Chapter 90
Andrew’s face turned deathly pale.
“Th-Then what about me…… what are you going to do with me?”
After hesitating for a moment, Andrew finally opened his mouth.
“By, by any chance, like my mother…….”
It was because Nora’s end, who eventually finished her life, came to mind.
At that moment, Andrew’s jaw began to tremble violently.
It was unfair, and so unfair. He had done nothing wrong, so why did the situation turn out like this.
He had only treated her with sincerity!
He was not a star destined to fade away so hollowly.
A commoner-born top graduate of the Academy.
How much more honor and achievements had yet to be attached behind that brilliant modifier.
However, Lionel cleanly trampled upon that hope of his.
“What shall I do.”
After a moment of silence, Lionel opened his mouth.
“First of all, let me tell you that your name will never be brought up in the medical field again. Since a doctor by the name of Andrew will become an existence that never existed from the beginning.”
Andrew reflexively denied it.
“Th-That is impossible! There are several papers published under my name alone—,”
“Whether it is possible or not is not a matter for a guy like you to judge.”
Lionel slowly tilted his head.
“That is how being a nobleman is, after all. One can erase at least one bothersome thing from the world.”
He used to despise that dog-like privilege that wasn’t truly a privilege.
Yet Lionel, at least for this moment, was truly pleased that he was that nobleman.
Because he could erase this kind of trash from Agnes’s life without a trace.
“Li, Life. Then are you sparing my life?”
“What do you think? Ponder hard after this with that grand brain of yours.”
Andrew saw an illusion of the tower he had painstakingly built up collapsing with a crash before his eyes.
That the honor and achievements he was so proud of would become things that never existed at all.
Lionel released Andrew’s collar as if flinging it away from his dazed form.
However, Andrew rather forced his hands through the iron bars, flailing to catch Lionel.
Even so, Andrew’s hands could not even graze Lionel’s collar.
“Transfer this bastard to the criminal detention center outside the Duke’s mansion right away.”
With those final words from Lionel, Andrew’s new residence was decided.
To the notorious detention center from which once one enters, they can never come out again.
☆☆☆
“Wh-Where are you dragging me! Let me go!”
With a thoroughly pale face, Andrew busily scanned the surroundings that were entirely gray.
Inside the long-stretched iron bars, people who looked menacing at a glance were huddled together.
A guard who stopped in front of one of the rooms slid a key into the lock of the iron door.
“You shall stay here from now on!”
*Clang!*
The sound of the iron door closing echoed dully.
Andrew was thrown just like that among the criminals.
Air intermingled with the smell of rotten straw, sweat, and blood rushed into his lungs.
Just inhaling made it feel as though his stomach would turn inside out.
“No…… Not here.”
Andrew gripped the iron bars with trembling hands.
“I am not a criminal! I am a doctor! I was the top graduate of the Academy, and I was the Duchess’s primary physician!”
His voice grew increasingly higher, but there was no change at all in the pupils watching him.
Even the guards did not even pretend to hear.
Beyond the iron bars, prisoners were laughing lowly, yawning, or remained immersed in their respective worlds.
Andrew’s scream was merely one of the noises that were too common here.
After a while, a slow aria unsuited for a detention center flowed out from an old gramophone.
Then, the sound of footsteps was heard from the end of the hallway.
It was music signaling the shift change.
“Ah—.”
One guard who walked in while yawning opened his mouth unconcernedly.
“Did you see it? The corpse hanging in front of the castle gate, I mean.”
The other guard nodded.
“Ah, that prisoner who was said to be the head maid of the Duke’s mansion?”
“Uh-huh. She was quite bold. To think of insulting a direct line of that Valheim ducal family, not even a low-ranking noble.”
He shook his head from side to side.
“It seems she was not even afraid of her master.”
A low murmuring flowed among the prisoners.
“At any rate, these days, things break out every other day.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t know what is turning out how.”
One guard continued indifferently.
“From what I hear, even the servants of the Duke’s mansion were entirely replaced?”
“That’s right. Ah, by the way.”
After a moment of silence flowed, the other guard suddenly tilted his head. His gaze headed toward Andrew.
“There is one here too, you know.”
The guard pointed inside the iron bars with his chin.
“That man. I heard he was the Duchess’s primary physician?”
In an instant, gazes poured in.
