“I’ll leave you both to talk. Please call if you need anything.”

Riley withdrew with a neat, composed bow, and the two siblings both smiled to themselves.

Charlotte was thinking ‘she was such a little thing, when did she grow up like this,’ and Andrea was quietly amused that the boy who talked back to him without hesitation turned out to be perfectly well-mannered in front of his sister.

After Riley left, Charlotte turned to her brother with another reproach.

“I let you take her because you insisted, but look how slight she still is. She’s twenty now and still shorter and thinner than her peers.”

Andrea crossed his legs with the air of someone who found the scolding tiresome and pushed back.

“Why is that my fault? She was always small. And what brings you here so suddenly, anyway?”

He fidgeted with his riding gloves, making it clear he needed to be on his way and she should get to the point.

“Is this how you treat a sister you haven’t seen in ages?”

Charlotte shot her indifferent brother a look, then opened her mouth to say something and burst out laughing instead.

Andrea raised an eyebrow with an expression that said ‘have you lost your mind.’

But then Charlotte set something down on the table with a sharp thud, and his gaze dropped to it.

It took him only a few seconds to recognize what it was.

『A Ballad of Flame and Loss』

The magazine carrying that outrageous serial.

After a few seconds of silence, Andrea slowly uncrossed his arms and reached for it. But Charlotte, never one for patience, flipped it open to the page in question first.

What it revealed made Andrea go rigid.

There was Captain Alain, their protagonist, not a stitch of clothing on him, seated in a provocative pose and fixing the reader with a smoldering gaze.

One hand wrapped around his own impressive manhood, displaying it openly.

Even Andrea could not breathe for a moment.

The illustration took up the entire page, and the draftsmanship had improved considerably since the last installment. It was more detailed and vivid than anything before it.

More than that, the full frontal view of Alain’s face, which had left room for doubt until now, was unmistakably his own face, even to his own eyes.

It was a better likeness than the official portrait hanging in the palace.

Charlotte’s laughter rang out.

“You know this filthy novel is the biggest thing in the underground right now, don’t you? It’s so popular it’s starting to come up in salon conversation.”

Andrea rubbed his jaw and exhaled a curse under his breath.

“I know.”

“You know? Then you also know that people are mapping this protagonist onto you?”

“I know.”

Charlotte looked at her brother with an expression of pure exasperation.

“Then why haven’t you done anything? People in the capital are starting to believe the chapters in here are your actual private life.”

Andrea said nothing. He just stared at today’s illustration.

The fact that he felt humiliated meant they had won.

That was the goal from the start.

And it was not just the face. The resemblance in atmosphere, in bearing, was close enough that he felt stripped bare before a crowd.

“Hah……”

The knuckles of the hand gripping the magazine went white.

What kind of pose was this. Impossible to look at.

The illustrator had sold their soul for gold coins.

Or harbored a deep and personal grudge against him.

Charlotte watched the obscenity slowly forming on Andrea’s lips and smiled, then pressed further.

“You know the gossip 〈Clemont〉 keeps putting out matches the plot of this novel, right?”

“I know.”

“If you know, you should have shut it down from the start. Why have you been letting it go?”

Andrea closed his eyes for a moment, steadying himself, and said through his teeth,

“I’m already tracking down the publisher. I’ve put informants on it, so it won’t be long, but if they’ve set up multiple layers of guild members and intermediaries, it may take more time than expected.”

Charlotte propped her chin on one arm with an air of boredom.

“The person behind it is obviously the queen, no need to look far. If tracing the connection is going to take time, shouldn’t you start by catching the novelist and the illustrator first and dealing with them?”

It was blunt language for a princess, but Charlotte was too busy laughing to care.

“The illustrator’s skill is needlessly exceptional, and the detail is what’s making this spread so far.”

The Kingdom of Arvel had no shortage of works walking the line between obscenity and art, but nothing of this illustrated-collection quality had ever surfaced under the guise of a literary serial before.

“And it seems one of the women you’ve actually slept with told someone your physical characteristics. Who exactly have you managed to make an enemy of?”

Charlotte’s bombshell made Andrea’s brow draw together dangerously.

“What? Which woman have I slept with?”

“You’d know that better than I would, so why are you asking me? There are plenty, the actress Priscilla, all those ladies, and so on. Isn’t this what happens when you don’t handle things cleanly at the end?”

Andrea’s face flushed and he dragged a hand roughly down his face.

“Even you believe those cheap scandals?”

But Charlotte did not back down.

“Then how do you explain this?”

She tapped one spot in the illustration with her finger, bold as anything.

It was, mortifyingly, the center of Alain’s magnificent and fully upright manhood.

Andrea felt a wave of acute shame and could not keep his eyes from dropping.

His brow began to crease with irritation.

The veins winding up along the shaft were rendered with meticulous care, like climbing vines, and the realization settled in again that this illustrator had truly sold their soul to the devil.

His gaze drifted, searching for somewhere to land, and followed where Charlotte’s fingernail was still tapping.

There was a mole.

Right.

He had a mole there. Exactly there, just below the head.

The equivalent of a beauty mark, if it were on a face.

But this was a physical secret that no one knew about except his sister and his late mother. So why was it being announced to the world right now?

Could it be a coincidence?

A tangle of thoughts churned through his mind, and a cold sensation slid down the back of his skull.

Charlotte watched the color drain from his face and added,

“You still have that mole, don’t you? Anyway, the fact that they’ve described even this, just to make absolutely sure, means some woman with a grudge against you has joined hands with the queen’s side. That’s why I keep telling you to handle these things cleanly. So get married already.”

The cheerful, clear voice lecturing him made Andrea’s head throb.

He tried to smooth his hair back and collect his thoughts, but the shock of it, like a blow to the head, would not pass.

And no wonder. Because he was innocent.

Andrea yanked at his stock tie, which felt like it was tightening around his throat, and kept thinking.

He did not go around tumbling with women the way the world believed.

He had simply allowed the image the queen had pinned on him to stand unchallenged.

Which meant there was no one who knew what his body looked like. Let alone something this private.

So how had this been drawn?

‘D*mn it, someone would have had to see it to say anything……’

And yet why did this dirty, half-knowing feeling keep creeping in. What was this cold sensation sliding down the back of his head.

Something was almost within reach, almost graspable, and Andrea heard none of his sister’s scolding.

“Wasn’t it that actress you had a scandal with not long ago? She sold your physical secrets. You were barely done with her before the rumors started up with that count’s daughter. Isn’t that right? You’re not young anymore, and if you can’t be clean about these things, it becomes a problem. That’s why you need to get married soon.”

Charlotte believed every chapter in the novel more thoroughly than anyone else, and Andrea shook his head at her, pulled out a cigar, and put it between his lips.

His head was pounding.

This sort of thing would not shake his position, of course, but it was a matter of honor.

And above all, his father was in the process of gradually transferring power to him. Losing trust now would not do.

Andrea made his usual effort to recover his composure and think clearly.

He pushed Charlotte’s stream of questions and scolding to the far edge of his awareness and worked through it step by step.

Was the mole a coincidence? Or not?