Chapter 9

Fabienne seized Riley’s chin and wrenched it upward.

Riley’s eyelids, held shut by a heavy sedative all this time, struggled open.

“Should I call you Miss Spencer, or Miss Radonel? Or simply Riley, common birth and all? I wondered who had dared make a laughingstock of my son before the entire kingdom, and it was you.”

You, of all people.

Fabienne curved the corners of her red lips.

This creature had drawn her precious son Henry, the legitimate heir of the Aurelion royal house, as a hopeless degenerate and spread it everywhere. Drawn him to look like a debauched fool, thrown into even sharper contrast against the cunning, flawless Andrea.

Thinking of the daily comic strips that had mocked Henry’s everyday life and gained such popularity made her teeth grind. What a weak-minded, contemptible character they had made him out to be.

Overlooking the fact that the illustrations had only recorded what her son had actually done, Fabienne suppressed another surge of murderous intent.

The hand gripping Riley’s delicate chin tightened, and her nails bit into the skin.

Fabienne dropped Riley like a discarded object and turned to the mercenary standing beside her.

“That woman Nina, she’s been properly dealt with?”

The mercenary in the black mask gave a silent nod.

Fabienne clicked her tongue and laughed coldly.

“Did she really think she’d survive, when she was the one writing the articles and columns?”

Whether you wrote the words or drew the pictures, if you had targeted Henry, you should not have expected to live.

But this particular creature was still useful for luring Andrea in, so she had been kept alive.

There was also a final negotiation to conduct, so she had no intention of touching her while she was in custody. No point in damaging the other side’s weakness ahead of time and lowering the odds of a successful deal.

Fabienne looked down at Riley, still drifting in a haze, with eyes full of disgust and contempt.

“Good. The artist is ready?”

“Yes. A skilled one has been prepared.”

Fabienne tilted her chin toward Riley and smiled.

“Tell him to paint her face so that not a single person in the kingdom fails to recognize it. Surely she’ll only understand her crimes and wish she were dead once she’s been humiliated the same way.”

Fabienne tilted her head with a cold smile and delivered her pronouncement to the crumpled Riley.

“I’ll serialize your novel for you too, one chapter a day. You’ll be so ashamed you’ll want to bite off your own tongue, and the crown prince will bleed a little more each day. I’m not sure how much he cares for something like you, but I suppose we’ll find out.”

Her eyes gleamed with cold, vindictive pleasure in the dark.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

“Ugh.”

Some time had passed. Curled up like a dead thing in the darkness, Riley began to stir. Consciousness returned in slow degrees, and with it came pain all over her body. She let out a faint m*an.

She forced her eyelids open and blinked several times, trying to focus on where she was.

But before she could make sense of anything around her, a voice reached her from somewhere nearby.

“Um…… miss? You’re, you’re awake. Here, drink some water first and try to come to yourself.”

Quiet words, and then the sound of careful footsteps approaching.

Something cold, like a glass of water, was pressed to her lips.

Only then did Riley feel the burning thirst. She grabbed the glass and drank in deep, desperate gulps.

The cold liquid moving through her seemed to sharpen her consciousness and bring sensation back to her body.

“Ah……”

Her body refused to cooperate, though, whether from the lingering effects of the sedative or something else.

She tried to sit up and collapsed again. The stranger caught her and spoke once more.

“P, please stay lying down, miss. It seems you need a little more time for the drug to wear off.”

The man carefully laid her back down and returned to what appeared to be his spot, a small desk on the other side of the room, and began to work.

The scratching of a pen nib against paper started up.

Riley lay there listening to that sound for a long while, gathering herself, and finally managed to push out her voice. It came out terribly hoarse.

“Um…… where…… is this……?”

She had no memory of why she was here or what had happened to her.

The man at the desk, glancing back and forth between it and Riley’s face, shook his head with an apologetic look.

