Chapter 20
“In the meantime, it seems you’ve even become mute. This is already the third time I’m asking who told you about this place.”
“It wasn’t that someone told me, huff. I heard piano sounds from here…….”
Agnes put strength into her vocal cords to avoid letting her trembling be noticed.
But her teeth clattered as if she had been thrown into midwinter ice water.
Seeing Lionel after a long time presented her with both joy and fear at the same time.
“Piano sounds?”
Lionel laughed shortly.
“You’re attaching a plausible excuse.”
He took off his black leather gloves and tossed them onto the piano with a thud. His cold gaze slowly scanned Agnes.
“Why. Did you rummage around thinking there might be something worth money? Or did that man you call your father tell you to find something that could be my weakness?”
“No. I haven’t rummaged around anywhere. The servants also don’t say anything to me-,”
-I was going to say that they don’t. But Agnes swallowed her voice along with sadness.
She didn’t want to appear as if she was sulking.
However, the loneliness she had been suppressing finally burst out as tears.
Transparent droplets gathered in her heated eyes and fell, leaving long trails.
She resented Lionel.
“If you’re going to be like this…… you shouldn’t have cherished the letters so dearly.”
A very small sound leaked out from between her lips.
“What?”
Lionel, who hadn’t heard Agnes’s words, bent his upper body. To match the eye level of Agnes sitting in the wheelchair.
Then, discovering the tears flowing down Agnes’s cheeks, he hardened his expression.
“Why are you crying again this time? It can’t be that you were hurt by my words without even having any shame.”
Lionel wiped the tear stains on Agnes’s face with the back of his hand.
It was a cold and dry touch.
Lionel himself didn’t know why his mood was hitting rock bottom like this.
He had just felt it in the imperial palace garden as well, but he didn’t want to see Agnes crying.
“Ugh…….”
Agnes bit her lower lip to swallow her sobs, but in the end, she couldn’t hold back and covered her mouth with both hands.
Rustle.
The letter paper she was holding got crumpled together.
From the spot where Lionel’s fingertips had brushed, a damply soaked charcoal smell rose up.
“Gunpowder smell…….”
Agnes’s fingertips trembled in response to it.
The crying that had risen from deep in her chest turned into breaths, and short, shallow respirations burst out in succession.
It had started as tears simply from grievance. But the moment Lionel’s hand touched her, that sadness changed shape into fear.
Agnes’s shoulders jerked as if in convulsions.
The suppressed crying was no longer crying, and it turned into rough and unstable breathing sounds.
Lionel didn’t notice that strangeness and came a little closer.
And he tried to pick up the letter that Agnes was holding in her hand.
At that moment, their fingertips bumped into each other. Agnes’s spine trembled as if in a spasm.
Right at that instant.
Crackle—
From the walkie-talkie at Lionel’s waist, along with a mechanical sound, a familiar and fearful radio transmission jumped out.
「Colonel. We’ve discovered traces of the mole passing by.」
Mole was the slang the Black Iron Knights used to refer to Revelte.
It was because the gathering place they had recently found was an underground facility prepared by digging tunnels.
“Turn off, turn off the walkie-talkie.”
Lionel’s hand, which was about to respond to the radio, hesitated.
A puzzled gaze arose from under his deeply shadowed eyebrows.
“What did you say?”
“Wa, walkie-talkie……. Please turn off the walkie-talkie, huff.”
Agnes violently blocked her ears with both hands.
However, the noise from the walkie-talkie seemed to go beyond the auricles and stingingly stimulate the brain through the blood.
All other sounds became distant.
Lionel’s voice, and the sound of rain echoing in the room.
Everything sounded like hallucinations murmuring from a very far place.
Her pupils lost focus and wandered in the air.
Space twisted and rippled.
Gunfire and dust, beast-like screams and collapsing sounds.
The scene from the day the carriage crashed revived.
Even the sensation of air entering her nose was sharp.
It felt not like inhaling breath, but like drinking the fear from the day of the accident, so her airway kept narrowing.
The oxygen that couldn’t reach the ends of her lungs shattered at the tip of her chin.
‘I can’t, can’t breathe…….’
As the gap between inhalation and exhalation became increasingly tight, her finger joints grew coldly chilled one by one.
Crackle—.
