Chapter 138
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 138
The backs of his knees hit the sofa, and the Duke collapsed onto it. An overturned table, scattered documents, an office in utter disarray, and an old man weeping without tears—everything was a complete mess.
As the Duke fell silent, the heated atmosphere in the room began to cool. A moment later, a loud pounding echoed from the door.
“Your Grace? Your Grace! Is everything alright in there?”
Perhaps because the Duke didn’t shout for them to get lost this time, the doorknob rattled as someone tried to open it from the outside. Contrary to their expectations, however, the door didn’t budge.
Canna, looking triumphant, made a gesture of turning a key in a lock toward me. Oh, what am I going to do with her? Our Canna is so quick-witted. Then, she yelled at the door to get lost. As I thought, it’s probably best to keep Jelly and Canna apart. My angelic girl’s vocabulary has gotten so coarse.
Now that the atmosphere seemed right for a conversation, I sat down across from the Duke.
We were interrupted last time and couldn’t finish properly, but now was my chance. It was time to manipulate the Duke’s mind and gaslight him to my heart’s content.
No, let’s rephrase that. It was time to “help him face reality.” From this moment on, Evangeline’s Counseling Center was open for business. It might be amateurish, but who cared?
“Don’t worry about the outside. Focus only on me.”
I tapped the table lightly to draw his attention. In the meantime, Canna must have done something more, because the noise outside died down completely. A silence so deep you couldn’t even hear the ticking of a clock filled the room.
It was so quiet that I felt I could hear the Duke’s very heartbeat.
“So, is the name of your abandoned daughter still not enough to earn Your Grace’s trust?”
I deliberately chose words that would rub him the wrong way. It was a statement that could have easily riled up the barely-calm Duke, but the exhausted old man only glared at me without much of a reaction. Even the look in his eyes was less venomous than usual.
“…Do you think Amaranth’s name is that important to me?” the Duke asked, his body slumped in exhaustion.
There it was. The “negative mode” that appears when someone is hit with a hard truth. This was a state where gaslighting would be incredibly effective.
Of course it was important. The Duke was trying desperately to rationalize his actions, but in truth, he was shackled by the past, suffering from the guilt of cutting ties with Amaranth.
He was a man who thoroughly turned his back on his past under the pretext of never regretting his choices. He deceived himself, claiming he had made the best decision and felt not a single shred of regret.
Therefore, the most effective way to break him down was to drag his inner turmoil to the surface and remind him of his guilt. And since I was a granddaughter who looked exactly like Amaranth, the effect was amplified. I was his living trauma.
“It is to me.”
The Duke stared at my face without blinking. His eyes were on me, but in his mind, he was undoubtedly picturing Amaranth.
After a long moment, the Duke closed his eyes. His index finger twitched, tracing something in the air. Was he drawing the past? Perhaps he was recalling their final meeting—the day he severed ties with his daughter.
“…I will believe you.”
The Duke quietly opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on me.
“Above all, you must know more about sorcery than I do.”
Spoken like a true master of avoidance. Making excuses until the very end. Honestly, it would be nice if he could just show a little remorse toward Amaranth.
“I’m glad you believe me. Grandfather, you were worried that Lady Agera might be harmed by the holy water, weren’t you?”
“Yes. I thought Agera had become an evil entity. That’s why… I was working so hard to silence everyone, to keep the Temple from finding out.”
Please keep working hard on that. If Bishop Marik catches on, the entire ducal estate will be roasted.
The Duke, in his negative mode, was incredibly receptive. In reality, he was just exhausted from his own rage, but to an outsider, it might have looked like he was hypnotized. At this rate, if I asked him to recognize me as his granddaughter, he might just do it. Or maybe not. Given his temper, he might snap out of it and fly into another rage… I was curious, but decided not to push my luck.
“You don’t have to worry. The holy water won’t harm Lady Agera.”
“…”
His lack of response meant he still couldn’t bring himself to give Agera the holy water. Good grief. Even after I made a solemn promise invoking Amaranth’s name, he still couldn’t fully trust me.
“Why do you hate admitting it so much?”