“I honestly don’t know either. I was brought here just a couple of days ago myself.”

This young painter’s name was Bellon.

He too had been seized by strangers on his way home after a day’s work, and given a strange demand.

He was to paint an exact likeness of the young woman who had been brought in before him and was lying unconscious.

More precisely, he was to take the face of this young woman and use it for the protagonist of a newly serialized novel. It was a deeply unsettling request.

But armed mercenaries had locked him in a lightless underground room and given the order, so surviving meant complying.

That was why he was drawing the moment the woman woke up.

The fact that the female protagonist in the illustrations had been kidnapped somewhere made his skin crawl with how closely it mirrored reality, but there was nothing he could do.

After he had begged one of the mercenaries who brought meals to please let him go, saying he could not simply draw something like this without question, he had been knocked unconscious with a blow to the jaw, and since then he had not had the courage to say another word.

At least they were not actually torturing the woman the way the illustrations depicted. That was something.

Drawing a woman being tortured was agonizing enough. Watching it happen in front of him would have been unbearable.

Bellon rubbed his still-swollen, aching jaw and kept his pen moving, for the sake of staying alive.

“Hah……”

He had been a painter who made his living on Montmartre hill, selling portraits of passing lovers and postcards of flowers.

How had he ended up tangled in something like this.

He had concluded that if he did not do as he was told, neither he nor this young woman would survive. So for now, he would comply.

If he kept his wits about him, surely a chance to escape would come.

Bellon had nearly finished drawing the first chapter’s scene when a mercenary came in carrying dinner.

The man had every manner of weapon hanging from his belt, and the sight made Bellon tremble. The poor painter had no choice but to hunch over his work and pretend to be absorbed in it.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

A grim tension was quietly spreading through the capital, Tennetcy.

The crown prince had launched a sweeping search of Marquis Karan’s residence and business properties.

Other parliamentary faction nobles who had their premises searched by military forces without any stated charges were furious. Word came that some of them were gathering their private armies from their provincial estates, but Andrea’s edge was sharper.

After several families that had been uncooperative with the crown prince’s administration were thoroughly raided, the searches stopped, and the rising tension settled for the time being.

But every one of Andrea’s attendants and advisors was silenced by the dangerous air around him, unable to open their mouths.

Unless they had a new lead on the disappearance, speaking carelessly in front of those blazing, piercing eyes was impossible.

So they only reported the size of the additional forces dispatched to the western towns and the southern coast.

In the midst of all this, the serialized novel targeting Riley continued without pause and had now reached its fifth installment. The preview summary described the female protagonist being subjected to brutal t*rture, a n*de portrait of her being painted by another artist, and the image being distributed across the city to humiliate her.

Alfonso, who obtained the content first, had to cover his mouth to hide his expression of horror.

Until now, he had held onto a small hope that it might all be coincidence, or that Miss Riley had been targeted at random by the crown prince’s enemies. Perhaps negotiation and a deal were still possible.

But with the plot developing this way, anyone could see it was retaliation for the Minerve’s articles.

Thinking of Andrea alongside his worry for Riley and Nina made Alfonso’s blood run cold. He broke into a cold sweat, certain that something truly terrible was about to happen this time.

Sure enough, Andrea’s expression changed the moment Alfonso handed him that day’s installment.

The already brittle blankness on his face gave way to something that burned with killing intent.

Alfonso quickly offered a possibility.

“This is certainly fabricated content meant to apply psychological pressure.”

He said it with every optimistic circuit he could engage, but the truth was that no one could know whether what was being serialized was actually happening to Riley or not.

That uncertainty was what made it feel like madness.

The enemy was cruel and calculating.

They had discovered that Riley was precious to Andrea, and they were turning the very methods he had used against his enemies back on him, bleeding him dry one day at a time.

The color had already drained completely from Andrea’s face.

Alfonso had been racking his brain over who the mastermind could be, but the list of suspects was far too long.