It was one thing to have built a rapport with the Prince and returned home wearing the Queen’s gift; it was quite another to deal with the aftermath. As I had expected, the residence of Cardinal Del Mare was in absolute chaos, a scene of carnage fueled by Lucrezia’s tantrum.
“De Rossi? De Rossi?! Queen Marguerite must have lost her mind. How could she treat me with such disrespect?!”
—Crash!
A vase thrown by Lucrezia shattered against the parlor wall.
“That filthy Galico woman! How dare she, a foreigner, speak to me like that?”
This time, a letter opener flew through the air, vibrating as it embedded itself into the woodwork of the fireplace. Arabella cowered in the corner, clutching her ears, while Isabella sat nearby, coolly fueling her mother’s rage.
“It’s true, Mother. Does being Queen mean everything? She’s been married for nearly twenty years and still hasn’t corrected her accent! It was shocking how countrified she sounded.”
“It’s no wonder she receives no love from her husband—she doesn’t even try to adapt. She can barely manage to see the King’s face five times a year!”
“What’s the point of a legal marriage? If she’s going to live as an unloved piece of furniture while holding the title of Queen, she’d be better off as a mere concubine.”
“She’s just an incompetent woman. Because she can’t hold a man’s heart herself, she lashes out at those who can, all out of sheer inferiority.”
The vitriol only grew sharper.
“Countess Rubina holds the real power. There’s a rumor that if you want to submit a petition to His Majesty, the fastest way is through her.”
“You’re so much smarter than your mother, Isabella. I don’t even have any ladies of status to socialize with—oh, my wretched fate!”
“Countess Rubina is incredibly capable. People are saying that Count Cesare, her son, is going to be granted land in the borderlands.”
“If a count born to a concubine is older than the prince, then it’s all over. Queen Marguerite couldn’t even keep a grip on the King when she was young; how does she expect to do it now? Alfonso hasn’t even been named Crown Prince! It’s all because his mother is useless.”
“Exactly. She’s just taking her anger out on you because she’s wicked, base, and contemptible!”
*I’ve heard enough of your self-introduction.*
Ariadne had no intention of stepping into that disaster. To enter the parlor now would be to offer herself up as raw meat to a pack of hungry hyenas. There was no doubt that a furious Lucrezia and an opportunistic Isabella would tear her to shreds.
*I should just quietly head to my room.*
To get from the front entrance to the third-floor attic, one had to pass the central staircase, and the first-floor parlor sat directly at its base.
Ariadne decided to hide in the dim hallway and wait for them to lose steam and retreat to their quarters. They weren’t the sort of mother-daughter pair to track when their second daughter returned; they wouldn’t even notice if she arrived late.
“Why hasn’t that girl come home yet?!”
*Ah…*
It seemed they weren’t waiting to check on her, but rather to use her as a target for their frustrations.
As Maletta stepped out of the parlor, having been sent by Lucrezia to check with the butler, she bumped straight into Ariadne, who was huddled in the hallway.
“Ah… Lady Ariadne. You’ve arrived.”
*So inflexible!*
Ariadne glared at Maletta, cursed silently, and took heavy steps toward the parlor, where household items were being decimated in real-time.
—Whoosh!
The moment she entered the parlor, a white porcelain vase whizzed past her face.
—Crash!
Ariadne bowed her head, expressionless. She felt the shards of the shattered vase catch in her hair and graze the hem of her dress.
“I have returned, Mother.”
“Mother? Mother?! You certainly didn’t think of me as a mother when you humiliated me at the Queen’s mass!”
One should never talk back when Lucrezia was in a rage. Yet, Ariadne had been forgetting that lesson since she was a child. Instinctively, she retorted.
“I did nothing of the sort, Mother.”
“If you didn’t speak! You wouldn’t! Be so hateful!”
Lucrezia grabbed a fireplace poker and hurled it at Ariadne. Ariadne barely dodged the spinning iron, snapping her head to the left, but it flew toward the corner where Arabella was huddled, striking the ten-year-old’s leg.
