Chapter 73

Instead of resorting to pointless violence, Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion pressed the corner of her phone hard between her brows. Her face had gone chalk-white. Sanche stared at her, baffled by the fear on her face.

“What’s with you? I know your commander is a big deal, but he’s still more or less your rank, so—ack!”

Sanche screamed and clutched his forehead.

“What was that for?!”

Erabelle had finally jabbed the corner of her phone squarely into it.

“Why are you hitting me?! What did I even say wrong to make you—ow! Stop hitting me! I said stop!”

“You little...!”

And then she unleashed a torrent of curses.

None of the security detail made any attempt to stop Erabelle. She was the only one exhausting herself, anyway.

The difference in their physical levels was like an earthworm facing a great white shark. Their young master was in no danger whatsoever.

If they interfered, the young lady would draw a line, and the young master would inevitably take his frustration out on them instead.

So, as always, the guards politely pretended not to notice the siblings’ quarrel. There were no outsiders around whose presence required them to preserve appearances, either.

“You little brat, crawling all the way up to the capital for no damn reason!”

Erabelle swore without restraint. Perhaps a few years in the military had broadened her vocabulary; she had an impressively fresh repertoire.

After pouring out a long stream of abuse, she moved on to threats.

“Do nothing. Got it? Keep your mouth shut and sit still. Try anything—anything at all—and I’ll have you rotting in an outer-planet prison for the next few hundred years. I’m not joking. Finding a plausible charge and pinning it on you would be nothing.”

Even the guards looked mildly uncomfortable at that, but they still did not intervene.

Sanche, after all, had spent his entire life safely sheltered on a ruled world.

If they had known they were actually going to encounter an Avganis, they might have taken Erabelle’s warning to turn back a little more seriously.

“T-that’s going too far.”

“Shut up.”

Erabelle gave him one final warning.

“You’re going to behave yourself and keep quiet. Understood?”

“Okay, okay.”

Cowed, Sanche stammered out his answer. But even then, the tension in Erabelle’s face did not ease.

Sanche’s own expression gradually darkened.

He had never seen Erabelle Vermilion like this before.

When she had been adopted into House Vermilion, he had been fifteen. Even then, she had always carried herself like someone who had already seen everything there was to see, indifferent to whatever happened around her.

Before the Senate had even had a chance to pressure her, she had drawn up, signed, and notarized a formal renunciation of inheritance.

After that, as though the family meant nothing to her so long as it was not the Count, she chose her own path without consulting anyone, left for some obscure academy in outer space, and, as if that were not enough, sent a curt notice a few years later announcing that she had enlisted.

To Sanche, Erabelle had always been an unfathomable world unto herself.

There had only ever been one thing she wanted.

To return to her original home.

At first, Sanche had assumed there must be something extraordinary waiting for her there. Wealth, prestige, power—something that made House Vermilion look insignificant by comparison.

He had tried asking about it once and got cursed out until his ears rang.

When she told him to get lost if he was going to spout nonsense, he snapped back that this was his house, so why should he be the one to leave? If anyone should go, it was her.

And then she actually left.

He had spent nearly a month begging her forgiveness.

He must have heard, “Why would I go into your house?” at least a hundred times.

Erabelle Vermilion could hold a grudge for an impressively long time...

“...”

Remembering the whole miserable episode, Sanche’s face darkened even further.

He glared at her on impulse. When their eyes met, Erabelle sighed.

That only irritated him more.

If she’s acting like this, then what the hell is wrong with that commander?

His voice over the phone had sounded absurdly sweet, though.

Sanche thought back to what he had heard earlier.

It was not as though he had been eavesdropping. He had been sitting right beside her.

Even so, the more he thought about it, the less sense it made.

Dezeb Avganis, the sole legitimate heir to the Avganis marquessate.

His reputation was impeccable, and his private life was said to be just as spotless.

On the way to the capital, Sanche had done some digging out of concern and had only reconfirmed the same conclusion as everyone else: the rumors were false.

Dezeb Avganis was practically the ideal embodiment of the empire’s highest nobility.

He was not the sort of man his sister—whose lifelong goal was to escape this world entirely—would ever get tangled up with.

Nor did Sanche see why a man like that would have any interest in her.

And there was absolutely nothing he could find that explained why Erabelle Vermilion was reacting like this.

