Delmir furrowed her brow slightly and let out a scoff, as though she had no idea what Elise was talking about, but she apparently hadn’t anticipated that Elise knew what she had done, because the corner of her mouth gave a faint tremor.

“What do you mean by that? Are you saying I lured the young lord away? Are you trying to tarnish a lady’s reputation with something completely unfounded?”

Delmir was bold about it. With good reason, since she had never actually lured Elise’s fiancé away herself.

“A few weeks before my engagement was broken off, you became angry with me over a hair designer. Do you remember?”

At the mention of the hair designer, Delmir’s eyebrow twitched slightly this time.

“And not long after that, you put someone up to telling my fiancé to marry Petra from Marquis Dulcon’s family? And after the wedding, you had a small plot of land granted to him?”

As her own misdeeds came out one after another, the curve of Delmir’s eyes slowly straightened from an arc to a flat line.

“You must have been so shaken by the broken engagement that you wrote yourself quite a story. It’s the most clumsy and tedious story I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it? The people who witnessed it firsthand told me it was no story at all. Quite plainly a fact.”

Elise wore no expression of triumph. She simply stated the facts in a flat, even voice, like a court clerk recording testimony.

“Wasn’t that three years ago? If you knew all this, why didn’t you come confront me at the time? Did it really take three years to write a convincing story and fabricate witnesses? Even if you needed someone to blame, isn’t this all a bit too sloppy?”

Apparently deciding she could simply keep denying it, Delmir crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and dismissed Elise’s words with cool disdain.

In truth, even granting that it was testimony, it was, as Delmir said, a matter three years old. Marquis Dulcon’s family and the former fiancé were unlikely to come forward, so the witnesses would be mostly servants, and in noble society their testimony carried little weight. That would only have been different if they had spoken up at the time of the incident, before anyone had the chance to gather people and arrange things.

Elise, careful and sharp as she was, surely knew this too. That was likely why she had held back and not rushed to expose the truth even after learning it.

But she had apparently not expected Delmir to brazen it out so shamelessly, because the expression on her face, solid and steady as a fortress wall, began to crumble bit by bit. Delmir caught the shift and drove the nail in with a smile of victory.

“Delusions must have been the grounds for the broken engagement.”

For a woman of marriageable age, a broken engagement without cause is a sentence of death.

Elise had endured pain that split her soul in two, and yet she had resolved to keep Delmir’s wrongdoing buried, right up until Delmir crossed the line. Watching Elise turn her steps humbly toward the lounge, I felt something close to admiration, a deep and genuine fondness.

‘Delusions?’ Staring at Delmir’s shameless face, I felt my fist clench without thinking.

I’m fine. I’ve said it before. I’m someone who’s long since grown used to being bitten. I can endure it.

But don’t touch the people who matter to me. Don’t cross that line.

I stepped in front of Elise, whose face was going steadily pale.

“May 20th, three years ago. The spring flower luncheon held in the Rose Hall of the Gertil ducal estate. Do you remember?”

At my words, Delmir tilted her head slightly with a look that said she had no idea what I was talking about.

“How am I supposed to remember every social event I attend?”

“You hadn’t made your formal debut yet at the time, so you were going around with your friends. You were wearing a pale pink robe trimmed with ruffles and ribbons, with your hair half up.”

“What. Why do you remember that? It seems the two of you are fixated on me together.”

Delmir gave a full-body shudder and twisted her lips, looking thoroughly put out.

“I remember it because I overheard a very interesting conversation in the garden that day. Just as Lady Delmir said, I’m the tiresome sort of woman who fixates on other people’s weaknesses.”

“Ha. And what was this interesting conversation?”

Delmir sniffed, completely unguarded, with an air that said she couldn’t imagine what someone like me could possibly have to say.

“I heard, in Lady Delmir’s own voice, the exact same account Lady Elise just gave.”

“What?”

She clearly hadn’t anticipated that. Delmir’s lovely face crumpled for an instant before her blue eyes began to dart. She was frantically searching her memory.

“You think you can make things up and get away with it? What, is the divorcee title not enough, and adding mistress to it is getting to be too much? Are you trying to ruin my reputation so you can escape people’s criticism?”

She tried to sound defiant, but the incident in the garden must have come back to her, because Delmir’s lips trembled faintly. Her voice rose as the remark struck home.

