“……Herdin.”

As she collapsed while calling his name, a sense of relief mixed with another anxiety overwhelmed him.

The thought that he might never hear that voice again.

If the intention was to turn his insides upside down by causing this commotion, it had succeeded.

Even now, with her breathing right before his eyes, that anxiety remained.

The coachman said Blair had entered the Empress’s palace. That she had taken something from there.

He had many questions about what it was, why she went to the palace alone that night.

So…

He hoped she would open her eyes soon.

The moment he thought that, as if hearing his thoughts, Blair’s eyelids trembled, and then she opened her eyes.

As Herdin blankly watched Blair’s blurry eyes slowly come into focus, he belatedly tried to speak, but Blair called out to him first.

“……Herdin.”

Her characteristically low voice flowed from her lips that moved with difficulty. Herdin waited for her next words.

“You were right.”

“What do you mean all of a sudden—”

“Her Majesty the Empress, that day, she wasn’t a suicide but was murdered.”

His gaze on Blair began to waver.

Blair, affected by her returned memories, swallowed the emotions welling up from that day and continued speaking.

“……And she wasn’t trying to kill me, but protect me.”

“……”

“I’m sorry. For being so late……”

On top of the guilt of having turned away from the truth for ten years, the guilt of not being able to save Esmeralda weighed heavily on her chest.

Though her tired eyes were dry without tears, her voice trembled with undeniable emotion.

“Then your visit to the palace that night, was it because of that memory?”

At his question, Blair hesitated for a moment before confessing.

“……Actually, yesterday I attempted hypnosis with Madame Lorelaine.”

When she mentioned performing hypnosis without his permission, Herdin’s expression hardened.

But the exhausted Blair didn’t notice his change in demeanor and continued speaking.

“The hypnosis was unsuccessful, but that night I had a dream. It wasn’t of the day of the accident, but a memory of seeing Her Majesty the Empress hiding something in her bedroom one day.”

“So that night, you went to find it?”

“Yes. I felt I needed to go before Mother noticed. Then… at the burning villa, the memories of that day came back.”

“……”

“In the end, I lost the document though.”

The self-deprecating look was evident in Blair’s downcast eyes.

Someone else might have blamed her for escalating the situation like this.

But at least he couldn’t blame her.

He knew better than anyone who had driven this woman, who would be bedridden for days after just one hypnosis session, to this point.

“I only saw the first page of the document because it was dark, but even that……”

“Blair.”

Herdin gently cut off Blair’s words as she rambled on like someone being chased.

He hadn’t pressured her to hear about some unknown document from a woman who had just narrowly escaped death.

This was enough for now.

The fact that you are breathing and speaking normally before my eyes. Just that alone.

Seeing Blair’s face filled with guilt, apology towards him, and undeniable fatigue even in the midst of it all, Herdin covered her face with his hand.

“Rest for now. I’ll look for the document.”

Feeling his hand gently touching her face, Blair blinked slowly, then lowered her heavy eyelids. Her exhausted body soon succumbed to sleep.

Herdin gazed intently at the sleeping Blair, who was breathing evenly.

She had recovered the memory of the accident.

With this, they had taken a big step closer to the truth they had desperately sought for the past ten years.

But why? Why did he feel uneasy rather than relieved?

After watching over Blair for a while, Herdin quietly got up and left the room. Luth, who had been waiting outside the door, approached.

“Those guys?”

“We put them in the underground prison.”

The two came to the underground prison outside the duke’s residence. The knight commander waiting at the entrance paid his respects.

Acknowledging the greeting with a nod, Herdin went down to the basement. Luth handed him a pair of leather gloves.

Putting on the gloves, Herdin entered the prison.

Inside was the man who had kidnapped Blair, bound in shackles. He seemed to have resisted capture, as there were various wounds on his body.

As soon as the man saw Herdin, he cowered in fear, making the chains binding him rattle.

It was no wonder, as the man before him exuded an overwhelming aura that could kill with just a glance.

“Hello.”

The voice that flowed through his sharp teeth was sweet. Chillingly so.

Casually brushing back his eye-catching bangs, Herdin took out a cigar from his pocket and lit it.

As he exhaled the smoke, he continued speaking.

“I’m in a pretty foul mood right now.”

“……”

“It would be best if you answer promptly when I ask once.”

The man gulped. He could instinctively tell that those words were not just bluster.