“Aaargh!”
The girl let out a cry like a wounded beast, but no one paid any heed to the unfortunate Arabella. Consumed by fury, Lucrezia didn’t even notice her own child had been struck by her weapon. The room echoed only with the sound of Arabella’s sobbing.
Ariadne frowned, stepped back, crouched down, and pulled Arabella into her arms. It was doubtful whether the frail, stick-like frame of a fifteen-year-old offered much comfort, but Arabella clung to her for dear life, as if grateful for even that.
Human warmth was a comfort to Ariadne as much as it was to Arabella.
But the impending threat was too great to find peace in such things. Lucrezia, standing commandingly over them, leaned her upper body forward, her eyes rolling with malice.
“You! You wore that chemise on purpose, didn’t you?”
*For being an idiot, her intuition is terrifying.*
Though she possessed no evidence, Ariadne was impressed that Lucrezia had hit the nail on the head. She shook her head gently and demurely.
“How could that be? Absolutely not, Mother.”
Ariadne bowed her head deeper, feigning innocence while simultaneously stiffening her posture in defiance.
Except for the chemise Queen Marguerite had sent, everything Ariadne was wearing—her dress, her ornaments—was the cheap junk Lucrezia had provided.
“That was truly all the clothing I possessed.”
It was a blatant lie.
Immediately after the words left her lips, Ariadne felt a sharp, throbbing pain in the last joint of her left ring finger. It was the finger restored by her regression, the one that had once rotted away from the disease she had contracted in Cesare’s place.
Lucrezia’s eyes darted around the room, wild and frantic.
“Who is the girl responsible for this child’s wardrobe? Which bitch has been stealing from me?”
The maids in the room turned their heads in unison, desperate to avoid Lucrezia’s gaze.
However, Maletta’s demeanor was strange. She kept glancing around, fiddling with her fingers as if debating a choice.
Ariadne held her breath. An aura of impending chaos radiated from the maid.
*I should have silenced her beforehand…!*
Threats? Bribery? The Maletta she had known her entire previous life was the type of person who would risk everything for a petty gain.
She shouldn’t have given the chemise to Sancha. If she was going to give it away, she should have at least hinted to Maletta about potential future rewards. Her planning had been too shallow.
*Please, please, let this pass smoothly…!*
Whether or not she sensed Ariadne’s nervous, desperate gaze, Maletta lowered her head. After three seconds of hesitation, she pointed a finger toward Sancha, who was standing nearby.
“It’s her! It’s her!”
The lifeless green eyes of Sancha, the freckled girl, widened to the size of saucers.
“She’s the one who manages Lady Ariadne’s clothes!”
Lucrezia’s high cheekbones tightened in a nervous twitch. Ariadne let out an instinctive sigh of relief that she herself had escaped, while Sancha, terrified, involuntarily stepped backward.
“You must have stolen that bitch’s undergarment.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t, my lady.”
Ignoring Sancha, who waved her hands in frantic denial, Lucrezia gritted her teeth and turned to Maletta.
“If she stole it because she coveted the expensive chemise that young lady wears, it must be hidden among her things. Maletta, go and search them!”
“Yes, my lady!”
Maletta accepted the order with wicked delight. As Lucrezia watched her scurry toward the third-floor maids’ quarters, she growled, looming over the trembling Sancha.
“If that bitch’s chemise turns up in your luggage, start praying.”
Ariadne wrestled with the urge to speak the truth, even now.
Whatever had been churning in Maletta’s small mind, at least Ariadne was currently cleared of the charge of having intentionally framed Lucrezia. But it was Ariadne who had suggested swapping the chemises, and Sancha was about to be butchered for a crime she had not committed. Even if the maid pleaded her innocence, Lucrezia would never believe her. After all, the chemise would be exactly where they claimed: in Sancha’s belongings.
Once a suspicion takes root, evidence only serves to make it unshakable. If things continued this way, Sancha was destined to be Lucrezia’s scapegoat.
