Chapter 112
The news that Raul had been killed spread from person to person as though it were nothing out of the ordinary.
“Raul? You mean that terrorist?”
“Looks like it. As expected of Duke Valheim. That damn terrorist bastard has been causing such chaos lately. Things should finally quiet down now.”
Amid the commotion, Agnes forgot even to breathe as she stared at the fallen drawer lying on the floor.
Two names engraved side by side upon it.
Ilena and Raul.
Her gaze remained fixed there, refusing to move away.
One after another, the moments she had shared with Raul surfaced in Agnes’s mind.
The first memory to cross her thoughts was his lined face when they had met across the negotiating table with Castia.
Back then, all she had thought was that his pale gray eyes, so much like her own, had left an unusually deep impression on her.
The next memory that followed was Raul’s quiet voice comforting her when she had been kidnapped by Rebelt.
“Please. Wait here for just a moment. I’ll bring the medicine right away.”
“I’m sorry you were dragged into this for no reason.”
With trembling hands, Agnes picked up the drawer.
Not content with merely seeing it with her own eyes, she repeatedly traced the engraved letters with her fingertips.
As though doing so might somehow change the words carved there.
But nothing changed.
“Ah… Ah…”
Before the cry could escape her lips, Agnes quickly covered her mouth.
Around her, the employees were still busily whispering among themselves about Raul.
Leaving them behind, Agnes bit her lip tightly and hurriedly pushed the wheels of her wheelchair.
‘That can’t be true…’
Her father had been Adrian. She had lived her entire life believing that without ever questioning it once.
That was why she had tried so desperately to earn Adrian’s affection.
But if Adrian wasn’t her father… then what had she been struggling so desperately for all this time?
She couldn’t bring herself to believe it. There had to be some kind of mistake.
Perhaps Ilena had simply made an error while writing about celebrating the nephew who would soon be born.
Agnes turned her wheelchair back into the building and headed toward Ilena’s room.
The door, untouched by human hands for well over ten years, looked old and worn even from the outside.
Until now, Adrian had kept it firmly locked, and aside from the one time she had searched for the fig recipe for Leuceviten, she had never even dared to enter.
But now that neither Adrian nor Chloe was there, no one stood in Agnes’s way as she entered Ilena’s room.
As she turned the rusted doorknob, the door opened with surprising ease.
*Creak—.*
As she pushed past the hinges crying out with the sound of old metal, the room came into view, with white cloths covering the furniture just as they had in the office earlier.
Agnes’s hands pushed the wheelchair even more frantically.
The wheelchair jolted several times as its wheels caught on the floorboards, but Agnes stubbornly continued forward.
She went straight to the bookshelf and pulled away the covering cloth.
The dust swirling through the air made her cough lightly, but she did not stop.
Because when she had come searching for the recipe before, she had seen other diaries stored on this bookshelf.
“That can’t be…”
Agnes murmured once more.
Yet from the very moment she had seen the engraving and the handwriting on the drawer, a certain answer had already begun taking root within her heart.
Those pale gray eyes that had felt strangely warm despite meeting them for only a fleeting moment kept appearing before her.
Doing her best to suppress the thoughts that kept surfacing, Agnes soon found Ilena’s other diary.
Without even taking a moment to catch her breath, she hurriedly opened the cover.
On the very first page of the diary, written in the exact same handwriting as the inscription beneath the drawer, was a single sentence.
『To Agnes, the gift that came to us.』
Agnes stared at the sentence for a long while.
From the following pages onward were entries written alternately by Raul and Ilena as they awaited the birth of their child.
They wrote about little things, such as what they should name the baby, during which season the child would be born, and whose smiling face the baby would resemble.
As Agnes turned another page, her hand suddenly stopped.
That page described Raul personally building a desk.
“Then… could that desk possibly…”
She had always believed Adrian had simply brought home a used desk from somewhere, but now she realized that wasn’t the whole story, and heat rushed to her eyes.
She had believed the desk Lionel had given her was the first thing that had truly belonged to her.
It wasn’t.
She had already possessed something precious that had truly been hers all along.
*Drip.*
A droplet fell onto the diary.
“Ah!”
The ink had already faded over time, and as soon as the water touched the letters, the words began to blur. Agnes hurriedly tried to wipe away the moisture with her sleeve.
