Hyderlin yanked the knife free in a single motion.
Leone’s lips moved as though he had something to say. But what poured from his mouth was only blood.
Naturally. He had a hole in his throat.
The back-alley criminal’s knees buckled after a long moment of working his mouth like a fish. He folded forward and hit the floor. Blood spilled from the half-severed windpipe and soaked darkly into the carpet.
Hyderlin, breathing in ragged pulls, let out a low sound.
“Well. This is a mess.”
She regarded what had been Leone Collozzo not with the panic common to people who had committed accidental murder, but with the weary exasperation of a cook confronted with a mountainous pile of dishes. Killing a dinner companion was inconvenient, yes. But it wasn’t beyond managing. A bit of trouble, a bit of tedium—and it could be concealed completely.
Murder and its aftermath were her trade.
She caught her reflection in a silver spoon. Clean—not a speck of blood. Her sleeve had caught some splatter, but the fabric was dark enough that it barely showed.
She straightened her clothes, then reached beneath the table to collect her sword. The one she had received, on some long-ago birthday, from her “father.”
Hyderlin kicked the door open and stepped out.
In the corridor outside the dining room stood a man who looked like her. Hyderlin called to him quietly.
“Uncle.”
The man turned. His face was rigid. With tension, perhaps.
She was tense herself. The heart she had managed to calm down was thundering again.
In the heavy silence, Hyderlin looked at the man’s blazing red hair and his dark, raptor-keen eyes. She had seen them her whole life—in the mirror.
She spoke in a voice that fractured slightly at the edges.
“Father.”
The man did not deny it. He only looked at her, his face visibly shaken.
Hyderlin—who had not quite managed to let go of the possibility that Leone Collozzo had lied—felt something inside her go desolate.
The man said:
“…Did Collozzo tell you everything?”
Hyderlin nodded.
“He broke his promise. He said he wouldn’t tell you.”
The man’s voice was trembling faintly. As though it had been soaked through.
“…I’m sorry, Your Highness. I am sorry. I have no excuse. I should never have appeared before you. I knew—I have always known—that burying you and Marcela in my heart and leaving you both in peace was what was best for the two of you.”
“……”
“But I wanted—just once—to see you. Marcela’s child.”
The man’s face and shoulders and body were weighted with a tenderness that had no place to go.
Hyderlin did not want to receive that tenderness. She had no interest in whatever tragedy the man had lived through. The single thing she wanted was for him to be erased from her life permanently.
She cut him off before he could say anything more.
“Who else knows about the nature of our relationship? Anyone besides Leone?”
“…No one. Only him, myself, and Your Highness.”
Good.
“Leone Collozzo says the three of us have something to discuss.”
Hyderlin held the door open. The gesture was clear—go ahead. The man stepped into the dining room.
Something strange hit his nose the moment he crossed the threshold. He had lived a rough life, and his instincts were sharper than most. Inside his head, every warning signal he possessed was flying at full mast.
But he could not turn back. He could only press down the alarms his body was screaming at him and walk forward.
At last he saw what the dining table had blocked from view at the entrance.
The corpse of what had been Leone Collozzo lay crumpled on the floor.
Behind him, the door clicked shut. The man wheeled around, his hand flying to the dagger at his hip.
But what person in the world has ever managed to dodge lightning falling directly on their head?
Hyderlin struck him the way a natural disaster strikes—without warning or mercy.
The blade, sinuous as a wicked serpent, drove through the man’s lung like a thunderbolt. He went down with a sound like blood boiling in his throat.
“Why… why would you—”
Hyderlin paid no attention to the wretched sound of his voice. She pulled the sword free in one sharp motion. The watered-steel blade she had polished with such care every night was fouled with blood now—a dark, spreading stain across the pattern.
She crouched, seized the man by the hair, and drove his face into the floor.
Once. Again. Again. Again.
She did not stop until no one could have recognized those features anymore. It was a methodical, exhaustive violence—meticulous in its thoroughness.
At some point the man’s face had passed the point of recognition. But the blazing red of his hair remained unchanged.
The exact same color as her own.
She could not bear it.
