IWAPUF 22

“It was agonizing, you know, narrowing it down when every single one seemed to suit you
perfectly, miss,” Marie said. “I never imagined I’d feel so frustrated by the fact that I only have
two hands.”
“Were there only dresses?” I asked.
“Yes, the room I went into had nothing but dresses,” she replied. “Is there something else you
need?”
“No,” I said curtly.
*Is Evan Li really preparing for the launch of Luisha?* The thought flickered through my mind.
The emergence of Luisha wasn’t exactly a problem. On the contrary, it could mean the Pison
Trading Company growing even larger—an outcome that would benefit me, if anything, and
certainly not harm me. And yet, why did this nagging sense of unease persist?
*It’s as if I’m missing something.*
Back then, I had squandered sums so astronomical they rivaled the national budget, all to feed my
insatiable vanity. Naturally, dipping into the state treasury was out of the question. Instead, I
reveled in luxury, drawing from the annual stipends allocated to my palace and the wealth tied to
my personal estates. The inheritance I’d received from the Marchioness and my grandfather was
considerable, but it must have been laughably insufficient to sustain my extravagance. Even so, I
never once felt the pinch—not until I was confined. My fortune seemed like a bottomless well, an
endless fount that never ran dry.
Spending was my sole obsession; managing it was a skill I utterly lacked. I’d handed over the
reins of my finances to Nanny without a second thought. How she kept it all afloat, I hadn’t the
faintest idea. And now, it wasn’t as if I could simply ask her. For the time being, there was no way
to unravel this murky discomfort gnawing at me.
“It’d have been nice to have one more hair tie,” Marie murmured, a hint of regret in her voice.
Today, I’d chosen a light green dress, and to complement it, I wore a matching green hair tie that
held my hair in a half-up style. My curls, inherited from the Marchioness, tumbled in natural
waves, as though they’d been artfully permed.
Marie unpinned my hair and let it fall, then gathered it into a loose braid that draped over one
shoulder. She wove the light green hair tie into the braid, its delicate hue peeking through the
strands. With deft fingers, she tamed the stray wisps, arranging them into a look that felt effortless
yet refined. When she stepped back, a pleased smile curved her lips, as if she were admiring a
masterpiece of her own making.
*Knock knock.*
The sound came just as I finished preparing, as though someone had been waiting for the precise
moment. I gave Marie a slight nod. She tidied the remaining dresses to one side and opened the
drawing room door. There, framed in the doorway, stood Evan Li and a small child named Lai.
Both had apparently changed in the interim; their neat appearances belied whatever chaos had
preceded this moment. Lai clung timidly to the hem of Evan’s trousers, her hesitation palpable.
Marie stepped aside to let them enter. Evan nudged the child’s back gently, guiding her into the
room.
“I offer my apologies once more, Lady Eliont,” he said, bowing deeply toward me. Lai, after
darting nervous glances around, mimicked him, dipping her head in a small bow.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“…” I said nothing, leaning back into the sofa as I regarded them both. The ruined dress didn’t
truly anger me. It was an inconvenience, an irritation at most—hardly an offense beyond
forgiveness.
Letting it go would be simple enough. But the child’s recklessness gnawed at me; such
carelessness could, in time, cast a shadow over the Pison Trading Company.
Perhaps I was leaping to conclusions. The Pison Trading Company wasn’t so fragile as to crumble
under the weight of one child’s mistake. Yet I couldn’t unsee it: Evan’s face as he’d rushed toward
her, etched with raw worry.
That the head of the trading company would arrive in such a flustered state over a single child was
a problem waiting to happen. It wasn’t that his concern for her was misplaced. But Evan Li bore
the full responsibility of running the company—his shoulders carried too much for him to let
personal matters sway him so easily.
*Does that child mean so much to him?*
I studied Lai carefully. Her head remained bowed, revealing nothing but the fine sheen of her hair.
My brow furrowed as I took it in. Of all colors, it had to be sky blue. Even now, that shade
unsettled me. Worse still, it was the exact same hue as *hers*.
I tried to recall the color of Lai’s eyes, but I’d never looked at her closely enough to remember.
“Is your name Lai?” I asked.
“…Yes,” she replied, her voice small, her head still lowered. Her trembling frame suggested fear,
perhaps resentment—maybe both.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?”
“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered.
