‘Since I can’t kill the Marquis, I should at least ruin his daughter.’

Mannea, who revealed her malicious thoughts without filter, took a deep breath.

Despite the musty smell permeating the air, her face looked as if she were intoxicated by a fragrant scent.

Her crooked, upturned lips were so bizarre and eerie that it made Lucilia’s scalp crawl.

Mannea’s breathing was so close that Lucilia could hear it clearly, so she stepped aside to avoid her.

If her father had known, he would never have handed Mannea over to the Pope. This also meant that the Pope had a weapon to strike at the Marquis.

Everyone was cunning, both this person and that person.

The moment Mannea revealed her hostility, her hand reached out and grabbed Lucilia’s hair.

“Aaagh!”

“If you don’t want to sit, we can settle this here.”

When she roughly twisted her grip, Lucilia’s neck was violently wrenched to the side.

As her forehead was forced against Mannea’s shoulder, she felt something cold tap against her temple.

“I have nothing left to lose, but my grandfather needs to live, right? Let’s say it’s all for the best—the priest promised to take care of my grandfather, so I should pay my dues.”

“Did the Pope tell you to kill me?”

“No. If you die, the picture won’t be complete. You need to play the role of kindling. Instead, he told me to pluck out these bewitching eyes.”

“I’ve lost my holy power anyway, so I can’t do anything.”

“There’s always that small chance, isn’t there? Who knows if your holy power might recover later?”

Her giggling laughter grated on Lucilia’s eardrums.

She thought Mannea was out of her mind, but she didn’t expect her to actually singe near her eyebrow with the sharp knife tip.

Far from hesitation, she seemed almost cheerful, as if playing with a toy, which was shocking. It was both absurd and infuriating that everything she had seen until now had been fake.

A warm trickle of blood flowed down.

“Ugh! Why, why are you doing this?”

No matter how hard she tried to maintain her composure, her limbs trembled violently. Terrified, Lucilia gasped for breath and twisted her body.

She wanted to scream “Are you crazy?” but feared her throat would be slit next, so she couldn’t resist too fiercely.

“Why am I doing this? The person who used tenant fees as an excuse to put us in debt, who made my mother a slave and molested her. That was the Marquis’s bastard!”

“…”

“My mother killed herself, and my father was murdered by private soldiers when he went to protest. And far from apologizing, they demanded we pay our debts and even seized our home. What could I, as a child, have done? My grandfather and I had no choice but to wander from place to place before finally living in the mountains!”

The shocking truth emerged, as startling as Mannea’s transformed behavior. Her father had destroyed someone’s family.

It took a moment for those words to float through her ears and be properly understood.

Mannea knew that Lucilia had severed ties with her father. Yet she hadn’t given up on revenge.
Unable to punish the Marquis directly, she had chosen an easier target.

She should feel unjustly burdened by her father’s sins, but the emotion resonating in her chest changed to something else.

She felt sympathy for what must have once been Mannea’s innocent and pure childhood. Anger welled up at her father’s evil deeds that had forced Mannea to harbor such resentment.

And… she was simply sorry.

“…I’m sorry. I’ll, I’ll apologize instead. I’m truly sorry.”

“Forget it. Your role is to be damaged just enough. I won’t kill you, so don’t cling to me pathetically.”

The words “please spare me” wouldn’t come out.

The moment she saw the eyes of someone whose life had been completely stolen, she lost all words. She could only desperately grip Mannea’s wrist that held the knife.

“Sob… I’m sorry.”

She should be raging that it was her father’s fault, not hers, that if Mannea wanted revenge, she should go after the Marquis…

But her rational thinking had stopped, and like a fool, she could only repeat that she was sorry.

“I don’t want to hear such words. I lost my family, my everything! Don’t make a fuss about losing one measly eyeball. It’s disgusting!”

Mannea screamed in fury.

As she raised the knife with all her might, Lucilia’s hand that had been gripping her wrist fell limply. She had no way to withstand the strength of Mannea consumed by vengeance.

“Please… Sister. Just listen to me.”

“I said I don’t want to hear it!”

She had barely managed to speak, but far from persuading, she only provoked Mannea further. It was natural that nothing would reach the ears of someone determined to gouge out her eyes.

