Chapter 3

He was perched loosely on the edge of Riley’s desk by the window, slowly turning a sketching pencil over in his fingers.

Alfonso, standing beside him in visible distress, met Riley’s eyes and went rigid.

He looked at her hard, let out a sigh, and shook his head slowly.

Whether it meant don’t come in, or why did you do this, or you’re beyond saving, or all three at once, there was no way to tell.

Andrea, on the other hand, was not looking at Riley at all.

He simply kept rolling the pencil loosely between his fingers, over and over.

Riley stared blankly at her own pencil spinning through the air, then dropped her gaze. In that instant, she saw what was on the desk and felt every drop of blood drain from her body.

‘……My sketchbook……?’

She drew a sharp breath and stood rooted to the spot, and Andrea looked over at Alfonso.

“Wait outside.”

Alfonso flinched and asked with genuine concern,

“……You’re not going to hit him, are you?”

“Out.”

The order came back cold and without mercy. Alfonso hesitated, then had no choice but to brush past Riley on his way out.

He rested a hand briefly on her shoulder as he passed, a small gesture of comfort, though his eyes carried something close to reproach.

‘……Hit? He’s going to hit me……?’

Wait, that sketchbook on the desk…… that is mine, isn’t it?

Riley clutched her pounding chest and forced herself to keep thinking.

Watching Andrea turn through the pages one by one with that unreadable expression made the hair on her scalp stand on end. A slow, cold shiver crawled down her spine. Every fine hair on her body rose.

She stood frozen, and Andrea finally lifted his head and looked at her without a word.

Those eyes, calm and still, with no anger and no agitation, simply piercing straight through her. They were terrifying.

“Come here.”

Riley startled, trembling, but obeyed the low voice that left no room for refusal.

She forced her stiff legs to carry her forward and stopped a few steps away from him, squeezing her eyes shut.

Because what Andrea was holding was, without any doubt, her figure-drawing sketchbook.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

“Ugh……!”

Several hours later.

Riley was alone, kneeling on the floor, weeping without moving.

There was no one left in the room, but the sound of her broken sobbing cut through the silence at intervals.

She had been crying so long that her face was flushed red, and thick tears mixed with snot ran freely down her cheeks.

No matter how hard she clenched her teeth, everything kept spilling out and dripping steadily onto the backs of her hands.

Alfonso stopped by out of concern and found Riley still on her knees in the same position after hours. He clicked his tongue.

He hauled her up by force, guided her toward the bed, and she limped and wept her way over, curling up as she lay down.

Alfonso looked down at her with a troubled expression as she buried her face in the pillow and sobbed.

He had known Raul since the boy was small, and he felt genuine sympathy.

The sight of that red nose and all that crying was pitiful.

But then he thought about what this person had actually done, and the sigh came out on its own.

It was a serious crime.

Against a member of the royal family, no less.

He pulled the blanket up to her chin and sighed.

“Hah…… what on earth were you thinking, doing something like that without a shred of fear.”

Raul only sobbed.

If you had the nerve to sell your master’s n*de likeness, you ought to at least have the spine to be brazen about it. Breaking down like this now was almost absurd.

And besides, it was His Highness the Crown Prince who had been wronged here. Anyone watching would think it was his n*ked body that had been published across the city.

Alfonso watched Riley cry for a long while, then spoke gently.

“Even so, I’ll try to persuade His Highness not to send you to prison. That’s all I can do. So at least try to understand how serious what you’ve done is.”

“Ugh…… hic……!”

By the letter of the law, this was a crime that could carry a sentence of hanging.

However fictional the framing, the story had stripped and mocked a figure unmistakably mapped onto the crown prince, and it had damaged the honor of the royal family.

It was fortunate the situation had been contained before it swept the entire country.

Had hostile factions joined in, they could have used it to stir anti-royalist sentiment among the people.

“This will have to be reported to His Majesty the King as well, but I’ll do what I can to keep your name out of it as the culprit. That said, you’ll need to leave the palace soon.”

Alfonso felt hollowed out, caught between the grief of losing the sharp, capable young thing who had served His Highness so well for four years, and a betrayal he could never have imagined.

He himself was this shocked and furious. What must His Highness be feeling. How much he had cherished this one.

Huu.

He let out another long sigh, then left Riley alone in the room.

“Hic, hic.”

Even after he was gone, the sound of quiet, wretched crying went on and on.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Two days later.

One evening, Andrea had just opened a bottle of whiskey when he stopped.

He had come home after a packed schedule and the familiar hollow, aggrieved feeling had come rolling in right on cue.

‘Hah, unbelievable.’

Over the past two days, he had completed his investigation into the 『A Ballad of Flame and Loss』 affair.

Tracking down the magazine’s main office, which had apparently sensed danger and gone to ground, would take a little longer. But Raul’s account had been confirmed as accurate on every point.

There had been no direct contact with the publisher and no direct instigation from any political faction.

The question was whether to believe what the boy had kept repeating throughout.

‘I truly had no idea Captain Alain was a satirical stand-in for Your Highness! I thought he was just a fictional protagonist, and I just…… I had no other model but Your Highness…… Huwaaang……!’

That miserable face, streaming with tears and snot, was still vivid in his mind.

Red as a ripe peach……

If Raul’s account was true, then the faction trying to undermine him had gone looking for an illustrator, happened to land on Raul by chance, and the boy had inadvertently drawn a likeness accurate enough to be unmistakable.

The people pulling the strings behind that publisher must have been stunned by their unexpected windfall.

They could never have anticipated it would cause this much of a stir.

‘I, I had absolutely no idea the chapters in that story were based on rumors about Your Highness. I really didn’t…… hic!’

Two clear streams of snot were making their way into Raul’s mouth, and Andrea had sighed and handed over a handkerchief.

‘Tch. Wipe your face before you talk.’

He had said it curtly, but the truth was he did not disbelieve the boy.

From what he knew, Raul had come to the palace at sixteen and had likely had little exposure to outside gossip or trends since then.

The outings had only started recently, and the boy had grown up sheltered and doted on within the palace walls.

Of course, he could not take every word of a person who had done something this outrageous entirely at face value.

What a situation, he thought, when the criminal manages to look pitiful.

He pressed his back teeth together and asked again.

‘One question. Why did you draw that mole?’

‘Pardon? The mole……?’

Raul had seemed confused at first, then the color flooded into his face.

The ripe-peach face turned tomato red in an instant.

Andrea was starting to wonder if the boy was going to faint when Raul launched into a rambling confession.

‘Th, that mole is actually proof that I really didn’t know Alain was meant to be Your Highness. If I had known, how could I have been bold enough to put it in?’

It was absurd, but hearing it laid out that way, it made a certain kind of sense.

It would have been a clue that could narrow down who knew about the physical secret and lead straight to the culprit. Doing it deliberately would have been reckless.

Raul kept going, face still a mess.

‘The mole…… I just put it in without thinking. The publisher kept telling me my illustrations were getting more and more popular, and I got a little carried away……’

Raul continued, snot bubble and all.

‘I think I…… got greedy. I wanted to capture the ladies’ hearts a little more. I thought if there was a mole like the one I always saw, women would like it more, and so…… before I knew it, my hand……’