Interlude (4)
Thinking hard about something doesn't guarantee a clear answer. What it does do is trim away the mistakes and missteps along the way — because turning a problem over again and again strips the excess fat from a plan. Of course, there's always the chance your thoughts will bury themselves too deep in one place.
I have to decide.
Quick and clean, that was the way to handle it. The longer I dragged things out, the faster the odds of Rihardt noticing would climb — exponentially.
First, let me lay out the situation. While the knighting ceremony was underway, Rihardt had entrusted Bianca's disposal to me, his aim being that no noise would arise on her account.
Was he trying to see how I handled things? This was a man who had gone to the trouble of killing Primaje — Karen's horse — and burying it in the ground, all so that not even the smallest opening would be left behind. Rihardt might well be watching with keen interest to see how I disposed of Bianca. Maybe he'd simply handed me the job hoping I'd kill her with my own two hands. His personality was angular and warped to the core, so it wouldn't have been strange at all if that were his intent.
I stared down at my own palm. Could I do it? Kill a person?
Or suppose I swung the other way and let Bianca live. Could I actually pull off the performance — playing the version of me who had killed a girl named Bianca? Sadly, my acting wasn't nearly that good. Big or small, Rihardt would see the cracks. ...Killing her really is the better path.
Then what about Sean? He knew Rihardt was holding Bianca somewhere, and he'd looked ready to do anything if it came to that. A man who had served the House of Line for years was no fool. But a father, I suppose, is the sort of person who will walk into a pit of fire knowing full well what it is. He'd move even knowing there was no hope. Maybe he'd even braced himself to die. Because he was a father.
By rough judgment, the quietest option was killing them both. The noisiest was sparing them both. And yet I couldn't bring myself to settle on killing them. I'd said I wouldn't live altruistically — that didn't mean I wanted to hurt people.
What if Sean took Bianca and fled somewhere far away? Easy to say. Abandoning the land he'd lived his whole life on, to live out his days as a man with no name? How brutal that road would be, words could hardly say. With their livelihood hanging on it, he wouldn't leave unless he absolutely had to. And before any of that — seeing Bianca beaten half to death, could Sean even keep his reason? Once his eyes rolled back, never mind the odds, wouldn't he try for revenge by any means he could?
Absently, I found myself fiddling with the dagger I'd brought out of the basement and strapped to my thigh. The blade Rihardt had honed on his whetstone split skin at the barest touch. It was that sharp. With a weapon like this, even a woman's strength was enough to kill a man — all it took was one soft stroke across the carotid the moment he let his guard down.
Night, for the timing. And if I wanted the cleanup easy, summoning them to the basement was the right call. The crux was how much a man like Sean trusted me. Harming someone unguarded and harming someone on their guard were different beasts entirely — and he was a grown man in the prime of his health. If the ambush failed, I'd be the one dying. The reason Karen Florence had been captured so easily was that she'd been caught off guard; at full strength, she'd have lost to Rihardt all the same, but she'd have given him a real fight.
In short, everything hinged on whether I was someone Sean could trust enough to drop his guard around. He hadn't looked like a man who trusted me that much. Whatever I'd been before, I was now entangled with Rihardt. The rumors were all over the estate — and, in practical terms, they were true. Sean would know that too. Would a man like that trust me so readily? Not a chance. It would have been stranger if he didn't suspect me. If he'd trusted me in the first place, he'd never have barged in on me last night the way he did — the kind of move that could hand Rihardt the very clue he needed.
Killing him by ambush won't be easy. He was wary of me. Which meant I had to find a way to dissolve that wariness. What play would work? Did I have a move that could catch him off guard?
And then a truly vicious thought flickered through my mind. What if I brought Sean to Bianca? Personally delivering the daughter he'd been longing for. No matter how careful a man, in that one moment every scrap of his attention would be on her. That's when I cut his throat. I knew all too well how lethal the smallest opening could be.
Just thinking about killing a person set my palms sweating. I was afraid — of taking a life. Honestly, when does someone who lived in a safe twenty-first-century country ever have to kill anybody? I closed my eyes and drew breath, letting the agitation settle. My overheated head felt a little cooler.
I can't let them live. Too many variables if they did. I'd made up my mind. Kill Sean. So what? If I failed, I died either way, didn't I? If I wanted to live, I had to thrash for it, didn't I? The only difference was dying by Sean's hand or Rihardt's. Maybe dying by Sean's hand would even be the kinder bargain.
I headed for the stable — to lay the groundwork with Sean.
Sean and I had found a secluded corner of the stable. Spaces that kept sound in tended to be remote and lonely by nature. Even if he screamed in here, the noise wouldn't carry easily. I looked at Sean with that thought in mind. Not built like Rihardt, but still a solidly built man.
