Father, Here's Your Death Flag
After the President left, a heavy silence descended upon the secret room.
“Aaaah……” A faint moan slipped from between Karin’s lips as she lay sprawled in an obscene position across the cold marble floor. The pleasure that had been forcibly injected through Full Hypnosis Mode was slowly receding like the tide, and the severed thread of her reason was finally reconnecting.
Karin had already been told by Edric in advance that the President would perform a regular inspection. Fearing that the shadowy mastermind might notice their clumsy resistance and rewrite her mind forever with a mocking laugh, she had voluntarily buried her ego deep inside herself the moment Full Hypnosis Mode activated, offering no resistance at all. She had done so while firmly believing that her only fellow unfortunate, Edric, would surely awaken her again from this hellish situation.
‘Is it… over…?’
Karin blinked her unfocused crimson eyes, staring blankly into space. Soon the chill of the air against her bare skin made her realize she was still completely naked, and she hastily curled into a ball, overcome by shame.
Her gaze, searching for the man who had restored her ego, soon locked onto the grotesquely shaped woman standing near the sofa beside the bed.
“……What… what is that?”
Karin’s voice shook with horror.
There stood a woman in a neat maid uniform whose chest area had been blatantly cut away. Her eyes were covered, a round gag filled her mouth, and heavy magic headphones sealed her ears, completely depriving her of external information. The way she trembled faintly, left with only primal senses, was a sight that sent chills down the spine.
“Ah, you mean that gift? It’s a bonus the President handed over while he was inspecting her earlier.”
Edric took a leisurely sip of wine and flashed a cold, mocking smile at the terrified Karin. Lounging against the sofa, he looked far icier and more cynical than usual.
“A gift? No matter how you look at it, that’s a woman who’s been remade into a doll! Why is she in that state…!”
“Because she’s the true culprit behind the terror incident that nearly killed my mother.”
At Edric’s frigid declaration, Karin’s face turned deathly pale.
“What……? What are you saying? Wasn’t the culprit that knight-aspirant who blew himself up out of resentment… Surely this woman isn’t his girlfriend?”
“She is.”
At his curt confirmation, Karin cried out in shock.
“Have you lost your mind?! If it’s her, she’s the genuine victim whom even the Empire’s law and the Church declared completely innocent! How could you turn a pitiful woman who lost the man she loved into something like a piece of human furniture?!”
Karin’s eyes blazed with fury. Her knightly pride and compassion for the weak surged forth. Yet Edric merely swirled the remaining wine in his glass and let out a chilly snort. His relaxed demeanor seemed to lightly mock her moral sense of justice.
“Victim? Heh heh. How naïve. How could a mere knight-aspirant have pierced the layered barriers of the Blake County Estate alone and obtained a mana bomb? Did you never consider that someone might have whispered sweet poison into his ear and pushed him toward death?”
“Ah……!”
Karin closed her mouth, unable to refute him. Even her rational mind—honed by handling countless cases in the knight order—instinctively acknowledged his point. A common knight-aspirant breaching a noble house’s barrier and smuggling in a bomb? Such a thing could never have happened without an inside accomplice.
Edric rose slowly from the sofa and approached Emily. He gripped her chin roughly, lifting it as he murmured in a low voice.
“At the time, I was furious. Honestly, I didn’t care if the beast of a father who treated me like an animal died. But if my mother hadn’t come to nurse me… she would have been caught in the explosion right there and perished.”
His cold voice carried deep resentment and murderous intent. Karin’s complexion turned ashen.
‘If Lady Carna hadn’t been in Edric’s room that day…’
Having grasped the full weight of the situation, Karin could only fully understand why Edric treated this woman with such merciless depravity.
Through her conversations with Edric, she had already learned the harsh, ugly truth of the Blake Count family. The scoundrel Edric Blake had lived his entire life as a puppet, ensnared by his aged father’s hypnotic suggestions and destined for ruin. Yet the even more tragic puppet was his own mother, Carna.
The noble Carna, once praised as the Empire’s greatest genius mage, had been thoroughly dominated by hypnosis far longer than Edric. In fact, Edric’s very existence was the tragic product of the Count violating the ego-stripped doll that Carna had become.
