Chapter 5. Haetae (15)
***
Nelly was the first to regain consciousness. Her face was swollen and puffy as she struggled to open her eyes. Even her eyes seemed swollen, making her vision narrow and blurry. In fact, she couldn’t tell how many times she had woken up. Each time she came to, she found herself sometimes in a carriage, sometimes in a shabby room.
She had been beaten for trying to escape, beaten for kicking at the mercenary who climbed on top of her, beaten for no reason at all—just for waking up again and being a nuisance—and lost consciousness repeatedly. So she had no idea how much time had passed or where she was.
All she could see was dark reddish-brown. Her nose was blocked, perhaps from bleeding, but she could still clearly smell the stench of rot. She tried to move her body but couldn’t budge at all. Looking down, she saw she was sitting in a chair, tied up with rope in various places.
Gradually her senses returned and her blurred vision cleared somewhat. Only then did she realize that the dark reddish-brown pooled on the floor was blood, and she shuddered in shock. Slowly looking around, her eyes widened with horror and fear, trembling.
Soon her mouth fell open and uncontrollable screams burst out. At that sound, Osian, who was likewise tied to a chair, regained consciousness.
“O-Osian, Osian, wake up… Osian!”
“Ugh…”
Osian, looking even more wretched than Nelly, struggled to lift his head. Soon he began to grasp the situation, and deep fear settled over his face as well.
That’s when it happened. A door she hadn’t even known was there burst open, and someone emerged from beyond it. Nelly and Osian couldn’t even breathe, paralyzed with terror. The person slowly approaching was Grand Duke Canis.
The Grand Duke, calmer and more composed than expected, sat in the chair placed before them. He appeared elegant and serene, as if the dark red pools of blood were carpets and the corpses hanging in the air were chandeliers.
He spoke leisurely.
“Caught at the harbor? And at one of Harun territory’s harbors, no less?”
The Grand Duke let out a incredulous laugh. Only then did Osian remember a fact he had forgotten. One of Grand Duke Canis’s titles was Harun. The problem was that they had blindly boarded any carriage that was said to be going to a harbor.
“Yes. Harun territory was unexpected, but I thought you’d take a ship anyway. To cross by land you would have had to pass through the duchy, so you couldn’t have gone that way. And you couldn’t hide forever either.”
So saying, the Grand Duke raised one hand and gestured. A servant standing behind hurriedly brought something. The Grand Duke threw it into the pool of blood. Clang. The sound of metal striking metal echoed.
Perhaps it hadn’t been tied well to begin with—the cloth containing them slipped away, revealing luxurious divine statues and various large and small gems.
“I thought Ronen had taken them.”
The Grand Duke murmured, resting his chin on his hand. Originally these were things the Grand Duke had given to Ronen, so if anyone were to take them, it should rightfully be him. However, Osian and Nelly had been carrying them all. Probably quite a few had been sold or secretly stolen by the mercenaries.
Osian and Nelly trembled visibly. They felt they should say something—make excuses or apologize—but their mouths wouldn’t open. Their gazes weren’t directed at the brilliant treasures but at the corpses hanging from the ceiling. Their future.
Suddenly the Grand Duke’s gaze fixed on something. Standing up abruptly, he approached the two of them. Nelly was so frightened she began hiccupping. Standing before such a Nelly, the Grand Duke drew a dagger from his breast and swung it without hesitation. The sharp dagger pierced Nelly’s finger.
“Ugh… Ughhh…”
Unable even to scream, Nelly looked down at her finger as blood gradually seeped out, then rolled her eyes back and lost consciousness. Thud. One of Nelly’s fingers fell to the floor. It was the finger wearing a ring set with a gem larger than a fingernail.
Grand Duke Canis personally picked up the finger, removed only the ring, then threw it away again. He spoke quietly toward Nelly, who had already fainted with foam at her mouth.
“That’s not something for a bitch like you to wear.”
The Grand Duke took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from the ring. The blue-green gem, barely worked but therefore more elegant, gleamed brilliantly. It was a ring he had personally brought from the desert across the sea, resembling Ronen’s eyes.
He had given it to Ronen, but somehow it had ended up on the finger of a whore’s daughter, so he had personally reclaimed it. The blood-stained handkerchief was discarded carelessly as if it were filthy.
Watching this scene, Osian wept and pleaded.
“Please… I’ll tell you everything, so please let Nelly go. Please… Nelly is innocent.”
“Innocent?”