She bowed even deeper, so low that, with a touch of exaggeration, her hair nearly brushed the
floor. I spoke slowly, deliberately. “What should I do with you?”
Her body flinched. I shifted my gaze to Evan. He’d straightened by now, standing tall and looking
down at me.
“It’s tiresome to crane my neck,” I remarked.
Evan glanced at Lai, who still hadn’t lifted her head. With a quiet sigh, he settled onto the sofa
across from me.
“What would you have me do with her?” I asked.
“I beg your leniency,” he said.
“Is that all you have to say?”
He fell silent. His gray-blue eyes locked onto mine, steady and unyielding. His lids, free of any
crease, blinked slowly—once down, once up.
“What is it you want?” he asked.
A smirk tugged at my lips. His response—so straightforward, so pliant—stirred a flicker of anger
in me. To save one child, the head of the trading company was asking *me* what I desired. Was
this really the man my grandfather had entrusted with the Pison Trading Company?
“Shall I kill her?” I said.
“My lady!” Evan’s voice cracked with alarm.
*Thud.*
With his cry came the sound of something collapsing. I looked down to see Lai crumpled on the
floor, trembling violently, her face a mess of tears and terror.
“Even if I killed you right here,” I said, “no one could stop me. Not even the man you’re counting
on.”
I rose from the sofa and approached her. Fear pulsed in her orange eyes—a shade both like and
unlike *her* amber ones.
“That’s the gravity of the mistake you’ve made.”
I knelt, bringing myself to her level, meeting her gaze. Those orange eyes, quivering with dread,
struck me as odd. I leaned closer to see them more clearly.
I hadn’t been mistaken. Her pupils were vertical slits, like a cat’s.
“My lady!” Evan’s voice rang out again.
A rough hand seized my shoulder. Evan Li’s face, as he pulled me to my feet, was tinged with
bewilderment. I glanced back and forth between Evan and the child, my eyes tracing the tense air
between them.
“…It seems there is much to discuss,” Evan murmured, raising a hand to his forehead as if to
steady himself.
“I-I’m sorry! It’s all my fault. The leader has done nothing wrong. Please!” The child’s small
hands clutched desperately at the hem of my skirt, her body trembling violently. “I-I’ll die instead.
Please…” Tears streamed down her face as she clung to me, her sobs breaking the silence.
I knelt down once more, bringing my gaze level with hers. Her pupils remained vertically slit, like
a cat’s, a stark and unshakable detail.
I reached out toward her, my hand brushing against her hair. Her sky-blue locks slipped softly
through my fingers, delicate and familiar. It was the same sky-blue as *hers*. Sky-blue hair wasn’t
especially rare—not entirely unheard of, at least. Though uncommon, it appeared now and then
among those hailing from the western regions.
*Is this a coincidence? Or something orchestrated?* The question gnawed at me. What I knew for
certain was that neither back then nor now did I have much grasp of the events unfolding around
me. That ignorance grated on my nerves.
“You know who you are, don’t you?” I said, my voice steady but pointed. Shock flashed across the
child’s face, her cat-like pupils contracting even tighter. There was no mistaking it—her eyes bore
the distinct mark of the Inayari, the tribal nation of the west.
Inayari lay to the empire’s west, a reclusive tribal nation shrouded in mystery. Nestled in the desert,
they guarded their way of life and customs so fiercely that outsiders knew almost nothing of them.
The empire, along with many other nations, treated Inayari as a taboo. They were deemed barbaric,
their unique physical traits setting them apart in ways that unsettled others. Humanity has always
had two responses to the extraordinary: veneration or rejection. For Inayari, it was the latter.
In truth, Inayari wasn’t regarded as a mere nation but as a race entirely distinct from humankind.
Their dark skin and cat-like pupils defined them. That skin wasn’t deeply tanned so much as it
carried a yellowish hue, reminiscent of Easterners—a tone that stood out sharply in a land where
pale complexions reigned. Their most striking feature, though, was those pupils. Under normal
circumstances, their eyes blended in with everyone else’s, but in moments of excitement or
emotional upheaval, those pupils narrowed into vertical slits, like a cat’s. That, above all, was why
people shunned them.
The child’s skin, however, wasn’t so different from mine. She wasn’t a pure Inayari, then.
Mixed-blood Inayari faced even harsher scorn than their full-blooded kin, branded as impure and
reviled all the more for it.