“Who is it?”

Though he abruptly asked who it was, the meaning behind the question was clear.

But the man hesitated to answer promptly.

Exhaling smoke while looking at him with cold eyes, Herdin put out the cigar by carelessly throwing it on the floor and spoke.

“Does having a few fingernails pulled out feel like nothing to you?”

He called the knight commander waiting behind him.

Realizing what was about to happen, the man cried out in panic.

“I-I don’t know! I really don’t know!”

“Seems like you’re not ready to answer properly yet.”

“I really don’t know! We just do what we’re told for money!”

Gauging the sincerity in the man’s eyes, Herdin motioned for the knight commander to step back again. Then he took a step closer to the man and asked.

“What were you ordered to do?”

He already knew it wasn’t simply to kill Blair.

If the order had been to kill her, those fools wouldn’t have been searching the entire forest saying she had escaped.

When the man didn’t answer quickly and looked around nervously, Herdin’s gaze turned to the knight commander behind him.

Seeing this, the man immediately answered.

“M-memories. We were told to erase her memories.”

“What memories?”

“To erase memories from her childhood……”

“How were you going to erase them?”

“We were going to use black magic to erase—”

The man who had been answering frantically suddenly closed his mouth, realizing his mistake, but he had already mentioned black magic.

Herdin’s eyes narrowed as he read the information the man had not yet spoken.

“You don’t seem to be a black magician yourself, so there must be more in your group.”

“N-not exactly group members. More like… collaborators.”

At the word collaboration, Herdin smirked. Collaboration among those doing dirty work. What an amusing term.

The man seemed to take that smile as a danger sign and voluntarily confessed.

“But we don’t know who they really are. We were just told to monitor the duchess’s movements, kidnap her, and then contact them……”

“Where is ‘them’?”

The man gave the address he had contacted. Upon hearing the address, the knight commander immediately left the prison.

‘Though going there will probably yield nothing.’

According to the man, they were meticulous enough that even the ‘collaborators’ didn’t know each other’s identities.

There was a high probability they had already fled after catching wind of the situation near the villa. Of course, they would have left no traces behind.

Herdin moved on to the final topic.

“I heard the duchess had a document with her. Have you seen it?”

The man thought for a moment about what document Herdin was referring to, then shook his head.

“I don’t remember clearly… but we brought the duchess’s belongings with us when we kidnapped her, so they should be in that villa……”

At the man’s answer, Herdin furrowed his brow.

The villa had almost completely burned down in the fire. That meant the document inside would have been destroyed in the flames.

Herdin wrapped up the interrogation at that point and left the underground prison.

He wanted to get rid of the kidnappers who had nearly killed Blair in the fire, whether by accident or not, but they still had some use.

Herdin ordered Luth who had followed him out.

“Release them tomorrow morning. Have people tail them. They might make contact with their backers or the black magicians again.”

“Yes.”

“And make sure everyone involved, inside and out, keeps their mouths shut about today’s events.”

“Understood.”

In fact, he had a suspicion about who was behind this.

No, it wasn’t just a suspicion. There was one person who had come to mind first when this incident occurred.

‘……The Empress Dowager.’

She had noticed that Blair was trying to recover her memories from ten years ago and had told her to stop the hypnosis.

But he only had circumstantial evidence.

If it were a simple kidnapping case, he would publicly announce the culprit and deliver appropriate punishment to show what happens when you mess with the Delmarks, but this incident wasn’t that simple.

If this kidnapping was tied to the incident from ten years ago, he couldn’t rashly make it public without concrete evidence.

A heartless mother who abandoned her daughter for ambition, and the pitiful daughter who was used by her.

Or a daughter who betrayed her mother, swayed by her husband.

It would be like throwing bait that gossipmongers could chew on either way as they pleased.

If that happened, the greatest damage would be to the Delmarks and the imperial family on a large scale, and to Katrina and Blair, the subjects of the rumors, on a small scale.

He had no intention of throwing the woman, who was already struggling with the truth that her mother had used her own life, to the gossipmongers as fodder.

Many people would have witnessed the large movement of Delmark knights today, so rumors about the kidnapping couldn’t be completely prevented from spreading.

‘But if Delmark doesn’t make it public first, it will probably just remain at the level of baseless speculation.’

This incident needed to pass quietly. At least until they had solid evidence.