Chapter 40

Owen paid no attention to the startled maid. He took hold of the door handle and stepped inside. The maid quickly moved out of the way for her master and stared at the closed door with wide eyes.

“What do I do……”

The hand holding the lantern fidgeted with indecision. She wanted nothing more than to go back to bed, of course, but she worried about being blamed if something went wrong later.

Oh, forget it. The master told me to go.

After a long moment of hesitation, the maid took her lantern and returned to her quarters. A more experienced maid would have stayed at her post in case Owen returned to his room, but being new, she tipped the scales in favor of her own exhaustion. Fortunately, that choice never came back to trouble her. Owen truly intended to watch over Lea through the night.

“……”

The sound of the maid’s footsteps outside faded away. Owen closed the door behind him and stood still for a moment, looking around his wife’s room.

It held no good memories for him. The mistress’s room had always meant Lady Ellarod’s room in his mind, and he had never been able to approach it without a sour feeling.

But looking around slowly now, the room was nothing like he remembered. The beautiful, lavish furniture had been removed and replaced with simpler pieces in pale colors. The sofas and curtains that had once been heavy with gold and velvet were now plain fabrics in soft cream and modest checks, and Owen could almost have believed he was in a quiet country cottage rather than the mistress’s room.

In terms of taste alone, Lady Ellarod had clearly won. But for Owen personally, he preferred it this way.

No trace of that woman is left in this place. That’s why.

Thinking of Lady Ellarod, who was surely cursing him from some distant asylum at this very moment, Owen smiled coldly. She was probably lying awake at night consumed by hatred of him, just as he had done as a child. The difference was that for Owen, their shared past was now nothing more than something that had already happened, while for Lady Ellarod, it would go on until the day she died.

Lady Ellarod had been the first to be dealt with in Owen’s plan. There was something almost stale about her now, but thinking of her still gave him a small sense of victory. It felt something like the nostalgia of a first trophy.

His mood lifted slightly, and he moved away from the door and into the room.

A gentle warmth radiated from the fireplace and filled the space. Owen looked at the spotless table, shelves, and sofa, then noticed a candlestick and matches on the shelf and considered lighting a candle before deciding against it. The firelight was enough that the room wasn’t as dark as the corridor had been. For some reason, he didn’t want anything brighter than this dim glow.

From the bed where Lea lay, there was no sound except the occasional cough. Owen looked briefly at his wife, who showed no sign of waking, then moved an armchair to the side of her bed. The thick carpet swallowed the sound of it being dragged across the floor.

Only after sitting down did Owen look at Lea properly. Her cheeks were red from the fever, but her lips were pale. Strands of hair clung to her sweat-damp forehead.

Without thinking, Owen brushed the hair away. The heat coming off her skin was real enough. It was no exaggeration to say she had been suffering from a high fever.

The moment he did it, he reproached himself for the pointless gesture. But then again, sitting here at all was pointless.

The personal physician had assured him Lea wouldn’t die. And even if her illness were serious enough to k*ll her, Owen was no doctor, and his presence at her side wouldn’t cure anything. Sitting beside Lea in the dead of night was exactly the kind of useless waste he despised.

And yet here he was.

“……”

He looked at her in silence. The sharp line of her collarbone, her neck and shoulders, her hollow cheeks. She had lost noticeably more weight since he had first seen her. Lea looked worse than she had in that worn, dirty room in Endelden.

Firewood crackled in the fireplace across the room. The heat from it filled the space with a comfortable warmth. A warm, clean room. The ideal conditions for someone who was ill. But Owen couldn’t understand how Lea had gotten sick in the first place.

He could have starved her to the edge of death. He could have locked her in a room that froze like an iced-over lake in winter and sweltered like a boiling pot in summer. But he hadn’t done any of that. Owen had given Lea an identity, the daughter of a businessman he had set up under a false name abroad, and he had let her live in a beautiful house with fine clothes and furniture and abundant food.

I promise. Trust me. Someday that day will surely come.

It was exactly the promise he had made as a child, taking Lea’s hand. The only difference was that all of that luxury had been provided for a kind of theater, the sort where a condemned man is treated like a king before being dragged to the guillotine like a dog and beheaded.

“She’s more particular than she looks.”

“……”

“She managed just fine in that filthy place……”

But now that she was actually lying there sick as a plucked bird, Owen’s mood was not good. It was too contemptuous to be called sadness, and too irritating to be called satisfaction. He lightly traced a finger across Lea’s gaunt cheek.

Lying in bed in a white nightgown of silk and muslin, Lea looked like a frail noblewoman. No one would ever guess that less than a year ago she had been a factory worker living a grueling life.

Owen had given her all of this. He had expected her to be dazzled by the beautiful, expensive clothes and jewels and furniture and rooms. He had believed that even if she shrank back at first because of what she had done, the sight of such wealth would quickly reveal her true nature, and he had deliberately told the servants to place no limit on the luxuries provided to her. But as time passed, Lea showed no wonder or greed for any of it. She seemed to suffer more than she ever had in that wretched, hard life she had lived before.

Lea wore the pearls around her neck like a noose. She looked at the glittering diamonds like lead shot. She put on the silk dresses like burial clothes. Watching Lea behave as though none of it mattered to her, Owen had first felt contempt, and now felt only irritation.

No…… in truth, it was something heavier than that. He resented Lea again, freshly and unexpectedly.

“Then why did you do it.”

Owen moved the hand that had been gently stroking Lea’s cheek down to her neck. Her dry throat fit inside one hand. The composure that always defined Owen’s face twisted with something conflicted. He wanted to close his fingers around that throat. He wanted to shake her until she stopped breathing.

“Why……”

But he couldn’t let go. Owen slowly lifted his hand away from her neck. He could watch her suffer, but he could not stop looking at this face. If he had been capable of that, Lea would be in a prison cell right now instead of lying here. Lady Ellarod was in an asylum precisely because he had been capable of it with her.

But Lea was different. She was not something he could remove like outdated furniture, the way he had with Lady Ellarod. At least not yet.

“Don’t die on me like this.”

Owen bit his lip.

“Don’t die.”

“……”

“Don’t die, Lea.”

He refused to let it become words of worry. That was his last line.

He hated Lea. More than anyone. His father, Lady Ellarod, Zebek Fell. Even the servants who had looked down on him. Owen had hated all of them, but he had never been so consumed by any of them that they appeared in his dreams. He had never thought of any of them as a reason to keep living.

Only one person had ever made him dream. Only Lea had given him a reason to go on. Whether it was hatred or love no longer mattered. Because Lea Fell was Owen’s last hatred and his first love.

Dawn came. Owen sat in the armchair and watched Lea until faint light began to seep through the gap in the curtains. Lea slept so deeply she seemed entirely unaware he was there.

Owen rubbed his temple and checked the time. Before long, the maids would wake and come up to give Lea her syrup and medicine and change the sweat-soaked sheets and bedding. For reasons he couldn’t name, he didn’t want to be seen sitting here beside a sick Lea, and so he rose from the chair before they arrived.