But her vision continued to grow hazy.
Only then did Agnes realize that she was crying.
Before she knew it, tears were endlessly falling from her tear-filled eyes.
Yet not even the faintest sob escaped her lips.
It was as though she had forgotten how to cry.
Ever since Lionel had told her that she had no right to cry, she had made a habit of suppressing every breath she took, until this silent way of weeping had become the only way she knew.
“……”
As though a broken dam had burst, tears poured down endlessly, and something inside Agnes’s heart collapsed without strength.
There was no longer any room to doubt that Ilena and Raul—not Adrian and Chloe—were her true family.
But that realization arrived hand in hand with loss.
The family she had only just found had already become people she could never meet again or spend time with.
More than anything, what Agnes found unbearable was that Lionel’s face overlapped with the very end of that loss.
Her chest tightened until she could barely breathe.
Agnes didn’t want to blame Lionel for her misery.
She couldn’t.
Lionel had simply made the best choices he could to protect the Empire while standing on the front lines of chaos.
Raul had merely been caught in the middle of those choices.
Her ruined leg, and the truth about her biological father’s life and death that she had only just discovered.
Agnes knew that none of it had been the result of malicious intent.
Lionel had merely fulfilled his duty.
And she had merely been cruelly unfortunate enough to become caught up in it.
That was what Agnes kept telling herself.
But… even so, for the first time, Agnes resented Lionel.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, but a short breath still escaped.
“Why… why…”
Why did it have to be you?
And why did it have to be me?
She no longer knew where everything had gone wrong, nor how things had ended up like this.
Agnes’s lips moved soundlessly.
She was afraid.
Afraid that if she continued staying by Lionel’s side, one day she would begin blaming him.
Afraid that she would use her own wounds as an excuse to inflict the same wounds upon him.
Until they scratched and wounded each other again and again, leaving behind nothing but scars that could never be erased.
No…
Perhaps that was already happening.
She was just as afraid of placing her hopes in Lionel again as she was of spending the rest of her life trapped by resentment toward someone.
“…It seems we were never meant to meet from the very beginning, Rael.”
If that had been the case, then neither you nor I… no one would have been hurt or broken.
She had realized that truth far too late.
Agnes slowly closed her eyes.
As she did, the tears gathered there fell like rain upon her pale cheeks.
Perhaps she and Lionel were the kind of people who slowly consumed each other the longer they stayed together.
So perhaps it was better to stop, even now.
Just as Jerome had said.
Before she dragged Lionel all the way down with her.
While repeating those words silently to herself, the room gradually fell quiet once more.
Agnes remained standing motionless before the bookshelf for a long time.
Even after the murmuring from the front yard faded away, the newspaper deliveryman’s shouting ceased, everyone lost interest, and returned to their own business, she still remained there.
Only when no more tears would fall and her eyes had become painfully dry did Agnes finally turn her wheelchair and leave Ilena’s room.
When she returned to the carriage, Simon was still waiting for her exactly as he had been when they had parted.
“Lady Agnes, have you finished everything? Shall I take you back to the Duke’s residence now?”
As Simon naturally began carrying her luggage, Agnes answered him.
“…No. Please take me to the Bel Air Townhouse.”
☆☆☆
“Agnes went to the Bel Air Townhouse?”
*Blink. Blink.*
Inside the gray interrogation room, where the overhead light flickered unsteadily, Lionel raised his head with a cigarillo between his lips.
“Yes. She stayed at the townhouse for a while before returning to the Duke’s residence.”
“Anything else unusual?”
Kalt briefly glanced toward the person sitting opposite Lionel before straightening his posture and continuing his report.
“She also asked the doctor to prescribe sleeping pills.”
At those words, Lionel’s hand, which had been opening the Zippo lighter, slowed.
Sleeping pills.
He had seen with his own eyes several times how Agnes struggled in her sleep as though she were trapped in nightmares, so he wondered if that was the reason.
“I see. You may leave.”
*Click.*
After lighting the tip of his cigarillo, Lionel slid the Zippo lighter across the table toward the man seated opposite him.
Toward Raul, whose exhaustion was obvious, though his eyes remained as sharp as ever.
“Now then, shall we continue where we left off?”
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