At my question, the Duke swallowed hard, as if he were drinking poison. As if his mouth were full of thorns, he hesitated for a long time before finally spitting out an answer.
“…Because that is how I abandoned Amaranth.”
Peeling back his layers of thorny defenses revealed a fragile core on the verge of shattering.
“I cast Amaranth out because she practiced sorcery. I lived my life believing she was a sinner and that my actions were just. But if Agera is not a sinner… then does that not mean Amaranth wasn't one either?”
What? That was the reason? It wasn’t because my mother—no, Amaranth—gave birth to me, an illegitimate child?
“Not because of me?”
“It was because of you, too.”
So it was both. In addition to my existence, Amaranth had also used sorcery, which led the Duke to sever ties. The full story was finally coming to light.
I was surprised to hear she’d used sorcery, but on second thought, it wasn’t that strange. I’d felt uneasy ever since I found the spell circle in Amaranth’s diary. There was no way she just kept it for show. Amaranth had used the spell circle, and that was why the Duke had cast her out.
“So, Grandfather, because you were afraid of becoming a cold-hearted father who abandoned an innocent daughter, you decided to brand Lady Agera a heretic as well.”
I wondered why he’d been so insistent that Agera was cursed. It was all to protect his own conscience.
“…”
I really wanted to break his habit of retreating into silence whenever he had no defense.
“Grandfather, you are already a sinner. What difference does one more sin make?”
Then, for the finishing blow, I delivered the final verdict.
“Mother already hates you, Grandfather.”
In a typical family-regret story, isn't this the part where I'm supposed to embrace him and say he did nothing wrong? I knew that was the traditional route, but I was too annoyed to defend him.
An instinctive anger that bypassed all reason welled up inside me. I didn’t know why, but I hated what the Duke was doing.
Was it so shocking? The fact that the Duke cast Amaranth out just to soothe his own conscience? And just a moment ago, when we were talking about Amaranth, it was honestly disgusting to hear him ask if her name was really that important to him.
Seeing how everything, from start to finish, was only about Agera, while Amaranth wasn't given a single thought… I didn’t know why I was suddenly boiling with rage. Can’t you just apologize for abandoning my mother?
Perhaps sensing my anger, the Duke groaned as if in the throes of a nightmare.
“…I told myself I was prepared to be hated, but it seems I never truly wanted to accept it.”
That’s because you’re an avoidant person, Duke. You could tell just by how he buried himself in paperwork while a demon roamed his home.
In my heart, I wanted to hold him accountable for the sin of abandoning Amaranth, but I bit my tongue. With Count Rohanson having abandoned me, if I didn’t secure the Duke’s favor, Gabriel would be the only one left for me to rely on.
Phew… Now that I’ve calmed down, I don’t even know why I was so furious with the Duke. Perhaps my Confucian DNA was more deeply ingrained than I thought. Or maybe, since I’m using Evangeline’s body, I was reacting out of habit. If so, Evangeline must have loved her mother very much.
I took the Duke’s trembling hands in mine. He instinctively tried to pull away, but he must have lost all his strength, because he couldn’t shake me off and simply let me hold them. This time, it wasn’t to stop him from lashing out. It was just for show.
“It’s alright.”
A performance for the regret story I would write anew.
The Duke stared at me as if possessed.
“Mother might hate Your Grace, but I don’t. I won’t hate you. I forgive you.”
I, who looked exactly like Amaranth, whispered the words the Duke had secretly longed to hear. Of course, the real Evangeline would never have forgiven him, but I was a different person.
Although the anger that had flared up earlier still lingered, I brushed it aside, telling myself I was just getting too immersed in the roleplay. After all, the only thing I’d personally experienced was almost getting hit by a wine glass, and Gabriel had saved me even then.
“Is that true…?” the Duke’s voice trembled. The line was taut.
“Yes. It’s true.”
I summoned a smile that resembled the Amaranth in the portraits as much as possible—the face painted countless times and hidden away in the storage room.
“Your Grace is my ‘grandfather,’ after all.”
“Indeed…”
The Duke nodded. Just like that, he accepted me.
A family-regret story? For an avid reader of RoFan, that sort of thing is a piece of cake.
