Chapter 50
The pain didn’t last long.
That was because Princess Catherine had sent a priest. The priest, who had come rushing over in the middle of dinner, stared blankly at the mangled state of Owen’s thigh and kept muttering in confusion.
“No, it definitely healed completely back then, so how did this happen…?”
He kept asking how a wound that had supposedly healed could possibly have reopened like this, saying that if it had still been half-healed, Owen wouldn’t have been able to walk around at all. But Owen, as if the whole thing were a nuisance, only gave him a careless answer—said it had happened while he was eating.
“While I was eating… yes.”
The priest’s dazed murmur echoed softly through the room. If she could have, Sylvia would have apologized. But by then the torn flesh had not yet been mended, and she was hurting even more than the man who’d actually been injured.
“For now, please just heal him. The two of us are suffering at the moment.”
“Ah—yes? Yes, of course.”
He didn’t fully understand what she meant by “the two of us are suffering,” but it was true that he had tried to satisfy his curiosity in front of people who were in pain, so the priest reflected deeply on his behavior and immediately set about healing him with diligent bursts of divine power. Once the fierce sensation of torn flesh knitting back together had passed, the pain vanished so suddenly it was as if it had been washed away.
Sylvia gasped and lifted her head. Her face was streaked with tears, and she was breathless, but it no longer hurt.
“I’m terribly sorry. I’ve truly never seen anything like this before. For flesh to suddenly split open while eating. Unless one steps into the Dark Lands, wounds healed by sacred power simply don’t reopen… Please, be especially careful. I will pray for you.”
After the priest bowed deeply and withdrew, Owen straightened his upper body. He was looking down at his blood-soaked leg and the trousers torn open by the treatment with obvious displeasure. Perhaps disgusted by the blood covering his hands as well, he rose at once and began washing them in the wide basin of water nearby.
To Sylvia, the sight of him—only moments ago bleeding profusely, and then, with the wound healed, suddenly standing up to wash his hands—felt bizarrely unfamiliar. Less like a person and more like something unnervingly inhuman; impressive, frightening, she couldn’t even tell which.
“Doesn’t it hurt you?”
“It does. I’m just good at enduring it.”
“Why, because you got beaten up a lot growing up?”
It wasn’t as though she had meant to snap like that.
In her defense, the illness that made her mouth run on its own was still very much in progress. Sylvia suddenly felt miserable again and clutched at her head.
“Why am I like this? Shouldn’t we call the priest back? It’s been like this since earlier. I just say whatever comes to mind without thinking. If I try to hold it in, it feels like my head’s going to explode…”
“I know. It seems like you took a truth serum.”
“A truth serum?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how he got it. It’s rare.”
After he finished washing his hands, Owen soaked a towel in the water and wiped the blood from his thigh as well. Sylvia turned her face away so she wouldn’t have to look at the hard muscles of his thigh, which kept flashing into view, and asked,
“How do you know about that? I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”
“It’s circulated secretly only within the Holy Empire. It’d be stranger if you had heard of it.”
“Are you from the Holy Empire, then?”
At that, he laughed.
“Did you forget already? I’m Count Bronovich’s uncle.”
“No, I know that, but… sometimes you really are strange. And the way that wound suddenly burst open like that. You were the one who made that happen, weren’t you?”
The timing had been far too perfect for her to think otherwise. Owen let out a short, “Ah,” then apologized with a sincere expression.
“I’m sorry about that. There was no other way to get you out. I’d already given you the truth serum, and I didn’t think they’d let you slip away quietly, so I made a scene.”
“No, sure, it hurt, but that’s not the point. What I want to know is how you even did it.”
“If I tell you, then what are you going to do about it?”
It wasn’t a smug tone, nor was it teasing. He seemed genuinely curious about what she would do with the answer, truly interested in the workings of her heart. His amber eyes were so unguarded in that moment that they looked even more innocent than a child’s. And yet the question that followed carried a faint, aching urgency.
“If I really am a danger to the Empire, then what will you do?”
Sylvia suddenly thought she might have heard something like that before.
When she’d been at the knights’ quarters, sitting in Owen’s shabby room, he had asked something similar.
“What are you so worried about? That I might be a threat to the Empire?”
“…”
“Don’t worry. That can’t happen.”
