Odette pushed open the door of Duke Tyrot’s study with an openly irritated expression.
“Papa, I’m busy — why do you need me so urgently?”
The study was full. Retainers and the heads of the regional trading companies were seated all around, their faces grave.
Among them, Odette spotted a familiar face and raised an eyebrow.
Simon Blanche looked back at her with his customary barely-concealed pleasure at her attention.
I didn’t know he’d already started working.
Simon had been the kind of card she could use, so she had recommended him to her father’s trading company not long ago.
Quicker than I expected.
She was just considering whether today’s plans to keep Simon to herself might be ruined when the Duke suddenly erupted with a fury that made her jump.
“Do you know nothing of basic propriety? Did no one teach you to knock before entering a room?”
Her father — who had never once raised his voice at her in her life — was shouting at her, in front of all these people. Odette froze on the spot, startled into stillness.
The retainers, who knew well how the Duke doted on his daughter, began carefully maneuvering to soften the tension.
“Ha — the Lady must have been in a hurry.”
“The meeting is concluding anyway, shall we take our leave?”
“Yes, yes — let’s do that.”
They filed out like a receding tide. Simon was the last one through the door, making a series of hand signals Odette couldn’t begin to interpret, winking at her as he went.
But seeing that her father’s mood was genuinely dangerous, she found the gesture more irritating than anything else and turned sharply away.
Once the room was empty, Odette moved swiftly to her father’s side. She deployed her most disarming voice, the one that usually had him softened within three seconds.
She had been planning to spend the day at the dueling grounds and throw money around to her heart’s content, and she absolutely could not afford to lose her allowance over something like this.
“Papa. Did those awful people do something to upset you again? What a shame, making you this cross.”
Normally, this exact tone — warm and wheedling — would have dissolved his anger inside three seconds.
But today was different. The Duke kept his head in his hands and did not turn around.
“Fa… Father?”
Reading the atmosphere at last, Odette dropped the baby voice and straightened.
The Duke exhaled — a long, slow breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep. He showed no signs of opening his mouth easily, and while she waited, Odette let her mind drift to other matters to keep her irritation from showing.
Why has my luck been this foul lately? Maybe I should go have my fortune told.
But fortune tellers always gave her the same dull, flattering nonsense.
Pathetic. Parasites who live off other people’s misfortunes.
She was cycling through her usual internal commentary when the Duke finally lifted his head.
She was startled. The dark, deep-set eyes that had always reminded her vaguely of a badger had sunken further into his face.
“Father — you’ve aged suddenly, or — I mean, has something happened?”
“Something has happened, all right! You! My one and only daughter, Odette Tyrot!”
He bellowed so abruptly that Odette nearly leapt from her chair.
“Father, what on earth is the matter? Are you unwell?!”
Was this about the seamstress somehow? Had she been sending enormous bills to him? She had been buying rather a lot lately, admittedly.
Or was it about the brawl in the salon with the Lenomer Earl’s daughter the other day? But that girl had provoked her first. Going on about how Odette looked like she’d put on weight, and swanning about because Lenomer House had apparently started some magical instrument venture with Kasha Rüschino — she’d only put the girl in her place.
Odette lifted her chin with studied nonchalance and straightened her spine. Her mother had always emphasized good posture.
If you carry yourself like the one in charge, people will treat you that way. So be confident, everywhere, always. You are the treasured only daughter of House Tyrot.
“Don’t you dare lift that chin at me!”
…There were limits, of course, to how far posture could take you.
Odette pressed her lips into a line.
“What exactly have I supposedly done—”
“What have you done? You want to know what you’ve done? The Holy Order came to our trading company today!”
“Why would the Holy Order go to the trading company?”
She looked at him with genuine confusion. The Duke beat his chest.
“Because you coerced our employees into distributing ‘Tali’! You absolute madwoman!”
“…H-how do you know about that.”
The confidence drained from Odette’s face all at once.
Tali. It was a plant that produced calming effects alongside powerful hallucinations — usually dried, crushed, and rolled to be smoked. Extraordinarily addictive, it had spread across the entire continent in the early imperial era, pulling countless people into dependence and death.
A turning point came when the saint Antevein burned down a Tali storehouse in an attempt to rehabilitate addicts, and was publicly condemned for it. From then on, the temples warned addicts severely and forbade its use with strict authority.
It was now explicitly banned by imperial law, the dangers of addiction long since well-established and widely known.
And yet there were certain young nobles — drowning in money and idle time — who drifted toward Tali almost without noticing. Among Odette’s circle of admirers, there were several addicts, and she had been supplying them quietly, using that supply as an effortless means of keeping them under her thumb.