Nevertheless, perhaps thanks to his mother’s magnificent maternal love that refused to completely surrender even in that hellish abyss, Edric had been able to shatter the Count’s suggestion that had bound him for life. It was because of the brief note his mother left just before the knight mother and daughter were taken in.
‘How astonished and comforted he must have felt when he learned the secret of his birth and realized his aunt’s maternal love.’
Karin felt a profound sense of kinship. She overlapped her own shock at learning she was Camilla’s adopted rather than biological daughter, and the memory of being moved by her mother’s unwavering love, with Edric’s circumstances.
‘In the moment he realized his parents’ love for their child… that vulgar maid’s shallow greed nearly caused his mother to be found as a gruesome corpse that day. Edric’s rage is completely justified.’
A man for whom filial piety toward his mother was both his ego and his reason for survival. If this was the bloody fury of a son who had nearly lost that mother, it would be more than enough to turn the maid into something far worse than mere “human furniture.”
“S-still… no matter how much she was the culprit, turning a person into a doll… Then you’re no different from the Count…”
The moment Karin voiced her last remaining knightly principles in a trembling voice, Edric coldly cut her off.
“My original purpose wasn’t to turn this woman into a doll.”
He stared into empty space with hollow eyes.
“I was certain that enemies who had been eagerly waiting for the Blake family to collapse were lurking in the shadows. So I commissioned the President. I told him to use any means necessary to drag the true mastermind before me. I would make them confess the truth with my own eyes. But what I received… was only this woman.”
His voice, intricately woven with sorrow, rage, and bitter emptiness, made Karin’s crimson eyes tremble violently.
“Then… is this woman truly the mastermind behind everything?”
When Karin looked at Emily with eyes full of doubt and confusion, Edric removed the gag and roughly tore the headset from her ears, whispering.
“If you’re curious, listen for yourself. See what kind of truth this woman’s vaunted ‘Three-Inch Tongue’ spits out.”
Edric snapped his fingers. Emily gasped like a beast, finally releasing the breath she had been holding. Though her body shook uncontrollably, she squeezed out a desperate, pitiable voice toward where she sensed Karin’s presence.
“Hic… please spare me… I… I only needed money for my critically ill mother’s medicine… Every night she coughed up blood. To save her, I needed a fortune I could never earn in my lifetime…”
Raw desperation dripped from Emily’s voice. Karin’s knightly instinct to protect the weak twitched in response.
“I heard that working at the Blake estate paid three times the usual wage. And above all… the rumor that if I let Young Master Edric molest me, I could receive a huge settlement fee to keep my mouth shut… Hic, this worthless daughter decided to soil her own body to save her mother…”
“What? You deliberately came to be molested for money?!”
As a noble knight, Karin frowned in disbelief at Emily’s confession that she had thrown herself at a man for cash. But Emily wept even more bitterly, as if making excuses.
“Yes… honestly, I was terrified and felt guilty. But when I actually arrived at the estate, the young master was lying in bed wrapped in bandages from full-body fractures. I thought heaven was helping me and felt relieved. However…”
Emily’s body trembled like a leaf in the wind. Thick fear seeped into her voice.
“Some time later, the Count secretly summoned me… and threw the gold pouch I so desperately wanted at my feet as I shivered. Then he pointed at my chest and ordered me to serve the young master lying in bed with it.”
She paused for a moment, then continued as if pitying Edric.
“That’s when I realized… Ah… all the maids who had received settlement money and left hadn’t been molested by the young master at all… They had been forced to serve under the Count’s strict orders, and the money was hush money…”
At that moment, Karin’s breathing stopped. A shock like being struck in the back of the head with a massive hammer pierced her entire body.
The bitter confession he had uttered with a wry smile a few days earlier. Every puzzle piece in Karin’s mind clicked perfectly into place. Edric’s horrific reputation as a scoundrel. All those filthy rumors about him making countless women cry—they had all been a “shield” to hide the old, ugly Count’s lust!
Unaware that Karin’s mentality was being completely reassembled within a massive misunderstanding, Emily’s desperate and pitiable confession continued.
