‘Stop.’

Andrea pressed a hand to his forehead and cut him off.

The sheer brazenness of what was being cheerfully confessed was too much to bear.

He felt humiliated, and yet a helpless laugh kept threatening to surface. He was furious, and yet he found it faintly endearing. He was the one with the problem.

So he made his voice colder and laid down the threat.

‘You know this qualifies as lese-majesty, fraud, defamation, contempt, and treason, all at once, don’t you?’

As the list of serious charges poured from Andrea’s mouth without end, Raul apparently concluded a death sentence was possible, squeezed his eyes shut, and started sobbing all over again.

Andrea watched fat teardrops fall one after another onto those small clenched fists, and let out a troubled sigh.

‘So. Did you at least make decent money selling me?’

Raul was still hiccupping through tears but nodded honestly, and Andrea swallowed a hollow laugh.

‘What, was the salary here not enough?’

‘It’s not that, but…… hic……’

After a brief hesitation, pressed by Andrea’s silence, Riley confessed the rest.

‘I wanted to save more…… and……’

‘Save for what?’

‘I wanted to buy a small house somewhere on the outskirts of the city.’

A short silence followed.

‘You wanted to leave the palace?’

Andrea had not scolded him, and yet Raul’s shoulders heaved harder with crying.

‘I wasn’t sure how long I could stay here, hic, and I had a vague feeling that someday I’d need to learn to live on my own.’

‘……Live on your own…… And?’

‘……I also wanted to study painting properly once I left here. To enroll formally at a higher arts institute, hic…… and that takes tuition money.’

‘Ah.’

So there was a dream.

Come to think of it, the boy had been taken in young and had been living however circumstances allowed, never really free to pursue what he wanted.

From what he had heard, the boy was half noble blood, so there was probably some pride in there too.

But the words that came out ran contrary to his thoughts.

‘So you sold my body for your dream.’

The already-pitiful creature leapt up and wailed.

‘If I had known Captain Alain was a satirical stand-in for Your Highness, I would never have drawn it! I drew it because I didn’t know. Hic.’

Raul was crying again, and Andrea jabbed his forehead with one finger.

‘Then draw yourself and sell that. Why sell me, with no fear at all.’

Raul pulled his neck in slightly and answered through sniffles.

‘Because…… because my body isn’t impressive at all.’

Andrea glanced at the thin, slight frame, and had to admit the point.

‘True. If your body had been Alain’s model, the novel would never have sold.’

Andrea rubbed his face with his hands, let out a weary sigh, and waved a hand.

‘Go back to your room for now. I’ll decide on your punishment and what’s to be done with you shortly.’

Three days had passed since he sent the boy away.

The other attendants were covering the gap, but it was genuinely inconvenient.

He had gone back to bathing himself, and while he did accept help getting dressed, it never felt quite right.

The precise, careful styling Raul always produced had vanished entirely from Andrea’s appearance.

Anyone else looking would have noticed no difference at all, and his natural build was fine enough that a simple suit kept him at the top of the fashionista rankings regardless. But Andrea himself felt the subtle difference.

‘Have I completely absorbed that boy’s taste?’

It was not that he minded losing the title of the kingdom’s foremost fashionista, but still. Dropping in the rankings was a bit much.

He had also brought in a new attendant who could manage hair quickly as a stand-in for Raul, but that was not satisfying either. Beyond the subtle difference in the result, the more fundamental issue was that having anyone else touch him simply felt wrong.

On top of all that, word of the novel had apparently spread thoroughly through the nobles’ salons, and wherever he went, the looks that landed on him carried unmistakable meaning.

‘Irritating.’

Days had been slipping by like that, nothing resolved, when one evening Andrea came back from the main palace, tossed his jacket aside, and opened another bottle.

The room felt strangely quiet.

Before, Raul would have been waiting and would have followed him in right away, chattering about some useless thing that had happened during the day, and Andrea would have snapped back, and they would have bickered.

Somehow, by the end of it, the fatigue of the day would ease and the tightly wound feeling would loosen a little.

But calling in one of the other attendants for close personal service felt wrong, even though they had all been at Eli Palace for years. Whoever he tried to substitute, there was something off-putting about it.

‘What’s the difference?’

He could not identify the reason, but he concluded that the sharp-eyed, impertinent boy had been more comfortable to have around than he had realized.

‘Hah. If that little thing had just not pulled this stunt, daily life would have stayed peaceful.’

But then, what was he actually going to do with the boy.

He genuinely had no answer.

By the rules, a serious punishment was warranted. But he had no intention of going that far.

In that case, stripping the pension and expelling him from the palace was the next best option.

The problem was that even that felt wrong.

Stripping the pension and throwing that pitiful creature out, what would he live on.

Andrea’s mood twisted unpleasantly.

But if he felt sorry enough to let him keep the pension and severance pay, that was exactly what the boy wanted.

A crime of this magnitude rewarded with the fulfillment of the criminal’s wishes. Absolutely not.

Andrea rested his head crookedly against one fist and thought, and his eyes narrowed slightly.

‘The more I think about it, the more outrageous it is……’

And the more outrageous it felt, the less inclined he was to hand down a serious punishment, which made the whole thing more outrageous still.

Right after the Queen Dowager passed away, he had been moved by those sad eyes staring up at him and taken the boy in, and this was how it had been repaid.

His neck actually felt stiff at the back, and he reached up and kneaded it slowly with his hand.

“The nerve.”

Using him as a source of income was bad enough, but the boy had secretly wanted to leave?

His teeth ground together quietly, and yet the order to dismiss him was something he kept putting off, day after day.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Days dragged on with nothing decided, until Alfonso finally came to him.

“Um…… what should we do about processing Raul’s dismissal? The pension…… should that be revoked as well?”

Andrea rubbed his index finger across his lips and snapped back.

“I’m thinking. Stop pestering me, Alfonso. Heartless.”

He was taking it out on Alfonso for no good reason, and the days kept slipping by in a blur.

One of those days, after bathing on his own, Andrea came out in just his robe, took the brandy a servant had prepared, and stepped out onto the terrace.

The palace gardens spread below, evening lanterns lit here and there throughout.

It was a beautiful view, but knowing as he did how fierce the struggle for power playing out within those walls truly was, a quiet bitterness settled over him.

He had many loyal subjects, but no family he could speak openly with.

He was past the age of feeling sorry about that, but the blow of being betrayed by someone he had thought of as one of the few he could be at ease with seemed to have hit harder than expected.

His grip on the crystal glass tightened without warning.

He tipped the ice from the glass into his mouth in one go, went back inside, and pulled out the sketchbook he had taken from Raul.

The boy had apparently been collecting his work over the years. There were ten of these sketchbooks in total.

‘I may not be the only one he used as a subject.’

Looking for additional offenses, Andrea started with the oldest sketchbook and went through it with sharp eyes.

But what he found were drawings that appeared to have been made much earlier, in pencil, and among them the most numerous were of a woman who seemed to be Raul’s mother.

There were also landscapes, a garden with warm sunlight falling through it, rabbits and ducks.

Turning page after page, he reached a point where Marietta, his own mother, began to appear.

After Raul’s mother Mina had passed away, the subject of the drawings had changed.

The skill had improved markedly by then, enough to make the subject clearly recognizable.

He had heard that his mother Queen Marietta had been very fond of Raul.