Yet, Ariadne could not summon the courage to step in front of Lucrezia, who was raging like a cornered beast. Even after nine years of commanding high society, the sound of Lucrezia’s growling invoked a childhood terror etched deep into her bones.
The sight of her mother being whipped by Lucrezia. The memory of Lucrezia kicking her mother, who had hidden young Ariadne behind her back, before grabbing the girl by her hair. The memory of Lucrezia’s eldest son, Ippolito, insolently patting her mother’s buttocks as he walked past, while her mother dared not voice a single protest.
And the deepest, most agonizing guilt of all: the day the rain poured in sheets and she had knelt before her mother’s wooden coffin, only to run away and hide. She had abandoned the makeshift funeral parlor in the shed, terrified that Lucrezia might be passing by.
*Sob, sob, sob.*
Sancha’s hunched back trembled violently, her muffled weeping leaking out. She didn’t even dare close her eyes; she wept with them wide open, shedding large, bead-like tears, struggling to stifle the sound.
Watching Sancha’s pitiful frame, Ariadne felt her heart tearing between terror and the prick of her conscience.
She felt such pity for Sancha that she wanted to ignore the fear, but whenever she tried to find her voice and step forward, her throat seized shut.
The guilt of that day, when she had abandoned her mother’s coffin and fled to the stables to tremble alone, slashed through her chest. But even so, every second she stood frozen like an icicle, doing nothing, was becoming utterly unbearable.
*Throb!*
Her left ring finger burned as if scorched by fire. Hot blood, as if forming a new ring, writhed beneath her skin, expanding its reach.
‘…It hurts!’
She heard a voice—a hallucination, or something else. It sounded human, yet carried a resonance not of this world.
*The Golden Rule.*
The divine whisper drilled straight into her mind, its meaning so absolute that it transcended the nature of sound itself.
*Treat your neighbor as you would wish to be treated. You resented and grieved over the betrayals you suffered. Have you truly never betrayed another for your own gain?*
It sounded like a whisper, yet carried the weight of a stern rebuke.
While the air in the drawing room hung heavy with suffering, Maletta returned like a streak of lightning from the maids’ quarters.
She marched in triumphantly, pulling a clean chemise from a tattered cloth sack and presenting it to Lucrezia De Rossi with a flourish.
“It is hers, my lady. This was found among her belongings.”
With the expression of a devil risen from the depths, Lucrezia snatched the chemise, waved it in the air like a flag of conquest, and flung it directly onto the face of Sancha, who remained kneeling on the floor.
“Do you still have anything to say for yourself, you thieving, rat-like bitch?”
Sancha kept her mouth tightly shut, her hands clenched and trembling in the silence.
Consumed by rage, Lucrezia began to grab whatever object was within reach, hurling them at Sancha. The first to fly through the air was a paperweight; the second was an ink bottle.
*Whoosh!*
*Thud.*
The blue ink bottle struck Sancha square on the forehead. The glass shattered, and the ink sprayed outward, splattering the drawing room with jagged blue stains.
Drenched in the dark pigment, Sancha was a grotesque sight—her hair matted, her face blue, and her eyes wide with the green, glassy sheen of injustice and sheer terror.
Lucrezia did not stop there. She seized an ivory pen holder from the desk and began to strike Sancha, raining down blows wherever her hand landed.
*Thwack.*
Sancha did not let out a single groan, though she could not hide the way her entire body shuddered with every impact.
Each time the pen met Sancha’s flesh, Ariadne’s own body jolted in sympathy. And every time Ariadne looked at the battered woman, the scent of blood from her own left ring finger burned and seared, sharp and metallic. The red energy swirling within her was undeniably growing.
*He who benefits from the suffering of the righteous shall pay the price. That is the curse of The Golden Rule.*
Ariadne could not tell if the agony she felt was purely a reaction to the red energy, or if Sancha’s beating felt like her own blood being spilled.
The moment Lucrezia’s right arm, the ivory pen poised high in the air, descended for another strike, Ariadne could no longer hold it in. She screamed.
“Stop!!”