Karen Florence (10)
Any given cellar might smell of earth, I suppose, but this passage was especially thick with a damp, cloying must. It assailed me with a particular offensiveness — likely because I kept recalling the account of how Rihardt had scattered fresh soil to smother the scent of blood and other fouler reeks.
Whether she understood how this felt to me or not, Karen's mouth never rested as we walked.
Babbling on about fluttering hearts, about finally, at twenty, climbing the stairs of adulthood — things I had no wish whatsoever to hear…
No, hold on.
There was something I absolutely could not let slide.
Rubbing the spot between my brows with thumb and forefinger, I asked in return,
"…Forgive the interruption, Miss Karen Florence, but did you say you were twenty?"
"So what if I am? Look at me — twenty, through and through!"
Her sheer shamelessness stopped my mouth for an instant.
If anything, it was I who wanted to ask.
Where, exactly, am I supposed to look?
"'Look at you,' you say."
Her looks, for one. The way she behaved like a child, for another.
Hers was a remark that toppled my prejudice in a single stroke.
"That's a rude thing to say!"
The rude thing here is your face. But I couldn't spit out my honest opinion, so I kept my mouth shut.
Of course, my silence didn't stop hers.
The ceaseless racket of a twenty-year-old woman whittled away at my sanity and my hearing at an alarming rate.
If she was chattier than usual, it presumably meant she was rather nervous about being summoned by Rihardt herself.
It's not that I can't understand.
But listening to every last word of it was pure torture.
The moment I tried to let her words run in one ear and out the other, Karen caught on at once and puffed up her cheeks.
Quick on the uptake only in situations where it did no good whatsoever — what an exasperating woman.
"How cold can you be! So you like Rihardt too, don't you, Lucy?"
That was Karen Florence for you — serving up an interpretation so dreadful I couldn't possibly ignore it.
In her own mind, I suppose, it was a perfectly reasonable deduction.
Not even slightly.
But if I told Karen, "In fact, I am a person possessing this body known as Lucifer. My original sex wasn't even female — I was a man. Which means the objects of my desire are women, not men. Your statement, Miss Karen Florence, is therefore quite, quite wrong" — it was self-evident I'd get nothing but looks questioning my sanity.
Able to neither advance nor retreat, I heaved a deep sigh and pushed back.
"How on earth does one interpret things to reach such a horrifying conclusion?"
When I said it dead serious, right to her face, Karen laughed sheepishly.
"It's not just me — you seemed nervous too, Lucy, so I figured I'd crack a joke."
"It wasn't funny in the least."
"Well, you're less tense now, aren't you?"
Ugh. It wasn't as if I could thrash her for it.
"Ahem. Anyway — what about me? Anything strange about me?"
At that, I looked her over.
A beauty that even the dark couldn't hide stood out all the more for it.
Whatever she might say about feeling inferior to my looks or what have you, Karen Florence was a lovely girl.
Besides, a nun's habit that stressed nothing so much as modesty only conjured a strange, sacrilegious thrill instead.
"You're pretty."
"If you're going to compliment me, at least say beautiful."
"In a few years, you'll be a beautiful woman."
"This is me fully grown, you know?"
"How regrettable, then."
"At least put on a regretful face when you say that!"
"I shall do my best."
Walking along and trading these trivialities, the tension that had hung so thick loosened, if only a little.
In exchange, perhaps — every manner of stray thought began to shake my resolve.
I realized I held more affection for the girl called Karen Florence than I had believed.
It meant I did not want to watch her fall into Rihardt's hands and suffer.
Should I tell Karen Florence to run for it, even now? Or beg her for help instead?
Neither held more than a glimmer of possibility.
Above all — would she even believe a word I said?
To Karen, Rihardt was her benefactor — the man who had saved her mother.
Who would believe that a savior like that had, for some unfathomable reason, decided to turn on her?
And so I desperately crushed down the urge to denounce Rihardt to Karen Florence.
I was not strong-hearted enough to lay my own life on the gambling table and weigh it.
And above all — hadn't I decided it was time to stop acting for other people's sake?
Which is to say, thoughts like these were nothing more than delusions I had no intention of executing.
I really am trash, aren't I.
This inner struggle soon became moot.
A little farther on, someone stood waiting ahead of us.
My own eyes couldn't make him out, but Karen could.
"That's Rihardt, isn't it?! Don't tell me — he came all the way out to meet us?"
Hand flailing, Karen Florence went darting toward Rihardt.