There's an old saying: to hide a tree, hide it in a forest. Applying that principle, I had mixed in a few truths to bury my purpose of harming him. The truths I'd told him were two: that Rihardt meant to dispose of Bianca, and that the disposal had been entrusted to me.
When he heard me out, Sean's face went graver than I had ever seen it. How could it not? He'd just been told his daughter's life might gutter out at any moment. How many fathers could keep their composure through that?
"So the moment you have Bianca back, Mr. Sean, I need you to leave this place at once."
"So you want me gone from this estate — from Line itself, is that it, Miss Lucifer."
"That's right. I'm risking his wrath myself — my plan is to make a show of disposing of Bianca while quietly smuggling her out. But if you're the one keeping her, Rihardt will naturally grow suspicious of me, won't he?"
"I suppose he will. After all, it's you of all people who's been handed my daughter's disposal." His tone was that of a man swallowing his rage.
"And don't you dare so much as dream of revenge. Not unless you intend to abandon Bianca, broken as she is."
For an instant his mouth clamped shut. He seemed to be wrestling with something. I pressed on, again and again, so he couldn't let his mind wander down foolish paths.
"If you don't smother that feeling, Mr. Sean, we all die — I do, Bianca does, and so do you."
Framed as useless emotion that would ruin everyone, it wrung a low groan out of him. Before long, his face said he had resolved on something.
"...Very well. At the very least, grant me a few days' grace. I'll need to dispose of my property, you see."
"Please keep that disposal as far from people's eyes as you can."
"I know well enough not to be seen, thank you."
"Good, so long as you do. Then I'll summon you separately the day before Rihardt's knighting ceremony."
"So be it."
And so my talk with Sean drew to a close, for now. On the surface, he seemed to go along with everything I said. But they don't say you can fathom ten fathoms of water and still not one fathom of a man's heart for nothing. Once he had Bianca back, those words might change. He might not leave at all — might even go to the Count of Line and denounce everything Rihardt and I had done.
But the same went for me. The moment I saw an opening, I meant to kill him without a second's hesitation. Whatever schemes we each harbored, the schedule was set. Now it came down to whose plan would hold.
Finished with Sean, I went straight to Rihardt's room. Seeing me arrive, he asked in an offhand sort of way:
"You look fairly busy, Lucy."
The ceremony was only days off, granted, but lately Rihardt had been keeping strangely, eerily quiet. That grated on me more than it should have. I answered without letting my expression change any more than I could help.
"You did give me orders enough to keep me busy, young master."
He grinned at my reply, then asked, "So — have you set the date?"
He meant the date of Bianca's disposal, of course. I nodded.
"Yes. I intend to carry it out the day before your knighting ceremony, young master."
At that, Rihardt rose from his seat and strode toward me. For no good reason, the moment made me tense.
"You put it off as long as you could, didn't you?"
"...I'm being as careful as I can so that no noise reaches your ears. That's all."
"Aw, there you go again. That's not why you put it off, is it?"
...
It was only an instant, but my heart plunged. What did he mean? Don't tell me — did he know about my contact with Sean? His gaze, faintly loaded with meaning, felt truly ominous.
"You speak as though you're peering straight into my head."
"You do the same to me sometimes, don't you?"
I hadn't expected to feel so seen — to find us mirroring each other somewhere so utterly unwelcome. Whether my flustered state amused him, Rihardt went on, laughter thick in his voice.
"Well? Fun, isn't it? Now you know a little of how I feel, don't you?"
"I can't speak for fun, but it does give me chills."
His big hand patted my shoulder.
"So even you balk at your first murder, huh?"
How would you know whether this is my first kill? It was my first, true enough.
...
"Not keen on it?"
"I can hardly claim I'm keen on it."
"If it's that bad, you can always ask me for help."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"I'll do the killing. You just handle the corpse."
...That was even worse. It would wreck the plan — I'd never lure out Sean's guard that way. I gritted my teeth and answered.
"Aren't you busy left and right with preparations for the ceremony, young master? I'll do it myself."
"Really? Well then, handle it well. Everything's hard the first time — once it's done, you get used to it fast. Killing a person. Dealing with the body after."
"...I doubt that."
"No — you will. I can see plenty of aptitude."
"And what aptitude would that be?"
"Complying. Adapting. You're playing along with my nonsense even now, aren't you?"
I play along because if I didn't, I'd die — that's all. I shoved down the loathing that came boiling up.
"...I'll handle it well, as you say, young master."
And with that, the lukewarm conversation ended. And now, here we are. The day set for Bianca's disposal had come upon us like an arrow.