「The location is near the square. Patrol teams in the relevant area, please respond.」
Without mercy. The walkie-talkie leaked waves again.
“Stop……, please stop…….”
Agnes wished and wished again that someone would remove that walkie-talkie.
Only her right leg was broken, but as if her entire body had been shattered in the carriage accident that day. Her whole body didn’t listen to her.
Agnes’s chest rose and fell more and more rapidly up and down.
Trying somehow to swallow air, shallow and short breaths poured out repeatedly.
But no matter how much she inhaled, breath didn’t come in. What came in was not air, but only burning anxiety.
“Huff…….”
In the end, Agnes’s head suddenly bent forward with a thud.
In the room, the noise from the walkie-talkie was still flowing out.
And in that endless noise, only Agnes’s breathing slowly faded away.
“Good grief, what’s this scheme now?”
To the suddenly quiet Agnes, Lionel swallowed a sigh.
However, when the shoulder of Agnes he was holding drooped downward, Lionel’s eyes widened greatly.
“……!”
The small body collapsed limply.
Tightly closed eyelids, limbs hanging slack.
Agnes fainted right there in Lionel’s arms.
“Hey.”
There was no answer.
“Wake up, Agnes Bardo.”
His tone, pressing down hard, was calm, but Lionel’s eyes were already shaking.
Seeing someone limp like this right in front of him was enough from what he had experienced on the battlefield.
He was sick and tired of this kind of thing.
“I have no intention of playing along with this kind of prank, so get up.”
Unknowingly, Lionel shook Agnes. However, there wasn’t even the slightest movement from Agnes.
The body temperature felt at his fingertips was gradually growing colder.
Agnes, whose body temperature wasn’t high to begin with. This made it feel exactly like holding a corpse whose breath was fading away.
To that unpleasant sensation, his heart thumped, thumped. It started beating irregularly.
Bloodshot veins stood out on the whites of Lionel’s eyes.
“Agnes.”
Thud.
Agnes’s arm fell powerlessly. As if she were dead.
The limp body temperature of Agnes held in his arms reminded him of Cedric right before death.
Lionel felt as if his blood was turning cold.
Clatter, fear rushed in.
From Agnes, Cedric overlapped. And the afterimages of comrades whose breath cut off before he could even do anything.
The sense of loss that he hadn’t overcome and had buried came rushing in.
The artillery fire of the battlefield, the smell of blood, the screaming sounds that rang in his eardrums revived.
Lionel’s nape stiffened, and cold sweat flowed.
He knew it couldn’t be, but the fear that Agnes would also fade away meaninglessly like Cedric and his comrades overwhelmed him.
The anxiety that he would have to powerlessly watch without being able to do anything, just like back then, covered Lionel.
That began to snap the threads of reason one by one.
His heart started pounding as if it would rise to the top of his head.
The large hand that seemed like it wouldn’t budge in any situation trembled finely while hugging Agnes.
Lionel brought his finger to the tip of Agnes’s nose.
Though unstable, breathing was coming out, but the pulse was too weak.
“Is anyone outside! Doctor, call a doctor right now!”
However, Lionel’s shout was swallowed into the pouring rain.
Lionel gritted his teeth.
“Damn……!”
Lionel hugged Agnes tightly and stood up abruptly.
The box hit by his elbow toppled over.
And from inside it, letters poured out onto the floor in a cascade.
The letters he had read and reread every night, stained with hand marks. The precious memories more than anything that had kept him going until now scattered at his feet.
But he didn’t care.
Lionel held the unconscious Agnes in his arms and ran out into the rain without hesitation.
Even though the letters he had cherished so much were being stepped on and crumpled, he didn’t mind.
Splash.
His military boots forcefully trampled the muddied ground.
Because of that, the letter stuck to the sole got crushed as it was buried in the mud.
“Wake up, Agnes!”
Lionel’s shout split the silence of the night that had settled over the ducal residence.
The head butler, discovering Lionel returning to the main building, hurriedly ran out to the door.
“Your Excellency! What has happened!”
“Call a doctor! Right now!”
Hugging the limply shaking body of Agnes more deeply, Lionel roared.
There was no trace of composure.
On the face of the hero who had always been lofty and arrogant, for the first time, an emotion akin to fear seeped in.
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