“Do you realize?” I pressed, my tone firm. “With a single careless act, you’ve endangered not just
yourself, but that man and the entire trading company.”
“P-please…” Her voice quivered, her chin trembling as she pleaded.
It wasn’t that I felt no pity for her. If she’d been an ordinary child, a light reprimand might have
been enough. But she wasn’t ordinary. The blood of the tabooed Inayari coursed through her veins.
Without those telltale pupils, I might not have pushed this far. Yet I felt it—a pressing need to sear
this lesson into her, to etch it deep enough to spark fear.
If rumors spread that the head of the trading company harbored an Inayari child—mixed-blood or
not—the Pison Trading Company could teeter on the brink of ruin. Its size made it a target;
enemies and opportunists alike watched eagerly for any misstep. I didn’t know why Evan Li had
taken this child in, but the moment this truth surfaced, they’d seize it like vultures, clawing at him
to drag him down. The company’s collapse would be all but inevitable.
Keeping an Inayari child was a perilous gamble. It handed Evan’s foes countless ways to ensnare
him. In the worst case, her very presence might be twisted into proof of collusion with Inayari
itself.
Yet for all their warlike nature, the Inayari held a fierce loyalty to their kin. They didn’t cast out
their children, even those of mixed blood. Their protectiveness over the young was especially
renowned. That this child was here, so far from their sands, was strange—unsettlingly so.
“If you don’t want to bring danger to those around you, stay vigilant,” I told her, my voice low and
insistent. “A single moment of weakness could jeopardize not just you, but everything and
everyone near you.”
She couldn’t respond, her words choked by gasping sobs as tears spilled freely.
“Do you feel wronged?” I asked, a faint edge to my tone. “Do you resent me for making such a
fuss over a mere dress?” I tapped her sky-blue hair lightly, almost absently.
Even with Inayari blood in her veins, she was still just a child—innocent in her ignorance. She’d
made a mistake, no doubt. In this rigid, status-bound society, if she weren’t a mixed-blood Inayari,
a simple apology and repayment for the dress might have settled it—a trifling error, nothing more.
She didn’t argue; she seemed to grasp her predicament too well for that. But she wasn’t yet old
enough to swallow her indignation entirely. Her cries grew more anguished, raw with the sting of
it all.
“If you feel wronged, if you resent this, then grow strong,” I said, my words cutting through her
sobs. “Strong enough that no one dares touch you, even knowing who you are—not even a
fingertip. If you can’t manage that, then live your life on edge, silent as a shadow, still as a mouse.
That’s the only way to stretch out your days and keep those around you safe.”
I let go of her hair and rose to my feet. Evan watched me, his expression clouded with unease.
I gestured toward Marie, who stood rigid nearby. Her face betrayed confusion, but she approached
without a word—a testament, no doubt, to the butler’s thorough training.
“Take the child out,” I instructed.
“Yes, my lady,” Marie replied, gently lifting the girl to her feet. The child, her face vacant with
shock, let herself be led away by Marie’s guiding hand.
I settled back onto the sofa as the door clicked shut behind them. Evan remained standing, his
features taut and unyielding.
“Let’s hear your explanation first,” I said coolly. “I’ll deal with your rudeness afterward.”
Evan glanced down at his hand, a flicker of realization crossing his face. Only now, it seemed, did
he register his error. No matter how frantic the moment, grabbing my arm without permission had
been a grievous breach of decorum.
He stepped toward the sofa across from me. “First, I sincerely apologize for my rudeness, Lady
Eliont,” he said, dipping his head in a bow.
I gazed up at him, my expression impassive. Evan straightened, then eased himself onto the sofa
with deliberate care. He hesitated, clearly wrestling with where to begin. I waited in silence,
giving him the space to find his words.
“Honestly, I don’t know where or how to start,” he confessed at last.
“Not words befitting the head of a trading company,” I remarked dryly.
A merchant ought to wield words like a weapon, charming and disarming in equal measure. Evan,
in that regard, hardly fit the mold.
“Yes, I’m more knight than merchant,” he admitted, a bitter smile tugging at his lips. “The Count
used to say as much.”
I couldn’t help but frown. So my grandfather had known Evan’s nature—his blunt, unpolished
edges—and still placed him at the helm of the trading company.