She released him and let his head fall. She felt along the table until her hand found the silver knife. She grabbed a fistful of her own hair and cut it off.
The severed locks fell like flames—or like blood—and came to rest softly over the dead man’s body.
She had been shaking at some point without noticing when it had started.
The fatigue she had shown after killing Leone Collozzo, the cold composure she had maintained while crushing the face of her biological father—both had vanished. She was shaking like a person terrified to the bone. She was gasping for breath. Like someone in the final stages of drowning.
And in that moment, Hyderlin understood something.
She could not bear herself.
The blazing red curls, the dark raptor eyes, the hollow cheeks—she could not bear any of it.
This breath, this heartbeat, this blood in these veins—everything that dirty man and that woman had given her—she could not bear a single part of it.
Not her hair, but her head—she wanted to cut that off. She wanted to pull all the blood from her body and pour it out.
She wanted to scream at the world: this blood is not mine, I have never for a single moment wanted it to be mine, I am the King’s daughter and the King’s sister—
But to do so was the same as confessing the stain she was born with.
Hyderlin ground her teeth and shook. Her face crumpled—helplessly, completely.
Something transparent fell, one drop and then another, into the blood and red hair pooled on the floor.
Its name was despair.
Skalts Petaora was the direct subordinate of Hyderlin Pharamasa san Lotsa-Biche, Captain of the Royal Guard.
Hyderlin sometimes brought him along in a personal capacity, and today—the night of her dinner with Leone Collozzo—was no exception. Skalts had been waiting in the estate’s reception room.
Something seemed to be causing a commotion outside. He could hear someone shouting about a fire.
He was still debating whether to go and look when the reception room door burst open and Hyderlin walked in.
Her red curls—which had fallen to her shoulder blades the last time he had seen her—were cut short, barely reaching her ears.
“I’ve dealt with Leone Collozzo and one of the household staff. The bodies are in the dining room. I set it alight.”
You—what? The words surged up to Skalts’s throat and stopped there. You killed Leone Collozzo? The Leone Collozzo you were on such good terms with?
“Before we leave, find a suitable servant and pin the arson on them.”
Skalts buried his horror somewhere deep and managed to answer evenly.
“Understood.”
Everything proceeded as she had instructed. Skalts Petaora selected a servant from the Collozzo household—one who had harbored poor feelings toward his master—and executed him on the spot.
“Shameless wretch! Killing the hand that fed you! This is the man—the one who murdered Leone Collozzo and then set the blaze to hide his crime!”
Most of the staff clearly didn’t believe it. But they nodded, having no choice.
In the carriage back to the palace, Hyderlin sat across from Skalts, watching the Collozzo estate recede into the distance. She spoke with perfect calm.
“They didn’t believe it, did they.”
Skalts gave a heavy nod. Hyderlin let out a thin smile.
“Well, you’d have to be an idiot to believe something like that. Anyone with half a brain is going to suspect me. They won’t act—not immediately—but they’ll be a problem before long. Better to root it out before it has the chance to grow.”
“Give the order and it will be done.”
Hyderlin was quiet for a moment.
There would be many people in that estate who had seen the man’s face. If she had her way, she would start dismantling the Collozzo household that very night. But she was short-handed—even she couldn’t manage that many people with only Skalts at her side. It would have to be done with patience. Thoroughly. Only then could she go on living comfortably as Hyderlin Biche, Captain of the Royal Guard.
“Starting tomorrow, there will be a thorough purge. Everyone in the Collozzo household—all of them. After that, find a way to dismantle what remains of Leone Collozzo’s network piece by piece. Whatever assets he left behind will be seized and returned to the royal coffers.”
“Understood.”
Hyderlin crossed her arms with satisfaction and closed her eyes.
She had been the King’s Captain and the King’s sister all her life.
She had been, and she would remain so.
Her little brother had been suffering through a broken heart lately. It was a sister’s duty to free her brother from suffering.
My King. My brother. Handmaid’s son or not—you are a king. What kind of king cannot have what he wants? No matter what it takes, I will put Margarite in your arms.
With her eyes still closed, Hyderlin spoke calmly.
“Arrange a meeting with the Archbishop. Send word.”
