Having finished his account, Cedarwood rose from his seat.

“I found your missing piece for you. Clean up the rest yourselves.”

“Cedarwood Carlisle.”

At that, Reagan Rockefeller called out to stop Cedarwood as he moved to leave the room.

“…How is your superior these days?”

The short question dropped heavily between the three of them. Nathan immediately narrowed his brows with an expression that said ‘are you seriously asking that?’

On the surface, it was Reagan Rockefeller asking after a superior with whom he had cultivated a business relationship.

But no one in the room believed the question was a simple inquiry.

“…An interesting thing to ask.”

Cedarwood walked toward Reagan.

“Is that asking whether the man is still disappointed that he never managed to take a young concubine in the end? Or whether the disappearance of the young lady he was going to be handed as a back-room arrangement will affect the Rockefeller family’s business? Or perhaps…”

He finally came to a stop in front of Reagan.

“Whether, now that the sister you sold off has died and vanished, you need to find another to take her place, eldest young master?”

Cedarwood Carlisle’s “superior.”

He was a general known as the “hero of the imperial army.” By another name, the “greedy pig of the imperial army.”

And he had been the man set to marry Lanen Rockefeller in a political arrangement.

“Shall I take a guess?”

Cedarwood tilted his head slowly.

“You’re probing me with all of that combined. Now that you can no longer use my lady to hold over me, you’re worried I might go for your throats.”

A small smile settled over Cedarwood’s softly delivered question. It was unmistakably a sneer.

“Don’t worry.”

Tap, tap.

Cedarwood patted Reagan on the shoulder twice.

“As long as my lady’s grave remains here, the Rockefeller family will not fall.”

Creak. Click.

After the blood-reeking man had gone, the servants stripped up the bloodied carpet and scattered fragrant powder over the floor. But the raw smell left behind where the body had lain refused to fade.

Nathan Rockefeller retched against the window for a good while.

“Do you believe what he said, brother?”

“Even if I don’t, we have nothing to say to him.”

Reagan Rockefeller scraped the bloodstain on the sole of his shoe against the floor.

“He’s the one I find most suspicious. He’s the type to lose his mind over anything involving Lanen. So why is he so calm?”

“……”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that the one most likely to be raving is this quiet? Or could it be that he killed Lanen and is hiding it?”

“Why would you think he killed her?”

“What? Well… because that man spent his whole life as her sl*ve. He was the type to starve if told to starve, die if told to die. That’s why he went to the war too.”

‘Die if told to die.’ Reagan murmured, thinking of Cedarwood’s cold eyes.

His gaze happened to fall on the bloodied leather gloves sitting on the table. They were what Cedarwood had left behind.

Fine leather with silver thread embroidery. On one of them, incongruously, a humble name had been stitched in clumsy needlework.

“Listen, brother. Now that he’s become a hero no one can touch, the only thing standing in his way is his birth. If Lanen and the servant’s contract she took with her were both gone, he could launder his status just like that.”

“……”

“That’s reason enough to k*ll her.”

Reagan knew whose clumsy embroidery that was.

He had thought of it the first time he saw that needlework. It had been during the height of the war.

He had heard that Cedarwood Carlisle, who had been living quietly as though dead all that time, had suddenly been disciplined on the charge of insubordination.

“The man’s out of his mind. He half-killed his superior officer, they say. Why wasn’t he locked up, you ask? Because the savages launched a surprise attack right then. Did you see him take down those men with nothing but a single blade? D*mn… insubordination is a serious offense in the military, but what do outdated rules like that matter on a battlefield. In the end it’s a world where surviving is all that counts.”

Yet for having left his superior permanently disabled, he was released after a light punishment of three days’ confinement.

“But why did he beat his superior? I don’t know the exact reason either. From what I heard, it started over some handkerchief or other…”

Reagan Rockefeller looked back and forth between Cedarwood, bound in the cell, and the worn, ash-grey handkerchief in his own hand. It didn’t look valuable, and it was old and frayed enough to have seen considerable use.

And he had caused all that trouble over something like this?

“Come to have a look, eldest young master?”

“…It’s not worth my time. I only came to deliver something. Thanks to you, that man’s limbs are all out of commission, so he couldn’t come himself.”

Reagan Rockefeller tossed the handkerchief he was holding without any particular care. It fell right in front of Cedarwood’s face.

The eyes that had been sitting there with indifference shook sharply the moment they landed on the handkerchief.

Cedarwood reached out reflexively. But the chain tangled in the iron bars stopped him with a harsh metallic sound. Without hesitation, Cedarwood got down on his knees and crawled forward to take the handkerchief in his mouth.

At last he held it carefully to his chest. The way you would hold the most precious treasure.

“Thank you, young master.”