The Grand Duke asked this while letting out an incredulous laugh. His expression was so eerie that Osian’s trembling intensified. He had always been a cruel man, but his atmosphere had become even sharper in the time they hadn’t seen him. Just facing him felt like being cut.
Sitting back down in his chair, the Grand Duke fiddled with the ring and said,
“Right. It would be easier to listen while you can still speak properly.”
“Will you let Nelly go?”
“I’ll think about it after I hear what you have to say.”
How to kill her. Thinking this while making a languid expression, the Grand Duke was met with Osian’s gaze—terrified but somehow quite resolute.
“You’ll have to let Nelly go first before I’ll open my mouth.”
“You seem to have forgotten your position. I don’t want to make a deal with you.”
So saying, the Grand Duke gestured to the servant standing behind him.
“It can’t be helped. Even if the pronunciation is slurred, as long as I can understand it.”
The door opened and men larger than average with arms several times thicker entered. Osian hurriedly begged for forgiveness, but it was already too late. The men surrounded Osian and began faithfully carrying out their assigned task, and terrible screams echoed throughout the mansion.
***
“…Gasp!”
Ronen opened his eyes, gasping urgently. His heart was beating so fast his ears felt muffled. Even the ceiling before his eyes swayed back and forth.
Sitting up, sweat-soaked hair fell across his face. Ronen covered his mouth with his hand and breathed roughly.
He thought he had heard a sharp scream in his sleep. It had been vivid, as if coming from right beside him, but when he actually woke up, the surroundings were completely quiet. Had it been a dream? The scream of a boy who was neither young nor mature, that voice seemed familiar, so Ronen tried to recall it and his body stiffened in shock.
‘…Osian.’
The face of the boy he had been forcibly avoiding but could never forget came vividly to mind. While thinking they must have escaped safely by now, the fact that for them to be safe, he shouldn’t be here like this caught at his ankles and slowly sank him like a swamp.
‘Right. This isn’t the time for this. The longer I remain alive and well, the more dangerous others become…’
Because there was no way the Grand Duke would just leave them alone.
Ronen squeezed his eyes shut. An ominousness sticky as congealing blood crawled all over his body. He didn’t know if this too was the influence of a dream he couldn’t remember, or if it was due to the anxiety and guilt that tightened around his body as time passed.
“Did you have a nightmare?”
At the sudden voice, Ronen’s head snapped around. The owner of the voice was reflected in his wide blue-green eyes. A man who looked as cold and composed as his calm, heavy voice—Eckart was standing beside him, examining Ronen’s face.
Ronen suddenly remembered the situation before he fell asleep. Again, under the pretext of help, he had borrowed Eckart’s hands to climax several times and was drowning in pleasure when at some point he seemed to have lost his fading consciousness.
It had been like that lately. Perhaps because Ronen had asked him to show compassion for just a short while, or because he had said it was fine to let him go when it became painful and threatening, Eckart helped Ronen every day. The frequency was high, and each time he offered his touch, Ronen climaxed several times, so his lustful body no longer stirred alone in longing.
This time too, he had lost his reason and pursued pleasure purely on instinct. Remembering belatedly how ugly he must have looked, an even deeper sense of transgression than usual rushed over him, crushing his entire body. Even in such a situation, he who couldn’t overcome temptation was truly the worst.
As Ronen remained silent with only a pained expression, Eckart reached out to him. His hand, which seemed about to remove the sweat-soaked hair clinging to his face, hovered near his face before merely brushing the empty air and withdrawing. At that careful tenderness, a faint smile crossed Ronen’s face.
What on earth should he do? Just looking at Eckart, that man, he became captivated by the desire to take comfort in this moment. Regardless of the situation outside, regardless of others, even regardless of Eckart’s feelings, he ended up wanting to do as he pleased.
Ronen deliberately turned his head away. Placing his meaningless gaze outside the window, he opened his mouth.
“Whether it’s just a nightmare or reality.”
“…Pardon?”
“Actually, I’ve always felt like I was having a very long nightmare. Even now, I feel like I’m in a nightmare.”
Perhaps that’s what life was. A nightmare that was too powerless and miserable, where nothing could be done according to one’s will.
Still, the hope that it would end someday had always remained as at least a small ember in a corner of his heart. He believed that when he woke from this nightmare, everything would be different, that no matter how helplessly he was swept away and trampled into a mess, if he kept faith and protected this ember, he would find a way out.
Grand Duke Canis—the moment he met that man, it had powerlessly died out.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