* * *
Now that I had the Duke’s permission, I officially began distributing the holy water. However, I couldn’t just hand it out openly. Holy water was far too precious. Not only could people pocket it like before, but if a host of the Rat drank it and had a reaction, others would see it and start screaming “demon” all over again.
So, just as before, we decided to bring people in one by one to give them the holy water.
At first, I offered to help, but Canna smiled gently and told me to sit this one out. She asked me to trust her, saying she would handle everything herself, and I couldn’t possibly refuse.
I might not trust Rico, but Canna was reliable. Leaving things in her capable hands, I returned to my room to play chess with Pudding and Mavka.
Pudding and Mavka were on the same team. Mavka didn’t know much about chess, so she just moved the pieces wherever Pudding told her to, but they kept losing to me. Pudding looked like he should be good at chess, but I won five games in a row. Honestly, am I a chess prodigy? Beating a six-year-old felt absolutely amazing. I’m a villainess, so I’m allowed to do this. Long live the villainess!
The official distribution of holy water was completed after more than half a day. Canna came straight to Amaranth’s room to report to me.
“There were eleven hosts in total.”
The number was larger than I expected. I thought there would only be one or two. Eleven? Even idol groups aren’t debuted with that many members these days.
“They have all been properly dealt with, so please rest assured.”
Canna didn’t mention who was on the list. I wondered if someone I knew, someone I’d been close to since coming here, was among them.
She was probably worried that if I knew who they were, I would treat them awkwardly, and she wanted to prevent me from holding any prejudices.
Our Canna is a total angel. I wanted to tell her she dropped a feather yesterday, but I held back. In front of Canna, I wanted to remain a noble and elegant young lady, not a gushing fangirl.
Beside her, Rico stared at Canna with a bizarre expression. Right? It’s surprising that such an angelic kid still exists in this day and age. It’s because she was sick for so long and wasn’t corrupted by the secular world. I must protect her from this filthy world from now on.
“Now we just need to deal with the Rat.”
“The… ‘cat’ is working hard, but there are still many rats left. It’s going to take a very long time, isn’t it?”
This time, Rico stared at Pudding with that same bizarre look.
“If only there was a way to catch them all at once.”
“Hmm…”
Canna fell into deep thought. Surely she’d come up with an efficient idea, just like how she finished the holy water distribution so quickly. I looked at her with high expectations.
“We have no choice but to have Pudding work hard!”
Canna smiled brightly and shifted the responsibility to Pudding. When Pudding bared his claws, I startled and quickly began to soothe him.
He can scratch anyone else in the world, but he must never bare his claws at Canna and Gabriel. They are my lifelines. If I get on the bad side of the female lead and the male lead, all my efforts so far will go down the drain.
After some passionate petting, Pudding retracted his claws as if to say he’d let it slide this time.
I needed to think hard about this. A way to exterminate the rats… Arson… no, not arson… No, I’m wrong, all I can think of is arson. Bishop Marik must have brainwashed me into becoming an arsonist.
* * *
It was said that holy water was being distributed to all the employees in the mansion. The official story was that Lady Rohanson had taken action out of concern for an epidemic after seeing rats run rampant.
While others praised Lady Rohanson, Jace knew how to read between the lines. It was obviously a show.
Someone, wanting to see if it was real holy water, had secretly cut themselves, drank the water, and showed everyone that the wound had healed. Some people fell for it. How could they be so stupid? That person was clearly a plant set up by Lady Rohanson.
“Next, please come in.”
It was Jace’s turn. Entering the room, he steeled his resolve. He would not be fooled. However, seeing Canna inside the room, his determination wavered.
Lady Rohanson’s maid, Canna, was incredibly sweet.
“Here you go.”
Canna smiled brightly as she poured the holy water into a cup for him. Jace accepted the cup she handed him, his cheeks flushing red.
The way her red hair was pinned up was incredibly alluring. It would have been even better if her white neck were exposed, but she had it wrapped tightly in a scarf. Still, her modest demeanor wasn’t bad either. The stray curls that escaped her hairdo were also very cute.
“Th-Thank… you.”
Our hands… our hands touched…