Chapter 105
What did it feel like to be begged by the person whose life you had destroyed?
Even at a moment like this, Agnes could not even scream.
She merely clutched tightly at his collar.
Lionel did not know what he could possibly say to her.
Applying ointment over wounds that could never be undone was nothing more than hypocrisy.
No matter what he said.
No matter what he did.
Everything felt like nothing but pretense.
A nauseating sensation crawled over him, as though insects were creeping all over his body.
He was no longer certain whether someone like him even had the right to hold Agnes in his arms.
Still, even allowing himself to be shocked was a luxury.
Agnes’s well-being came before emotions as insignificant as his own.
Agnes seemed to have exhausted every last bit of her strength.
She did not move at all.
Lionel carefully wrapped Agnes’s limp body in a towel.
Perhaps because she had been exposed to cold water for so long, her small body was unbearably cold.
Her temperature did not even feel like that of a living person.
Without realizing it, Lionel brought his ear close to Agnes’s face.
Only after hearing her faint breathing did Lionel finally release the breath he had been holding.
Then he filled the bathtub with warm water and slowly lowered Agnes into it.
His touch was so careful that it resembled handling a piece of fragile glass.
Afterward, Lionel examined Agnes’s hand.
The cuts left by the broken mirror shard were unmistakable.
“…”
The thought that another scar had been added to her pale skin because of him was unbearably painful.
“Your Grace, may I come in for a moment and examine her?”
It was then that the elderly physician’s cautious voice entered the bathroom.
Instead of answering, Lionel simply nodded.
After examining Agnes’s injuries, the elderly physician took a slow breath before speaking as gently as possible.
“The wounds are not deep.”
“If you apply ointment consistently, they will not leave scars.”
He was trying to reassure Lionel.
Yet not a single word brought him any comfort.
Rather, hearing that the wounds would not leave scars only made him think even more clearly of the other scars that already remained on Agnes’s body.
“Rather than Lady Agnes, it is actually Your Grace’s hand—”
The elderly physician could not finish his sentence.
Lionel’s gaze was far too frightening.
In the end, instead of treating Lionel, the elderly physician soaked gauze with medicine to treat Agnes’s hand.
“I’ll do it.”
Taking the gauze from the elderly physician, Lionel personally began cleaning the wounds on Agnes’s hand.
Every movement overlapped with memories from the past.
Right here in this very bathroom.
At this very spot.
The memory of Agnes cleaning the wound on his shoulder.
And the night they had kissed and shared each other’s breath.
The blissful yet dizzying moment when he had acknowledged the desire within himself for the first time and buried himself in Agnes’s embrace.
Lionel painfully realized that all of it had now become a past to which he could never return.
After finishing cleaning Agnes’s hand, he collapsed weakly onto the floor beside the bathtub.
Watching Lionel carefully, the elderly physician silently continued the treatment.
Only the sound of water droplets falling remained inside the bathroom.
Lionel kept his head lowered for a long time without moving.
His pale blue eyes, which had been resting on Agnes’s palm, slowly shifted toward his own hand.
A hand torn apart and soaked in blood.
The hand that had embraced Agnes was also the very hand that had destroyed her.
The truth became painfully clear once again.
Lionel drew in a deep breath.
With every inhale and exhale, his sanity wore away a little more.
Lionel lowered his mangled hand into the water.
The warmth of the water felt like a scorching burn.
Blood flowed from his hand into the bath.
The water gradually turned red.
When his trembling thumb touched Agnes’s leg, he could clearly feel the texture of the scars stretching from her calf to her ankle.
The uneven scars.
The skin that was no longer smooth.
The farther his hand traced those scars, the rougher Lionel’s breathing became.
How much pain must she have endured?
How terrified must she have been?
He could not even imagine how cruel his voice over the radio must have sounded to Agnes.
And after all that…
He had accused the Agnes he met again of living in a fairy tale.
He had deliberately played the piano in front of the woman who had lost her ability to dance.
Even that had not been enough.
In the end, out of sheer selfishness, he had forced Agnes to remain by his side.
The very woman who must have remembered her ruined legs every time she looked at him.
Lionel shuddered.