Back then she had thought he was overestimating her patriotism, but hearing the same question again gave her the strange sensation of a thread dangling somewhere in the distance. There was the presence of a string she could tug, and if she pulled hard enough, the truth would come trailing after it.
Sylvia looked at Owen’s eyes—quietly fixed on her, as though asking her to take his side—and murmured before she could stop herself,
“I don’t know. But I trust you, so even if I hear all sorts of strange things about you, I won’t betray you right away.”
She’d meant to think a little longer about whether to take hold of that thread, but perhaps because of the truth serum, the words simply slipped out.
Owen laughed softly, as if he couldn’t help himself, and Sylvia blushed late, more embarrassed by that smile of his than by the absurdly embarrassing words she’d just said—“I trust you,” of all things.
“You asked that on purpose, didn’t you? To take advantage of the situation.”
“If I wanted to take advantage of it, I’d have asked something else.”
Looking at her peach-flushed cheeks, he tilted his head with disarming ease. His lowered eyes carried a languid, seductive quality without even trying.
“Want to sleep with me?”
“Are you insane? How can you say something like that when you look like that?”
She knew it had to be a joke, and yet she couldn’t stop the protest from bursting out of her.
But Owen moved slowly closer and sat down beside her. The narrow bed dipped under his weight, dragging her body naturally toward him. He took her hand, which had stretched out to steady herself, and held it gently.
“I can’t let you go alone after this, anyway. There’s a very high chance that people sent by Duke Araspe will storm your room. Before the serum wears off, they’ll probably try to drag you off and make you spill whatever the princess is hiding from them. So it’s settled that the two of us are going to my room. The question is what we do there for the rest of the night.”
By then, she could no longer deny that his blunt suggestion had been sincere.
Her face twisted strangely. Really now—was there anyone in the world who asked to sleep together in that tone?
If she had to summarize his meaning, it was practically: We’re going to end up in my room anyway. We’ve got nothing else to do, so why not have sex? She was the one who’d taken the truth serum, so why was he the one making such a delicate proposal in such a lazy, uninteresting way?
And yet, while his mouth kept saying things that sounded entirely devoid of enthusiasm, Owen’s hand, threaded between her fingers and laced tight with hers, was astonishingly warm. Slowly, he turned their joined hands over and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist as if stamping a seal there.
“Sylvia Appleton. Want to sleep with me?”
His breath brushed hotly over the blue-veined skin beneath her wrist. Then, slowly, he traced upward along her arm and left another kiss on the tender flesh where it dipped inward. Because of that, their faces grew terribly close.
Especially because Sylvia was staring down at him in a daze. She looked at his smooth face—the kind of face God might have carefully molded by hand—as if, given enough time, she could work out its ingredients. What she’d actually wanted to say was, I think you’re really strange.
But the truth serum was a drug that dragged answers out of questions. And if you attached the name in front and asked, the person being questioned could no longer give any other answer. Sylvia didn’t know that, but Owen did, and contrary to his earlier claim that he didn’t want to take advantage of her, he had in the end made thorough use of the fact that Sylvia had taken truth serum.
“Mm.”
At her quiet answer, Owen closed his eyes and let go of whatever guilt remained. The answer was too good for him to be troubled by such a small thing. He lifted his head and kissed her.
The sensation of her soft, small lips being drawn into his mouth was always lovely. He hadn’t told Sylvia this, but she sometimes appeared in his dreams. Even before the first time they had sex together at Heston’s engagement ceremony, she had appeared there often.
“Hnn…”
A moan slipped from her lips. As Owen pressed into her parted mouth, he nipped lightly at her. He licked at the dampness of her saliva, enjoying the way the quiet air around them turned thick and wet with sound. Inside the warmth of her mouth, he gently rubbed his tongue over the soft, delicate membrane that moistened so easily beneath him.
It seemed to feel strange to her; Sylvia drew in a breath and tried to pull back. He wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her from retreating, then worried at her lips and sucked on her tongue.
The way she opened and closed her jaw, the way her mouth brushed hesitantly against his in a timid echo of response—it was all unbearably thrilling. He wanted to strip her down layer by layer, to chew her up slowly and devour her just the same.
Owen leaned back a little at last, then met her hazy blue eyes and said,
“Let’s do it, Sylvia. Let’s sleep together.”
***