Rising gracefully, he didn’t even pretend to help Iris up. Instead, he only stared with displeasure at her left leg, exposed beneath her disheveled dress.

“I’d like the books sorted perfectly and brought to my office.”

Along with that curt order, another sound rang out behind the retreating Michael.

It was the sound of retching.

Strength refused to enter Iris’s legs, like someone crushed her ankles. Even after Michael’s presence vanished completely, she lay on the floor for a long while.

Tears slowly slid down her pale cheek. The elbow that hit the floor still hurt, and her bony thigh was swelling bit by bit.

Before long, hurried footsteps came from far away. At first she wondered if Michael was coming back, but it wasn’t him.

Between strands of her snow-white hair, she saw the face of a man still unfamiliar to her. The pink-haired knight, Joshua Fate, was kneeling on one knee, picking up the scattered books.

Iris didn’t even think of standing and simply stared at him in a daze. She came to her senses only when Joshua called her.

“Madam.”

“…Ah.”

Her hands trembled finely as she took the book from him. She seemed to accept Joshua’s help, but then she brushed his hand away.

Unlike her trembling shoulders, the voice that burst out of her was colder than ever.

“Sir Joshua, I’m quite sure I told you it would be better not to help me.”

“How could I, as a knight, ignore a fallen lady, madam?”

He wore a kind smile, but Joshua Fate was ultimately Michael’s man. As a knight of Hagbris, he was someone before whom she didn’t want to show weakness.

Smack. Iris slapped away Joshua’s hand, which was reaching to lift her, hard enough to make a sound.

“Don’t be kind to me, unless you want to lose your job.”

Since falling to the floor, Iris’s limp grew even worse. Lifting the stack of books again with difficulty, she left Joshua behind and headed for Michael’s office.

Joshua’s urgent call rose from behind her, but Iris never once looked back at him.

Michael’s office was quiet as always, and his distinctive refreshing scent drifted in the air. When Iris inhaled deeply, the fresh scent rushed into her lungs and filled her chest.

After setting the stack of books on the desk, she let out a long, pained sigh.

For the past week, the garden at this hour was a mess of documents Michael threw. Yet the scenery outside the window was strangely clean. Michael, his temper ruined, must have left the mansion entirely.

‘The whole world is peaceful as long as Michael Hagbris isn’t around….’

Turning her head back to the office, Iris let out another very long sigh.

Behind Michael’s desk in his office hung a portrait, together with a sword symbolizing the house of Hagbris.

A man who looked just like Michael. It was the portrait of his father, Elias Hagbris.

Iris’s steps, as she was about to leave the office, stopped dead. Though it was certainly not her first time seeing it, she couldn’t take her eyes off Elias Hagbris’s portrait for a very long time.

Iris never met Elias Hagbris in person, yet she knew him better than anyone. While serving her sentence in prison, she read his writings over and over countless times.

Before she knew it, her trembling hand was stroking the book by Elias Hagbris that she brought. Michael’s face, full of rage from a moment ago, surfaced uninvited in her mind.

His voice seemed to circle her ears like a hallucination.

“Your family killed my father, Iris Oppenheimer. It means your father, Wilhelm Oppenheimer, intentionally murdered mine.”

Michael’s claim had no flaw. The sin Wilhelm Oppenheimer committed long ago against Elias Hagbris and the house of Hagbris was something Iris knew better than anyone.

The instant she recalled her past, her stomach began to churn, and Iris rushed out of the office in a panic.

The nausea didn’t subside for a long time. Her deathly pale face returned to normal only after she buried it in a basin and dry-retched a couple of times.

Michael returned to the mansion while Iris was stuck in her office processing documents. By dinnertime, he was already seated at the head of the table, ahead of Iris.

Michael’s attire was a little different from usual. Seeing him in a crisp dress uniform, even wearing a cloak, Iris asked on a puzzled impulse.

“Did you go somewhere?”

“Wherever I go, there’s no reason for you to know.”

“I only asked out of simple curiosity.”

Michael’s voice was lower and just as cold. Meeting his frosty eyes, Iris thought it would be better if he brought a woman home like yesterday.

Their conversation ended in three sentences. After that, only the clatter of tableware rang through the spacious dining room.

Iris’s steak was insanely salty again today. Food was for staying alive, but if she kept eating such salty steak, she felt she’d get sick and die early instead.

In the end, Iris couldn’t finish the steak this time either and left it.

Leaving the dining room, she let out a hollow laugh the moment she reached her bedroom. Who knew when he came and went, but on Iris’s bed lay the divorce papers Michael always carried in his jacket, plainly set there.

Divorce papers.

Divorce papers, as sickening as this marriage!

‘Goddamn it…!’

This time too, Iris tore the divorce papers cleanly in half and burned them with a match.

As the divorce papers burned, flecks of ash scattered and fell one by one at her feet. Staring at the flames, Iris soon began grinding the ashes under her shoe.

The resentment she couldn’t release clung thickly to the shoe grinding the ashes.

For some reason, Elias Hagbris’s portrait had been wavering before Iris’s eyes for some time. Picturing Michael’s and Elias’s faces at the same time, her stomach began to churn insanely once more.

Again a voice circled her ears like a hallucination. It was a mellow man’s voice, but it was never Michael’s.

“It’s something you brought upon yourself, Iris. Live out your whole life as a criminal who strangled her own flesh-and-blood younger sibling to death, be condemned by people, and live a life just as unhappy.”

It was a reproach like a curse, one Iris heard five years ago, slumped on a cold stone floor after being confined in prison. The moment the memory surfaced, her insides went from nauseous to boiling over.

Clamping a hand over her mouth, Iris rushed into the bathroom. Then, with her head over the toilet, she retched violently.

There was no one to pat her small back.

There was also no one to wipe the tears streaming down her cheeks.

And so, shut away alone in the bathroom, Iris ended up throwing up every bit of the salt-drenched steak.

***

There was still plenty of work left, but with her body emptied of all food, she couldn’t work at all. Iris dumped every sleeping pill in the medicine bottle into her mouth and fell asleep like she fainted.

By the time she woke, dawn was already breaking.

Iris’s day began an hour earlier than everyone else’s in the mansion again today. The elbow she hit when she fell in the corridor was swollen and puffy. Bright red tear marks remained on her face too, but fortunately they weren’t very noticeable.

After sitting before the mirror and neatly tying up her white hair, Iris took a sword and headed outside.

She didn’t bring many things from the ducal house of Oppenheimer. A few outfits including her wedding dress, a bonnet to hide her ugly crown, a spruce wood box, the jewelry she received as wedding gifts, and this sword were all.

‘…Is it going to rain? The sky is gloomy.’

Perhaps because it was early morning, white breath spread through the air with every exhale. Wearing trousers for the first time in a while, Iris limped toward the training ground behind the mansion.

Iris learned swordsmanship once, briefly, in her childhood. The teacher who taught her never held back his praise, saying she handled the sword skillfully despite learning so little.