As the daughter of the owner of House Tyrot’s trading company, with branches across the continent, it had been almost laughably easy.
But who had told the temple? Surely not those rat-faced employees at the trading company — the risk of losing their positions alone should have been enough to keep them quiet. She couldn’t understand how anyone had dared.
As though reading her thoughts, the Duke spoke in a tone heavy with dread.
“Do you remember a man named Juan Damir?”
“Juan… Damir?”
Of course she remembered. He had been one of her companions — of a sort — about six months ago. He was the eldest son of the Damir Count family from the small kingdom of Turnain, who had come to study in the empire and wound up spending his time working through every kind of pleasure the capital had to offer, which was how he had come into Odette’s orbit.
She had found it simple enough to charm him — he was pretty-faced and already half-consumed by Tali — and they had spent several months in each other’s company. Until she grew bored, naturally, and cut him off without ceremony.
But Juan, whose addiction had grown far worse during his time with her, found himself without a supplier when she ended things. The withdrawal had been devastating. He spiraled into gambling, destroyed himself financially through underground channels trying to secure more Tali, and finally — she had read it in the newspaper a few weeks ago — took his own life.
She had read that article and congratulated herself on her own foresight in dropping him when she had.
“Why would his name come up now?”
The Duke had paid Juan off when she’d ended things with him — he couldn’t be asking as though he didn’t know they’d been involved.
“Because before he died, he went to the temple — and he named you as his supplier. He had a ledger! Dates. Locations. Every transaction, documented — all the times you gave him Tali, listed out! And he handed them a list of every noble involved as well!”
“What — what?”
Odette shot to her feet, a wave of dizziness washing over her.
That miserable addict… I knew there was something off about his eyes at the end. How dare he.
She wanted desperately to go find Juan and scratch his face off — but inconveniently, he was no longer among the living.
This is going to be complicated.
She turned the situation over rapidly in her mind.
The temple was a closed institution that even the imperial family could not easily interfere with. The Crown Prince had lately been tightening its financial supply lines — but a religious body beloved by every soul in the empire was, in its own right, as formidable as a nation.
Bribing a priest or a holy knight here and there would be easy enough — but the problem was that a formal complaint had already been submitted.
Odette moved quickly to her father’s side and wrapped her arms around him from behind, resting her chin on his shoulder in her most practiced display of childlike remorse.
The threat of losing her allowance concentrated her mind wonderfully.
“Father. I’m sorry. It was my mistake. I won’t do it again — so please, just this once…”
But the Duke shook off her arms and turned on her.
“This is not something to be forgiven! Right now the Holy Order has sent investigators to every one of our regional trading branches to map the distribution network! And the noble families whose children you supplied Tali to — they’re being investigated too!”
“What?”
The scale of it landed on her.
The trading company was one thing — but if noble houses were being swept up in this, it meant the temple had no intention of treating this matter lightly.
Odette rose, her temper flaring.
“What do they want, in the end? It’s always about donations, isn’t it? Just pay them and be done with it!”
“Pay them?! The company director tried exactly that just now and was arrested on the spot by the Deputy Commander of the Holy Order for attempted bribery!”
“Wait. The Deputy Commander of the Holy Order — is that Leon Aranias?”
“Yes! That man is leading this entire investigation! Of all the inflexible, relentless people in the empire to get tangled up with — and to think, what a relief the engagement was broken off, or we’d be facing complete humiliation right now.”
The Duke shuddered as though the thought alone turned his stomach.
Odette, meanwhile, felt the floor tipping beneath her feet.
Leon — why does it have to be him?! He was already impossible to get close to, and now this is going to make it even harder!
Even in the middle of this, she had not given up on Leon. That, perhaps, was entirely Odette.
“And that’s not all. The Arkin Daily is sending reporters to rip through every corner of the trading company. Some kind of feature story about the corruption of noble society — the information must have leaked from the temple or the Holy Order. If that story goes to print — you’re finished. Not just your marriage prospects — you’ll be permanently blacklisted from every social circle in existence!”
The Duke’s anguished cry was starting to sound to her like mosquitoes buzzing somewhere far away.
No. This is impossible. Things like this do not happen to me. Not to me — not to Odette Tyrot.
Odette shook her head vigorously.
The world wouldn’t do this to her. She refused to accept this humiliation.
I’m going to track down every last person behind this and make sure they never see daylight again. Who do they think I am — I’m Odette Tyrot—
“What — Odette! Odette! What’s happening — snap out of it, my darling!”
Her father’s voice reached her from somewhere very far away.
Odette crumpled gracefully — and very badly — onto the floor of her father’s study.