At the corner of that handkerchief. There, a humble name had been stitched in clumsy needlework.

He had kept wondering why that terrible needlework looked so familiar. Only then did Reagan realize it was his half-sister’s work.

It had been a handkerchief she gave him. And he had caused all this over something like that.

“What a fool.”

Reagan said that and walked out of the cell block.

‘…But would someone like that have killed Lanen?’

Reagan Rockefeller looked down at the leather gloves again.

The same name, the same needlework as what had been stitched on the handkerchief that day.

The only difference from then was that back then he had been half-dead and desperate to get it back, and now it had been left behind without a second thought.

But Reagan found himself suddenly thinking that these leather gloves looked exactly like a small piece of cheese placed on a well-made trap. A perfectly disguised trap.

‘And…’

He couldn’t say why, but a disquieting scene he had witnessed that day refused to leave him. The sight of a blood-soaked man pressing his lips reverently to the embroidered name on the handkerchief.

“…I can’t think why it keeps coming back to me.”

***

“This… doesn’t quite feel like wanting to ruin my life a little.”

Lanen murmured, looking at the shackle fastened around her ankle.

“You hate me this much…?”

Sunlight filled the room. It was the kind of situation that should have left her head pounding, but she had slept so deeply that she felt nothing but refreshed.

‘Maybe that’s what it is. A mind pushed to its absolute limit.’

The strange phenomenon where the brain, having been driven past the breaking point by stress, paradoxically reaches a state of clarity.

“Since my head is clear anyway…”

Lanen looked around the room and began to calmly take stock of her situation.

First, the worst part. The shackle, long enough only to let her pace back and forth within the room. The consolation. The wine, meaning the alcohol, still had some left. The part she wanted to ignore. The window had been nailed so it could only open the smallest crack.

Lanen checked the contents of the wine glass, refusing to accept reality.

Between the settled grape sediment at the bottom, there was a pale, undissolved powder.

‘Ah. Revising the worst part.’

She had suspected it, but now she was certain. This was a sleeping draught. The medicine he used to hand her one at a time whenever she said she couldn’t sleep.

There had been a sleeping draught in the wine.

‘No wonder I slept so soundly, in an unfamiliar place of all things, in this absurd situation of having been kidnapped. I thought I must have lost my mind.’

Turns out she really had lost her mind.

Lanen set the glass down with a sharp clack.

She was fairly sure she had been feeling miserable right up until she fell asleep, but now it was more like, never mind the misery, the disaster looming right in front of her face was enough to make her head spin.

‘Right, so what now…’

There were two ways for a person to escape a natural disaster. The first was to run for your life before it killed you. The second was to fail to escape and, like your ancestors weeping through rain rituals, beg forgiveness until the heavens calmed down.

So then, what was the right way to escape the natural disaster known as “Cedarwood Carlisle”?

Ha. Lanen let out a sigh that rose from the very bottom of her chest.

“Right. Run. Run for my life.”

The first option was the answer. There was no way begging that man for forgiveness would work.

Lanen looked out the window. The scenery, with no regard for her feelings, was absolutely stunning.

‘If my internal clock is right, it’s been less than a day and a half since I was kidnapped.’

That meant roughly a month and ten days remained until the trial. Not nearly enough time even if she were sprinting through the final stretch to bring the family crashing down perfectly.

‘…It was already a fight where the odds were hard to call in my favor. If I, the key witness, go missing at a time like this, the chances of winning the trial will be nearly nothing.’

The conclusion, then.

Try to smooth things over with cheerful small talk and watch her life come to an end.

Running was a hundred, a thousand times better than that. At least with running, the only thing that got destroyed was her own legs.

Lanen walked straight to the window.

The window was fixed to open only a hand’s width. Even if she went back to the age when she was still babbling her first words, she wouldn’t be able to squeeze through here.

She looked out at the clear sky beyond the window. Above the cedar trees soaring high overhead, a few kites were circling lazily.

‘I don’t know exactly where this place is, but if it’s within Rockefeller territory or somewhere near Reifield, Glen’s trading company’s messenger birds might be somewhere nearby.’

If she could somehow manage to call for him, the difficulty of escaping would drop considerably.

‘So please…’

She made the hand signal Glen had once taught her and pressed her face as far into the gap of the window as it would go.

“If anything comes up, whistle like this. My trained falcon will come to you.”

‘Let my call reach Glen!’

Lanen whistled with everything she had.

One hour later.

“I thought you might want to see him, so I brought him along.”

Thud.

Cedarwood set Glen down in front of her, bound hand and foot with rope. Lanen stopped Glen with her foot as he came rolling toward her like a ball dropped on the floor.

“Haha, hello there, little one.”

She had wanted to see him, but not like this. Lanen pressed both hands to her nose and let out a deep sigh.