette’s nightgown. Inette seemed to be trying to shake off her uncomfortable mood by grasping Johannes’ hand that had come to rest on her stomach. After a moment of silence, she changed the subject as if lamenting.

“Lately… I hear the borderlands are unsettled. That presumptuous Milo keeps making advances when he can? Ah, I’d be so glad if he fell off his horse and broke a leg or something. Then Father would stay in the domain all the time, wouldn’t he? Not going anywhere….”

“It’s not for us to meddle in where he stays.”

At his strangely indifferent murmur, Inette mumbled softly.

“Still, it would be best if he stayed in the fortress all the time. The other day, I spent the whole time absent-mindedly waiting for Father to return, wondering if he’d come today or tomorrow….”

“You should be waiting for me.”

Not that man.

Recalling the duke’s iron-like blue eyes, Johannes’ eyes cooled with unprecedented hostility. That man doesn’t have the slightest interest in you anyway. He didn’t bother to tell Inette this in her ear. He only focused all his efforts on ruffling her part with the tip of his nose.

“Are you going to come up?” came a sulky question, but he couldn’t respond right away. After hesitating for a long time, he was finally able to answer after barely composing himself.

“Someday.”

Johannes blew a breath as if tickling her hair. Inette laughed with a snort as if it was ridiculous. The night that showed the first signs of a crack was deepening like that.

Johannes’ eyelids slowly sank. He blinked heavily a few times with blurry vision. Holding his sister, who had likely hung heavy drowsiness on the thick flesh under her eyes, in his arms, a sense of reassurance washed over him like a distant sleep, as if everything would work out smoothly.

Johannes believed without a doubt. That our bedroom, isolated like a ruin that no one visits within the huge fortress, would remain solid forever. No. To tell the truth, he didn’t want to doubt it.

That’s why he must have missed even the second omen.

***

“That woman…! That woman! Look what she’s done to me!”

That night, Inette, who had been blushing as she was dragged along by Griselda’s hand, let out a scratchy scream as soon as they were alone. Before Johannes could react, she took a step back, grabbed the hem of her nightgown, and suddenly lifted it up to her waist. Her white lower body was fully exposed in the room distorted by candlelight and moonlight. Johannes, perplexed by the sudden commotion, was surprised once more as he confirmed below.

“Th-that….”

“……”

“What is that…. Underwear?”

Johannes asked blankly, staring at the metal ‘imprisoning’ Inette’s buttocks. The metal, which seemed to have been forged to fit his sister’s curves without showing even a slight gap, even had a strange lock attached in the center. Unable to understand its bizarre form, Johannes’ eyebrows twisted strangely. Inette’s gestures, shaking her head vigorously as if it wasn’t something like underwear, were like some kind of shudder.

“Can you believe it? It’s a chastity belt…!”

“A what?”

“A chastity belt!”

A cry that shook her whole body. It was a voice thoroughly filled with anger. Startled by the loud voice, Johannes hurriedly moved close to her and covered her mouth first.

“Shh. Shh…. Inette. Too loud.”

Johannes threw a bewildered glance at the exit once, then looked at Inette’s face again. His sister, unable to hide her internal conflict, didn’t let go of her skirt even while her mouth was covered. Even though it had already left Johannes’ sight due to their closeness, she seemed utterly unable to let go.

It was resentment. She let out something like a crumpled sob in his grasp, then shook her head vigorously as if it was cumbersome.

“Take it off. Take it off….”

“Ah, sorry….”

Johannes finally removed his hand with a sullen expression and stepped back half a step.

“Anyway… what is this? I don’t understand its purpose.”

“It’s to monitor my virginity.”

“Virginity?”

“It’s to prevent me from recklessly receiving men.”

“……”

“Did you know? Can you see? Here. This is where men and women copulate. That woman thinks I might do that, so she put this on me…! No, how could she…!”

Inette, pointing to the wide metal plate below her navel with just a glance, trembled like an aspen tree. Her cheeks, flushed with rage that seemed about to burst, were so red they looked like they might explode at any moment. Johannes couldn’t move an inch.

He could only stare madly at the shameful piece of metal, then, startled by the baseness of his own gaze, suddenly lift his chin. The ceiling of the bedroom filled Johannes’ pupils as if it might all collapse. He firmly pressed his lips together, trembling with emotion, and persistently stared at a meaningless point in the air. Inette…. My woman.

It seems she has had her first menstruation.