Tears mixed with blood flowed endlessly like rain beneath her ruined dress.

Just like Rael resents you, you resent her too, right?

Her throat was too choked up to say anything.

Maidos was the beginning of the crumpled last 3 years. He was a fragment of memory she wanted to keep buried in her heart and never unearth again.

It was a past she wanted to hide out of shame, and the driving force that made her resent herself.

“How is it here? Are you living well, spreading your legs for the prince? Or are you still acting proud and making people angry?”

Maidos tried to grab Melissa’s face while mocking her. The past she tried to forget, the unhappiness, was drawing closer. Fear swallowed her whole and pressed down on her entire body so she couldn’t move an inch.

It was at that moment when darkness filled her vision.

Reizen slowly raised his gaze as the quiet reception room door opened.

There wasn’t even a hint of wavering in his cool blue eyes. The red blood splattered on his face made the atmosphere even more precarious.

“Count Maidos.”

And when the man opened his mouth, Melissa’s unhappiness closed its eyes as if it was a lie.

“You arrived right on time.”

Reizen lifted his lips leisurely.

“Something came up and I’ll need some time. I’ll have you guided to another reception room to wait there.”

Maidos nodded his head as if greeting in response to Reizen’s words.

“Of course, Your Highness.”

Though they exchanged words kindly, the looks they exchanged were nothing short of murderous.

“Then excuse me for now.”

After the brief exchange, Reizen suddenly scooped Melissa up in his arms. Rather than being startled by the sudden touch, Melissa held her breath in surprise at the prince’s action.

She quickly wiped her tears and looked up at the man after gulping down her saliva. Reizen looked down at her with an unbothered expression.

“This, will dirty Your Highness’s clothes too.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You must be heavy…”

“You need to gain more weight before I can even joke about you being heavy.”

Now his words no longer sounded scary to her. They sounded like he meant she should rest comfortably in his arms since she was light.

Her legs had almost given out anyway. Though she thought about refusing since being carried by him felt uncomfortable, her desire to quickly leave that place came first.

Melissa held tightly onto Reizen’s neck while climbing the stairs. Her eyes met with Maidos who was moving with the butler’s guidance downstairs.

He made an unpleasant expression.

Melissa deliberately avoided his gaze and buried her face in Reizen’s chest. It smelled nice. It was a comfortable embrace where she couldn’t see anything.

***

That evening, Count Maidos headed to a shop in the capital.

In the red-light district’s streets, women’s shrill laughter and drunk men’s loud voices echoed chaotically.

A storm had swept through the capital too. A black carriage stopped, splashing water on the still damp streets.

A large man wearing a fedora got out of the carriage and went into the shop. Two or three guards followed behind him.

“…You’ve come.”

The count who had been waiting with food laid out in a spacious room greeted someone politely.

The man whose face was hard to see because of his hat naturally took his seat and asked.

“About the port matter.”

“One merchant group went over to him. But I took measures in advance to prevent the rest from going over…”

“Don’t you think I know how important that one is?”

Count Maidos’s face turned white at those words. Rather than humiliation, sincere dismay showed on his face as he apologized saying he was sorry.

“Maidos.”

“Yes.”

He answered while keeping his head down.

“Your father and brother said similar things too. That they’d do better next time. But how did that end?”

There was no next time for them. This was also why Maidos, the second son of the count’s family, inherited a title he never dreamed of in his life and began moving directly.

“That’s, that’s not it, Your Maj-“

The man in the fedora stood up from his seat. Then the guard beside him took out a gun and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Bang! Though a loud noise rang out, no one came to check the room. Maidos’s eyeballs slowly rolled back as a hole appeared in his forehead.

The man spoke quietly while looking at the count who had collapsed to the floor with a thud.

“I told you not to call me that outside. Your loose lips are the problem.”

But the dead don’t speak.

The man who took off his hat and paid respects to the deceased smiled faintly.

“Then goodbye.”

***

“Madam, did you see? They say Count Maidos died. And on the very night he visited our castle!”

Laila came running with the newspaper first thing in the morning.

“The newspaper offices are all in chaos now. Since he died right after meeting His Highness at our castle…”

Moreover, Count Maidos was Melissa’s first husband. After visiting his ex-wife and her new husband at Mielin Castle, weren’t the two perfect suspects for murder.

This was no coincidence.

“They say the coroner reported to his superiors that Prince Reizen should be summoned for questioning. Photos of the process of delivering that report to superiors are even circulating.”

A black and white photo of a coroner with a mustache like Horrux holding documents in front of the courthouse took up a large portion of the newspaper page.

Looking at the content, testimony from the Emperor’s faction who saw Reizen covered in blood at Mielin Castle that day was decisive.

Laila trembled as she handed over the newspaper.

“Everyone at our castle knows! That it was Mr. Robert’s blood! How can Dr. Horrux keep his mouth completely shut after treating him himself?”

It was nonsense that Reizen killed Maidos. But the circumstances were enough to make him suspicious.

Melissa headed to the office right after getting up, clutching the rolled up newspaper.

“Madam, His Highness said not to come to the office anymore…!”

Though Laila followed behind trying to stop her, it was useless. Melissa strode quickly in her thin nightgown and opened the office door.

She saw Reizen sitting on the sofa talking with Whilton. The blonde man sitting with his legs crossed on one side stiffened his expression as soon as he saw Melissa.

“Whilton.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Close your eyes.”

Whilton loyally answered and squeezed his eyes shut.

Laila who had chased after them stood behind Melissa with a troubled expression. And the woman who was gripping the newspaper tight enough to crumple it spoke quietly.

“I know who the culprit is.”

The murder happened at Marita Loge’s shop. In the very same space where David Moore died, in the exact same way.

This was clearly the work of someone who wanted to bring up the sensational murder case from the past again. They were trying to amplify this case by reminding people of the past incident.

Just looking at how the newspapers were reporting every detail of the case’s progress with photos, the culprit’s goal was… Reizen’s social downfall.

What made things difficult for him wasn’t Maidos’s death. The problem was that multiple commoner witnesses from that day’s murder had lost their lives.

Most newspapers only published articles about Maidos’s death, but the commoners’ interest was focused solely on one thing: ‘Did Reizen really kill commoners?’

“You witch!”

Melissa recalled the stones and rotten eggs people had thrown at her. The memories of that past day when she was swept up in the crowd and heard all sorts of insults.

She didn’t want Reizen to be branded with such infamy. She absolutely hated the reality where he was being condemned as the culprit simply because he married her and Maidos was her ex-husband.

She was sick of how the past she wanted to forget kept dragging at her ankles.

“Madam…!”

Soon after, Nora came running and wrapped a thin robe around Melissa’s shoulders. But Reizen’s expression still hadn’t improved.

He spoke with furrowed brows.

“Are you wandering around outside dressed like that?”

Only then did Melissa look down at what she was wearing. She had rushed out so urgently that she hadn’t even put on a proper dress.

Though it was something unimaginable in the past as it went against etiquette, such things weren’t important to Melissa now. As she tried to tell him who the culprit was, Reizen cut off her words.

“Do you get sick if you stay still? Melissa.”

That damned ‘stay still.’

Go back, don’t leave your room, stay still.

It had been like this every time since getting married.

Excluding her from everything, telling her to just exist in her room like a living doll without knowing anything.

Telling her not to do anything except eat, sleep and excrete. Though it’s dressed up in nice words about recovering her health being the priority, in reality it must be because she’s not trustworthy.

But this time, even Melissa couldn’t stay still.