Sister-in-Law, You Can't Do This - 4
When I brought out the tea on a tray, Louise's eyes went wide as saucers.
From the look she was giving Elodie, it was clear some pretty serious talk had already gone down.
One wrong word and this is going to be hell.
Without a word, I set a cup down in front of each of them.
The table was large enough for everyone Louise had brought with her—plus me, Elodie, Marie, and Camilla—to sit around it comfortably.
The moment I took the seat beside Elodie, Louise fixed me with a stare that could kill. It wasn't just sharp; the edge was gleaming. She looked angry enough that it wouldn't have been strange if she'd thrown a punch right then and there. Even the woman sitting with her was radiating open hostility, her eyes saying exactly what she thought of the trash sitting across from her.
"Excuse me."
A voice full of thorns slipped past Louise's lips.
"Yes? What is it?"
"I've been told you're… deeply involved with every woman here. Is that true?"
What? Out of nowhere? I was so flustered I couldn't even get my mouth open.
I glanced sideways at Elodie. A silent nod was all the answer I needed. Looking at the resolute set of her face, I roughly understood what had happened.
Why would she tell her that?
It made no sense.
I let a beat of silence pass, then slowly spoke.
"I think the two of us ought to talk this over calmly, just us."
She'd already spilled everything, so denying it would only pour oil on the fire. Meeting it head-on was the only way.
"Camilla. The second floor's free, right?"
I turned my gaze toward her. My plan was to step out of the house for a bit and finish the conversation somewhere else.
"No reservations, no. So you intend to talk there, I take it."
"Yes. If you'll excuse us for a moment."
Too many eyes made the atmosphere restless; it was hard to settle anything. So I rose slowly from my seat. It wasn't that I'd done anything wrong, but from a little sister's point of view, this wouldn't be easy to accept.
"Will you come with me?"
"Fine."
When I asked Louise, she stood without protest—almost as if she'd been waiting for this.
She's not actually going to beat me to death, right?
I was nervous inside, but I kept my face calm as I headed out.
A neighborhood café wouldn't have been bad, but that still wouldn't have been just the two of us.
"A practice room. Is this yours?"
All the way down the corridor, into the elevator, and right up to the practice room door, Louise had kept a punishing silence. Now she was the first to speak. She seemed a little calmer; some of the boiling rage had cooled.
I nodded and locked the practice room door behind us so no one could walk in and break the flow. Both of us had already taken off our shoes.
"Yes, it is."
"I see."
Louise only nodded; she didn't press any deeper. Normally she would have started with whether it was mine and gone straight on to whether the whole building belonged to me without a second thought.
"Anyway, that isn't what's important."
She dropped heavily onto the floor. I sat across from her. Standing the whole time would have been uncomfortable for both of us.
"Let's continue what we were talking about earlier. You said the other two women live with you as well, correct?"
"Yes, that's right."
"And my sister accepted that?"
"Hard as it may be to believe, yes."
When I answered without resistance, Louise's brows knit neatly together. She even crossed her arms, making her displeasure blatantly obvious. Fair enough. Even in a world that tolerated polygamy, watching her older sister—a woman of a prestigious house, no less—simply fold and accept it would leave a bitter taste.
"Ah… I can't stand this."
A bone-chilling grind of teeth came from Louise's mouth. Goosebumps raced down my spine just hearing it.
"Mind if I hit you just once?"
She clenched her fist tight as she asked. It wasn't really a question; it was closer to a notice. She must have felt like she'd been pickpocketed—except the stolen thing wasn't money, it was a person, so the fury ran that much hotter.
And if I said yes here? She looked ready to drive that fist straight into my solar plexus and work off the anger on the spot.
I'm going to die.
Would a high-ranking Awakened's punch merely hurt? Odds were good it would punch a clean hole straight through me and kill me instantly. Especially since I was still an ordinary person.
"I don't suppose telling you to calm down would help much, would it?"
"Of course not! The man who's marrying my sister is keeping two other women on the side and I'm just supposed to let it slide?!"
Her voice suddenly ballooned. Her eyes went round. The anger she'd been holding down had finally hit its limit and exploded all at once.
"You're right. Perfectly right. Go ahead."
I closed my eyes, ready to accept my fate. Between the rest of us, the arrangement had come about suddenly yet somehow smoothly. Louise had never been given that time. One day, out of nowhere—without any chance to prepare her heart or even sense something coming—she'd taken the full shock.
Just don't die.
With that thought, I kept my eyes shut and waited for the blow. The building might take some damage, but I trusted the walls wouldn't get punched clean through.
"Haa…"
In, out. The woman's ragged breathing stirred tension and fear in equal measure—every bit as unsettling as the low, eerie BGM that creeps under a horror game.
"I won't hit you. Open your eyes and explain it from the beginning. Calmly."
At that far quieter voice, I lifted my closed lids. Expression, tone—everything about her was much calmer than a moment ago.
"Understood."
I slowly traced back through the past and put the memories into words: the first time I met Elodie, how we settled here afterward, everything up to today. I simply skipped over the old stories that concerned Marie, Camilla, and Elodie herself.
"…So you met by chance, my sister confessed first, then through Henri you met a friend of Valerie's, and somehow even someone who used to be on the side of the specters got mixed in?"
Marie I could understand, but with Camilla she could have just said she was under observation. Instead she'd apparently dumped the whole package. That was clearly Elodie's mistake—or maybe leaving only Camilla out had felt too awkward, so she'd done it on purpose.