“So I went to the young master’s bedroom, forcibly undressed, and tried to serve him… but he violently knocked my hand away and angrily ordered me to leave at once. He wouldn’t even look at the body of someone as lowly as me…”
‘That’s right—he hasn’t touched me either! Even while injecting coercive pleasure, he has never violated my body. As if he harbors a deep trauma that makes him loathe any woman’s touch…!’
Karin’s crimson eyes now trembled not with shock but with agonizing pity for him. The romance novel Edric had casually tossed her a few days ago flashed vividly through her mind. The ugly, violent old king. The pitiful prince forced to bear every filth and abuse beneath him. The tragedy in the novel overlapped with the Edric before her eyes in a spine-chillingly perfect way.
“When I reported my failure to the Count… instead of his son, he ordered me to serve him with my chest. Blinded by the pile of money thrown before me, I complied against my will. Then, wracked with guilt, I drank and confessed the truth to my boyfriend…”
“Insane… that old man with a maid young enough to be his daughter-in-law…”
Karin ground her teeth in disgust. Emily’s voice now approached a scream.
“The next day, the Count sent me to serve the young master again. But the young master refused me once more and instead drove me back to his father as if he had noticed what the Count had done. That’s when I became certain. The young master was deliberately playing the villain, suffering in the Count’s shadow…”
“Aah… Edric…”
Karin clutched his collar tightly with a trembling hand. A man who had endured treatment worse than a beast under the old devil’s yoke far longer than she had. Perfect, blind trust and guilt toward him paralyzed Karin’s reason.
“That day as well, I went to the Count’s room, took the money, and served him. But the Count’s wife—Lady Carna—stood beside us like a doll, glaring at me as if she wanted to kill me. It terrified me… so I made an excuse to the Count that it was burdensome with his wife present. Then he sent her away, telling her to nurse the young master instead.”
“……….”
“And then… instead of my chest, he tried to embrace my body directly. At that moment, my boyfriend who had secretly infiltrated the mansion saw the scene and lost his mind… He used the only mana he could wield to throw me outside, then detonated the mana bomb he had stolen from the main house… Hic… It’s all my fault… Please forgive me…!”
All the confessions ended. Only Emily’s miserable sobs echoed through the secret room. It was a perfect sob story designed to evoke sympathy, yet she had completely misjudged the depths of Karin’s heart.
Karin looked down at the prostrate Emily with an expression of nausea. Claiming she had no choice for her family’s sake? In the end, wasn’t she just a whore who had crawled between the old mastermind’s legs after being blinded by money? Above all, because of her shallow greed, Edric’s mother had nearly lost her life.
What gripped Karin’s heart even more strongly than the sordid truth was absolute pity for Edric. Along with the blind delusion that Edric Blake had never once lied to her.
“Edric…”
Karin looked up at him with tearful eyes. All distrust and wariness had vanished, replaced solely by blind faith in the only unfortunate savior she could rely on in this hellish world. She glanced at Emily with cold eyes, then leaned against Edric and whispered softly.
“That woman’s situation is pitiful, but… on the other hand, she’s repulsive. In the end, that vulgarity of willingly selling her own body for money…”
“Is that so? She’d make an excellent lukewarm water holder to warm cold drinks.”
“Having her beside me is unpleasant. She’ll interfere with my training, so I have no need for a shameless bottle holder like that! Get rid of her somewhere else immediately!”
The arrogant female knight refused to allow another woman in the space she shared with Edric alone. At her jealous complaint, Edric cheered inwardly but outwardly shrugged as if he had no choice.
“If you insist so strongly, I’ll remove her. However, since she was a gift, I can’t simply discard her out of courtesy.”
He stroked the trembling Emily’s hair and smiled a cold, sinister grin.
“Then… I suppose I should send her to my father’s bedroom as a ‘consolation gift’ from his daughter-in-law, just like that day.”
Karin nodded silently at his words. In her crimson eyes, she saw only a kind man thoughtfully removing a repulsive woman for her sake. The perfect justification to deploy the ultimate tactical weapon that would cut short the old raccoon’s life straight into the Count’s bedroom—where the most hideous desires coiled—had been flawlessly packaged under the name of Karin’s “jealousy.”