Lady Devil - Chapter 161

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.”

Read full content of this chapter on r e d c a t t y . c o m