"Embarrassing as it is, one thing led to another and it turned out this way."
"'One thing led to another.' Looking at it, there seems to be some special circumstance… Is it something that can't be explained?"
Louise had zeroed in on the part I'd deliberately left out. Ordinary meetings and goodwill alone couldn't account for everything.
"Yes. It's far too personal. I'd appreciate your understanding."
"Fine. My sister would probably say the same thing, so I won't push. That's the right call."
A heavy sigh escaped Louise's lips. The way her fingers twitched said her fist was still itching.
"One more question. Does my sister actually like a face like yours?"
"My face? Well… she isn't the type who looks at faces, so I don't think that's it."
"She is that kind of person, true."
Louise nodded, then narrowed her eyes.
"Must be nice, having three women. Did you reel them in with your looks?"
"…I wouldn't know."
I cleared my throat lightly and stalled. It felt strangely like someone saying, "Must be nice having two moms."
"Hard as it may be to believe, my face only changed recently. When I first met her, of course, I didn't look like this."
"Your original face? You mean you got plastic surgery?"
"It's a little different."
In a way you could call it plastic surgery. It just wasn't the kind people usually imagined, so the label felt awkward. Besides, from my side I couldn't very well start explaining soul rank and all the rest. Bring up soul rank and reincarnation would come tumbling out right after.
"What did you look like originally? Do you have a photo?"
Louise frowned even as curiosity got the better of her. Angry and resentful as she was, she still couldn't stand not knowing.
"Yes. There should be some."
I didn't particularly like having my picture taken, but records existed here and there—résumé photos, graduation photos, the traces left by necessity. Digging through my phone, I found a few old shots still sitting there.
"That's really you?"
Louise's eyes went huge. Looking at the phone screen from a fair distance, she seemed thoroughly shocked.
"It is."
"That's a completely different person. You didn't just save someone else's photo, did you?"
"Ask Elodie and she'll give you the same answer. Because it's the truth."
"And you still claim you didn't get surgery? That's impossible to believe."
Fair enough. My old face and my current one had changed so drastically it was like becoming another person entirely—right down to the skin that had turned pale.
"It changed like this after an accident. I don't really know the exact reason myself."
"An accident?"
"I was ambushed by specters once. Vampire-related."
As Elodie's younger sister, there was no way she wouldn't know about vampires. She was a direct descendant of a house that held France in a tight grip.
"And that made your face change like this? Hard to swallow."
"I understand. I'm the one it happened to and I still feel the same."
Especially when even I still didn't know the precise cause. The words cut off while I waited for her reply, and a dead silence filled the practice room—quiet enough that a ghost popping out wouldn't have felt strange.
At the end of the silence, Louise spoke.
"You answered without any deception, sincerely, from what I can tell. But honestly, from my position it's still hard to believe all of it. Part of me keeps wondering whether my sister fell into some strange trap."
"That's understandable."
"You're not offended?"
I answered with a quiet nod. I was scared, but I didn't feel hostility or take it personally. In the grand scheme of things, she was simply a well-raised blood relative looking out for her sister.
Louise stared straight into my eyes, then twisted the corner of her mouth—as if she'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Then I'll be staying here for a while. Even if it's rude, I want to watch you up close and see what kind of person you really are. At least until my heart settles."
She wanted to see my character. The blunt purpose was awkward, but I couldn't refuse. Aside from the fact that I had three women, there wasn't much for me to feel guilty about. Better to tie every loose end while I had the chance; half-measures now had a way of snarling into uglier knots later.
"Do that. And while you're staying, you might as well stay close by. No point wasting money on a separate place."
"Thank you for the consideration. I'll gladly accept."
Louise still wore a smiling face as she expressed her gratitude. It would take time, I suspected, before the sharp gleam in the corner of her eyes dulled.
Two days after she declared—first to Seo Ji-hyuk, then in front of Elodie and the other women—that she would be staying, Louise calmly sorted through everything she had seen and heard so far.
In the guest room prepared on the sixth floor of the building.
My sister is kind and affectionate as always. Yet there is something excessive about the way she frets over him—almost as if she is serving a master rather than a partner.
The other women are exactly the same. Put bluntly, they behave like mothers tending a baby.
The woman known to be unconnected and a criminal is especially hard to place.
Strange. The more she looked over the notebook where she had organized her thoughts, the deeper she felt herself sinking into a labyrinth.
Louise calmly called to mind the faces of the women tangled up with Seo Ji-hyuk.
Elodie. Marie. Camilla.
She couldn't even begin to guess how he had gotten involved with any of them, or why. Because his face was handsome? Because his abilities were impressive? From Louise's perspective, neither was the answer. Even her trusted aide Christine had agreed on that point. In other words, there was no obvious, eye-catching factor—which only made him harder to pin down.
He seems like a good person, at least.
Louise conceded that much: his character was solid. Setting aside the fact that he had three women, he was extremely likable. But did good character alone create that kind of special pull? There had to be some particular catalyst.
The more she tried to think rationally, the more her chest tightened. Even a single clue pointing toward an answer would have helped.
Strange.
On top of everything else, the longer she talked with Seo Ji-hyuk, the more oddly at ease she felt—almost as if she were chatting with a kind grandfather. That bothered her too.
Knock, knock.
Someone rapped on the door. Louise hurriedly snapped the open notebook shut.