With trembling lips firmly closed and eyes wide open, Mannea drew in her breath.

“I’m just doing my job.”

The sharpened blade was about to pierce her eyeball.

BANG!

With a thunderous noise, the door fell off like a sheet of paper.

And then it happened in an instant.

The stubborn grip that had twisted her hair suddenly disappeared.

As a result, Lucilia’s body, which had been bent backward, tumbled to the floor.

Before she could fall, her body seemed to float upward, and the scent of pania flowers brought her sharply to her senses.

He had come.

“A…aron?”

Lucilia looked up at Aaron, who was staring intently at one spot with murderous eyes while his arm encircled her waist.

She had only been waiting for Ension, yet Aaron had rushed to her.

She still couldn’t believe if this was a dream or reality.

Soon, an indescribable sense of relief washed over her. She hadn’t known that extreme terror could disappear so instantly.

Even the crisis of nearly losing an eye was just a passing breeze in Aaron’s presence.

Belatedly recognizing the situation, Lucilia asked in a trembling voice while still in Aaron’s arms:

“Did you kill her?”

“No. I barely kept her alive in case there’s something we need to find out.”

Lucilia’s pupils trembled convulsively as they slowly moved to the side.

Her heart sank as soon as she saw Mannea’s miserable state, eyes wide open with more than half the whites showing. Her throat appeared to be slit, causing her to fall backward.

For an instant, two thoughts collided in her mind.

Should she pray for peace? Or should she extract information?

“There’s not much time left.”

Mannea, on the verge of death, didn’t even make choking sounds.

Yes, the living come first.

After all they had suffered at their hands…

If she could only bring down those who had thrown Mannea’s life into the gutter, she could abandon any saintly compassion.

Lucilia hurriedly went to Mannea’s side and knelt down.

Though the gushing blood made her nauseous, she steeled herself.

She held Mannea’s chin and looked into her half-glazed pupils. Since Mannea had already revealed that the Pope was behind this, she needed to find out other things.

The fact that she had been transmitting fake thoughts all this time meant the Pope had not relinquished his suspicions. That’s why he had controlled Mannea’s thoughts.

“How were you able to deceive my holy power? How could you pretend your thoughts were genuine?”

Her purple pupils, taking on a murky color, were dimming hazily.

If she had been fully conscious, she would have been flustered by the mention of holy power, but in her fading state, she seemed likely to reveal the truth unconsciously.

Lucilia appealed in a desperate voice:

“I don’t believe in the Pope. Think about what he did to me. Do you really think the Pope will take care of your grandfather? I’ll take responsibility for your grandfather.”

With no time for rambling, she quickly spoke only the essentials. She wanted to explain more, but feared Mannea’s soul would leave her body if she did.

The wait for an answer felt excruciatingly long.

Her lips dried up and her throat burned with impatience.

‘Please don’t die like this.’

After gazing into her eyes pleadingly for a while, finally, Mannea’s thoughts opened up.

‘The token of being the Marquis’s person… I stole that rosary from the monastery.’

The cross attached to the rosary flickered before her eyes. The one with a mother-of-pearl leaf attached to the end of the cross.

“So you were originally at the capital?”

‘Yes, because the Marquis wasn’t the only one cultivating spies.’

The Pope had planted Mannea, his spy, in the capital’s monastery and had her steal the Marquis’s token.

Before she could hear the answer to how she had been able to deceive her holy power, silence enveloped them following a faint auditory hallucination.

Mannea’s voice was no longer heard.

If there had been a little more time, she could have learned more information, but things weren’t clearly organized, and she hadn’t been able to ask everything.

Just as she was about to withdraw her gaze with regret, a blurry vision projected from Mannea’s thoughts unfolded.

Lucilia muttered desperately, trying to capture the scenes as if wading through fog, hoping Aaron, who was listening with her, would remember these disjointed words.

“Holy water font, secret… room? Seems like an underground passage. Red petals with black stamens. Bathtub.”

The colored scene faded to a pale white.

“No. Just a little more… mother-of-pearl wooden box.”

The purple eyes that had once held vitality finally lost their light.

This must be the end.

Sighing, Lucilia caressed Mannea’s cheek, still covered with soft down.

“Rest in peace.”

With those final words, Lucilia also fainted as the tension drained from her.