Could he secretly be some kind of lunatic?

No.

There was no way a man like that would behave this way over something so trivial.

Sanche’s imagination began spiraling toward the worst possibilities.

By the time their car pulled up at the hotel, he had constructed in his head a deranged psychopath who belonged in immediate psychiatric confinement.

“Erabelle.”

So when he saw the spectacularly beautiful man standing in the hotel lobby, Sanche suffered a brief moment of complete cognitive dissonance.

Hair so black it seemed to swallow the light. Coolly shaped eyes. Pearl-toned skin.

His features were so flawless they looked illustrated, and even the shadows across his face seemed beautiful.

Sanche had known from photographs that he was exceptionally handsome, but this was...

“You got here early.”

This was ridiculous.

An impossibly gorgeous man was speaking to his sister in a voice so gentle it could melt a person on the spot.

Sanche had never seen any man look at Erabelle like that.

The man was smiling openly, his eyes curving with unmistakable affection.

Erabelle had been single since birth.

She had about three thousand celebrities she stanned, but absolutely nothing resembling an actual dating history.

His mouth slowly falling open, Sanche watched in stunned silence as the picture-perfect man leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to his sister’s cheek, smiling brightly all the while.

So right now...

What exactly am I looking at?

“...Gyeong, I think there’s something wrong with my eyes. My sister is being... kissed by an incredible beauty...”

“I am seeing it as well...”

At the sound of their voices, the man glanced in their direction and let his eyes curve into a faint smile.

Holy...

My heart...

Sanche clutched his trembling chest.

For a moment, he had genuinely felt his life was in danger.

Is this what my sister calls getting hit by a stan-crash?

A sudden terror seized him.

At this rate, he might actually start understanding Erabelle’s fangirl obsession.

***

“Home?”

About twenty minutes earlier, in the lobby of Hotel Paragon.

Commander Dezeb Avganis nudged the corpse of a Sanctuary monk with the toe of his shoe and asked again, as though the answer had taken him completely by surprise.

What made it even more absurd was that he ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) had obviously expected this possibility, had released the Dogs in advance, and yet he was still genuinely irritated.

Hearing Erabelle say she was going home with another man had put him in a fresh bad mood.

The Dogs collectively held their breath, careful not to draw his attention.

“Ah, that place. It’s basically an abandoned house, isn’t it? Your brother’s visiting the capital for the first time, and you’re planning to make him stay there?”

He prodded the pulped remains with his shoe.

“We have a perfectly good home. I’m not letting your only brother sleep in a dump. Feed him first. Bring him to the hotel afterward. I’ll send you the address.”

Dezeb hung up as though the conversation had been perfectly ordinary, then immediately bent over and began dry-heaving.

It was not because of the corpse he had just reduced to pulp.

Lately, Dezeb had developed a peculiar sickness.

Whenever Erabelle grew close to someone else, he felt like vomiting.

He retched uselessly into a lobby trash can, rinsed his mouth with bottled water, spat, then automatically reached for a cigarette.

“Clean it up.”

The cleanup team moved quickly to clear the area.

A moment later, Dezeb asked out of nowhere,

“An adopted daughter can marry a legitimate son, right?”

When Aries Cider met Dezeb’s unfocused gaze, the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

“Not unless she’s formally disowned first. Even then, the procedures alone take around five years. Nobles built all kinds of legal barriers into the system specifically to keep adoptees and trueborn children from getting involved with each other.”

“Yeah?”

So disownment was the way forward, then.

Dezeb had apparently started worrying that the young Vermilion heir and Erabelle might develop feelings for one another.

Aries quietly turned the surveillance laptop toward him.

[This little punk’s head is full of rainbow candyland... fuck... crawling all the way up to the capital for no damn reason... must be nice having such an easy life... I should just rip his...!]

A brief silence followed.

It was a good thing they had already cleared the lobby.

Not that Aries had actually needed to show him.

Dezeb was watching the exact same feed.

“Her swearing got a lot worse after the conflict zone.”

“She always swore a little.”

Aries desperately wanted to know what Erabelle sounded like when she cursed in front of Dezeb.

“And why are you so interested?”

Dezeb shot him a suspicious look.

To prove his innocence, Aries immediately held up a photo of the lover he was currently seeing.

Physical Level 6.

Unlike his master, Aries’ eyesight was perfectly normal.