Prisoners, guards, nameless pupils all scanned Andrew all at once.
The guard smacked his lips, smacking his appetite, and said as if it were no big deal.
“Then that human will be going soon too, then.”
The moment those words dropped, Andrew’s mind turned blank.
“……What?”
Andrew reflexively crawled to the front of the iron bars, scraping the floor with his knees.
“What does that mean! Saying that I am going too! To where, I mean!”
His voice cracked.
“Do, Don’t tell me I am to be executed too……? It’s not, right? Please tell me it’s not! Please!”
“Ah, what a surprise.”
At Andrew who suddenly rushed forward, the guard knitted his brow.
However, he soon lost interest, picked his ear, brought up another topic, and continued a trivial story.
“By the way, what would today’s food ration be. I am hungry, I wish I could lay my eyes on meat after a long time.”
“Look here! Can you not hear my words! Please tell me where it is said that I am going!”
The snickering guards treated Andrew like an invisible man.
But the guard’s word thrown in passing was intensely engraved in Andrew’s brain. With the terror that he too was of a destiny to die at any time.
It was from that day.
Andrew’s breath grew rapid whenever it became the shift change time.
The moment the first syllable of the aria signaling the guards’ shift change was heard, his heart dropped with a thud. Lest the guards approaching from the end of the hallway were those meant to drag him to the execution ground.
Would it be today.
Or would it be tomorrow.
The fact that he could not know when he would be dragged out gnawed away at Andrew’s sanity at every moment.
Even while sleeping fitfully, his body reacted first whenever he just heard the melody of the aria.
It was no use covering his ears. The melody continued to ring inside his head, tenaciously tormenting Andrew.
Since he could not smash the gramophone right away either, it felt as though he would go crazy. As terror encroached day by day, Andrew’s anxiety reached its peak.
To the extent that eventually, when the music was played, he reached the level of throwing a seizure foaming at the mouth.
While trembling his entire body at the uninterrupted aria, Andrew poignantly experienced it. That the treatment he had performed on Agnes was by no means an intact treatment.
Only after finally obtaining a fear of the exact same shape as the fear that suppressed Agnes, did Andrew realize.
Though that did not mean he could escape the detention center, of course.
☆☆☆
“…….”
Inside the dim room where stillness had settled. Above the bed positioned in the middle of it, Agnes’s eyelids trembled faintly.
The boundary between dream and reality was spreading like paint that had not yet dried less.
Slowly, light gray pupils were revealed, and like a person who was forcibly dragged up from deep water, Agnes’s chest heaved a beat late.
Even inhaling breath was unfamiliar, as if it were an old occurrence.
Her entire body was heavy and aching. Yet paradoxically, her sensations were dull.
She perceived that there was pain, but it was not clear where it started.
Everything was dull, exactly like a person who had been submerged in a deep place for too long.
Agnes blinked her eyes slowly a few more times without a word. As if waiting for the numb sensations to return to their places.
At first, there was only darkness.
Then, focus was gradually caught in her blurry vision, and the ceiling was faintly formed upon her retina.
The pattern of uniform stonework and gold decorations through its gaps spread faintly.
It was a pattern Agnes also knew.
‘That is……. The pattern that was on the ceiling of Rael’s room though…….’
Those words meant that it was a sight that could absolutely never be seen from the ceiling of a sewer.
The air inside the room was felt by the sensations that were gradually returning.
Not the smell of wet dirt, but things like the smell of medicinal herbs, warm cloth, and crackling burning firewood.
Agnes laboriously raised her hand, which was not moving well, and fumbled around her eyes.
‘……There is no blindfold.’
As her fingertips grazed bare skin, that fact came across as strangely unfamiliar and empty.
Only then did Agnes realize.
That this place was Lionel’s bedroom, not the sewer.
It was then.
Beside the bed, from a very close place, a slow low bass voice was heard.
“What kind of sleep is slept for so long.”
In an instant, her body reacted first.
Before consciousness could catch up, Agnes’s body froze instinctively.
Her muscles became taut like strings pulled tightly beneath her skin, and her heart dropped a beat late.
Lionel was sitting while leaning next to the bed.
He was looking down at her, exactly as if welcoming one who had just fallen into a slightly long sleep.
“It has been a long time, Agnes.”
☆▪︎▪︎▪︎☆