He felt like a monster.
His gaze fell upon the broken mirror fragments scattered across the floor.
His own reflection, dressed in military uniform, was reflected countless times across the shattered glass.
One of those countless fragments clearly reflected the medal pinned to the chest of his black uniform.
“…What is any of this even worth?”
Grinding his teeth, Lionel violently tore the medal and the epaulets from his shoulders.
Rip.
The sound of threads snapping filled the bathroom.
The honors he had desperately accumulated while walking the line between life and death fell to the floor like worthless trash.
His jacket came undone.
Blood stained it.
His military uniform was soon a complete mess.
But even that was not enough.
Lionel picked up one of the broken mirror fragments from the floor.
It should have been he—not Agnes—who lost everything.
That thought completely consumed his mind.
It was not a rational decision.
His body simply moved because he found himself so revolting and unbearable that he could no longer endure it.
He wanted to destroy the hand that had pressed the radio’s transmit button.
The hand that had mockingly pressed the piano keys before Agnes.
Lionel raised the shard and drove it down toward his right hand.
“Your Grace!”
The elderly physician, who had been tending to Agnes’s hand, let out a scream.
Simon and Kalt also rushed forward with deathly pale faces.
Simon seized Lionel’s left hand that was holding the mirror shard.
Kalt wrapped both arms around him from behind.
But Lionel’s strength was abnormally great.
Again and again, he tried to bring his hand down.
The two of them staggered as they barely managed to stop him.
“Let go!”
Lionel roared like a wild beast.
“I said let go!”
“I… This hand…!”
A scream so fierce that it seemed ready to tear apart his throat burst from his blood-soaked lips.
“It destroyed Agnes.”
“I did…!”
That cry echoed tragically throughout the bathroom.
Seeing their master lose all reason and collapse before their eyes, the servants covered their mouths and could barely even breathe.
Yet in the middle of it all, Agnes alone remained as though she belonged to another world.
Without even the slightest movement.
Simply immersed in the warm water.
Her eyes remained closed.
Peacefully.
☆☆☆
“Your Grace, please calm down!”
Simon’s voice, shouting as he chased after him, never reached Lionel’s ears.
Having completely lost his reason, Lionel left the bathroom and headed straight toward the dressing room.
The moment he threw open the door, rows of neatly hung military uniforms came into view.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lionel yanked them down.
Snap!
With the sound of hangers breaking, the uniforms crashed onto the floor.
Once, he had believed they were the only lifeline capable of restoring his family.
He had believed they were the very purpose of his life.
But now…
Every single one of them disgusted him beyond measure.
Then his eyes fell upon the radio sitting on a shelf.
Lionel strode over and picked it up.
Without the slightest hesitation, he smashed it against the floor.
Bang!
The radio shattered into countless pieces.
Its internal components burst out and scattered chaotically across the floor.
Lionel’s chest rose and fell unevenly as he stared at the wreckage.
The truth carved itself into his mind with painful clarity.
The beginning of this entire tragedy had been a single sentence that came from beyond that radio.
His own words.
Lionel grabbed his throat.
Then he dug his fingernails into it and dragged them down.
The sensation of suffocation rose within him.
But he did not stop.
If he did not do at least this much, he felt he would lose his mind.
It would have been better if he had been mute.
No.
Even that would not have been enough.
Someone like him should never have stepped into Agnes’s life from the very beginning.
He should never have admired the girl who danced so freely and shone so brilliantly.
He should never have developed such clumsy feelings because of her kindness.
Agnes had merely been too upright and too strong to ignore a foolish noble consumed by arrogance.
If there had been one and only one stain upon her noble and beautiful life…
It was Lionel himself.
And yet…
What had he ever hoped for?
That he could keep both his revenge and Agnes?
“After ruining someone else’s life to this extent…”
His low murmur disappeared into the empty air.
“…Someone like me?”
Who exactly was taking revenge upon whom?
Lionel let out a hollow laugh.
The laugh ended almost immediately, breaking off like a suffocated breath.
He was someone who should never have existed in Agnes’s life.
From the very beginning.
And forevermore.
☆▪︎▪︎▪︎☆