“I’m not making anything up. I can swear to it.”

In contrast, I was calm, the way Elise had been moments before, because I was telling the truth.

“How dare you fabricate things! Who would believe a word you say?”

My composure seemed to stoke her further, and Delmir’s manner of speaking had turned crude without her even noticing.

“I’ll stake my honor on it. No, my honor has been gone for a long time now, so I’ll stake my life. I swear that Lady Delmir ruined Lady Elise’s marriage over nothing more than a hair designer.”

The atmosphere in the central hall of the imperial palace went cold, the way it would if someone had doused the room with ice water.

Destroying a woman’s marriage was a matter far too grave to compare with spreading rumors behind her back or writing commentary in the gossip columns. It was something that could ruin a person’s life and a family’s reputation.

Every pair of eyes that had been glancing sideways with feigned indifference but genuine curiosity snapped to Delmir at once. Whether they believed me or not, the eyes of everyone in the hall held a contempt deeper and heavier than before.

What are you going to do now? Keep denying it, or apologize and grovel right here. Go on. Do something.

I pressed down the corners of my mouth, which kept wanting to pull upward, and waited slowly for an answer.

To think that watching the face of someone who had always smiled her innocent, harmless smile in front of me finally fall apart in real time could be this satisfying.

Was that it for you too? Did you do it because it was enjoyable, watching me flustered and deflated and scrambling to get away?

What are you going to do? How are you going to react?

At that moment, I may have grown a little arrogant.

Drunk on the fact that I had, for the first time, repaid Delmir for all the years she had dismissed me throughout my marriage, I failed to fully reckon with how cornered she truly was.

I, who had grown thoroughly accustomed to contempt and humiliation over a lifetime, overlooked the deep and consuming darkness that grips a person who encounters such a thing for the very first time.

There was no bottom to the darkness inside a person.

* * *

Thud. The pin of the brooch Delmir wore on her chest, a thick and long brooch, tore free from her robe and drove into the area above Lucian’s collarbone. It happened in a single instant.

Blood splattered in every direction.

“Your life? You’ll stake your life? Say it again. Can you still say it?”

Covered in blood and laughing in a strange, broken way, Delmir raised the brooch high again.

Elise and Nelia, who had only screamed in shock at first, quickly caught Lucian’s collapsing body and pulled her back, but Delmir stepped forward with purpose, unwilling to lose her target, and smiled her characteristic bright smile.

“Go on, say it again! Say it one more ti… Aaagh!!”

Gentlemen rushed forward to restrain Delmir, but the fastest among them was Heliones, who had not even been standing particularly nearby. He flew across the hall in a single motion, moving so swiftly the hall might as well have been empty, and shoved Delmir hard.

Pushed by the hands of a powerfully built man, Delmir flew back a considerable distance and fell hard. Whitney and Dylan, who happened to be standing right in her path, scrambled backward as though she were something foul, trying to draw a clear line between themselves and what had just unfolded before their eyes.

Delmir let out a groan at the pain of hitting the floor, but no one paid her any attention.

Most were concerned about the victim, Lucian, or simply desperate to know her condition, and even Delmir’s close relatives were in a panic, terrified that if something went wrong with Lucian, the blame might fall on them.

Sprawled on the floor and writhing from a sensation she had never experienced in her life, Delmir watched Whitney and Dylan turn their backs on her too, and ground her teeth.

“…don’t you… dare… I’ll never let this… mmph!”

A shadow fell over Delmir’s face. Roned, every bit as beautiful as she was, pressed his hand over her mouth with an expression of terrifying coldness.

“You’re right. I’m absolutely devoted to Lady Lucian.”

“Mmph?”

“The only reason I’m not killing you here and now is that doing so might cause trouble for Lady Lucian.”

His murmur, low enough that no one else could hear, was sharp and cutting, like a blade buried inside the words.

“How dare someone like you… wound Lady Lucian like that again…”

Roned drew a breath, steadying himself for a moment, then spoke in a voice far lower than before and far more chilling.

“Just shut your mouth and stay down. I think if you say one more word, I’ll actually kill you.”

Even Delmir, sheltered from the world as she was, could understand. Roned’s words were not a simple threat. They were sincere. Delmir knew it in her bones: push his nerves even slightly further, and the hand covering her mouth would slide down and close around her throat.