So much for all that talk of composure. She'd thrown propriety clean out the window.
Like some flying squirrel, she raced straight into Rihardt's arms.
WHAM!
And her body crumpled to the floor, almost anticlimactically.
She likely never dreamed the one she trusted would strike her from behind.
I'd expected some sort of reaction, at least — but it was over in a single blow.
Nothing, it seemed, made a person weaker than letting down their guard.
Rihardt's eyes moved to me, then to the fallen Karen Florence.
The meaning of that glance was crystal clear.
"Yes. I'll move her."
But the moment I bent to gather Karen Florence up, Rihardt's right hand closed around my throat.
It was a sudden development, but I met his gaze calmly.
"What is it, young master?"
"Lucy."
"I'm listening."
He propped his chin on his left hand, seeming to take a moment to choose his words.
"You told me once, didn't you. That if I selected a target, you would take the appropriate measures and lay them out in the basement — so that I wouldn't have my precious time wasted on tedious, bothersome processes."
What an excellent memory.
I had certainly said exactly that.
"That is so, but — has something about it displeased you?"
"In the end, this whole situation amounts to borrowing my hand, doesn't it? Look at Karen — there isn't a single trace of subjugation on her. If it hadn't been me, how exactly were you planning to subdue her?"
So he was going to nitpick after all?
It was more or less the reaction I'd anticipated.
"You told me only to bring Karen Florence to the basement, young master — you never said anything about the state she should arrive in. And with the means available to me, I had no proper way to subdue her. So I judged that summoning her down to the basement while keeping her close enough that she'd feel no suspicion toward me was the best my level could manage. Besides, she's hardly an ordinary woman, is she?"
Weren't you the one who made an unreasonable demand in the first place?
When I put it to him with that undertone, Rihardt laughed.
"Fair enough. Karen isn't someone soft enough to be subdued by you."
Was he going to understand and let it pass?
His red irises glowed with menace even against this dark scenery.
"But you know, your excuses are remarkably fluent. Did you anticipate I'd pick at it like this? Next time I'll issue more specific instructions — so there'll be no pretext left for you to wriggle out the way you just did."
"……Understood."
"Then let's go in. Fresh ingredients — we ought to enjoy them together, shouldn't we?"
He opened the iron door.
A raw, gamey stench bled out. A thick, dreadful reek of blood.
There is a proverb everyone hears at least once in their life.
"You cannot live doing only what you want."
It's a phrase that draws particular rebellion in adolescence, when the ego swells fat.
So when is it, then, that we come to know we cannot live doing only what we want?
The details vary with the circumstances we're handed, but most people grasp it from the very moment they become capable of perceiving themselves and others.
And most of us go on living in obedience to that immovable fact.
Because there are far too many things to crash into if you rebelled at every single turn.
In short, to live by your own convictions means enduring a hell of a lot of resistance.
Why am I laying all this out in such painstaking detail?
Because I am, at this very moment, about to put my mouth between the legs of an unconscious girl without so much as her permission.
And to keep it up until that girl regains consciousness.
"………You mean, me?"
I recoiled in revulsion and looked at Rihardt, but he showed not the slightest intention of withdrawing the order.
"Your punishment for being insolent in front of me."
Ah. Right.
So I'd looked insolent, had I.
I suppose a maid spouting excuses could well have seemed distasteful to him.
"And the two of you — you've gotten rather close, haven't you?"
I flinched.
Because it felt as though this man had caught on to the affection I harbored for Karen.
"If you think of it as serving Karen, then it's not so impossible, is it? She'll like it, too."
Bullshit.
There is a word back home for childhood friends who grew up bathing together — "ball buddies," literally. But it was never meant as an instruction to actually put a ball in your mouth.
My disgust climbed without end.
But the line between master and servant was drawn too firmly to refuse outright.
Besides, by the standards of his usual orders, this one was even on the mild side.
I looked at Karen Florence, laid out in the middle of the spacious room.
Rather than strip her habit off entirely, Rihardt had torn it open only at the chest and over her groin — and perhaps because of that, she looked all the more obscene.
Massive manacles and shackles clamped her slender wrists and ankles.
A precaution to eliminate any unnecessary resistance.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I parted Karen's legs, plump with just the right fullness of flesh.
The cloth covering her groin had been ripped away completely, leaving her utterly defenseless.
A slit sealed shut in a neat, straight line came into view.
A pussy without so much as a wisp of down on it.
I truly did not want to do this.
But as I said before — people cannot live doing only what they want.
It was a truly shitty business.