Karen Florence (16)
The words breaking Karen Florence had lodged itself in my chest like a harpoon. Then it turned into an anchor, sinking deep and binding me where I stood. I had known, hadn't I? I'd known that things warming between Karen and me would only work against me in the end. And I had gone ahead and done it anyway. It was far too late for regrets.
"You said you'd have me break her. Is there a specific standard for that?"
"I don't expect her to obey my every word with absolute submission. I know your gentleness alone could never manage that. She only needs to reach the point of complying when I give an order."
So he meant to snap a collar around whatever wreckage remained after her sense of self had been shattered. The absurd part was that, by Rihardt's standards, this counted as one of his milder choices. The Rihardt of the novel would have simply disposed of her, the way he had disposed of Bianca.
"And if she falls short of that standard...?"
"How could she? This is a historic collaboration between me and my accomplice."
His face hadn't allowed for the possibility of failure even for a moment. Of course. This was a man with calluses built up from breaking people.
I cursed him with my eyes, and Rihardt laughed.
"You really are a pessimist, Lucy. Do you want to hear it that badly? What happens if she fails?"
"Even if the odds were a thousand to one—ten thousand to one—it could still happen, couldn't it?"
Rihardt answered without a trace of deliberation.
"I kill her. She'd no longer be a situation I could keep managing."
So failure in training would end in Karen's death. How convenient, that it's so easy to understand. I let out a sigh.
"I see."
Perhaps the sigh had grated on him. Rihardt rose from his seat and came toward me. He was a tall man, and I naturally found myself looking up at him.
"If you fumble it like you did last time, I won't forgive you—even if you are my accomplice."
He delivered it flatly, without heat. I suppose you could call it an ultimatum. I clenched my fists hard and ground my lips together.
You'd think that after spending enough time together, some of that oppressive weight might ease.
However much time had passed, Rihardt de Line remained to me a frightening, dangerous man. I'd half hoped that becoming his accomplice might change that, but this precarious balance between us held fast.
Of course it did. In truth, this was less a relationship between full accomplices than something suspended somewhere between accomplice and toy.
I was well aware that this man favored me, even doted on me. He had turned a blind eye to my mistakes and my pointless antics more times than I could count. Even the corporal punishment he'd once dealt out was, by his standards, excessively gentle. If that wasn't special treatment, what was? Rihardt was unnaturally soft with me.
And that only tangled my feelings further. Because I know all of it is nothing more than a whim.
He was a man who could subdue me, break me, whenever he pleased. Was there anything worse for the heart than a man like that quietly showing patience? Living alongside a monster that might turn without warning at any given moment. It was bitterly ironic that I had brought this unrelenting tension on myself.
Then, unbidden, something Rihardt had once said surfaced in my mind. I really do want to see you beg, saying you want to become my toy.
"Lucy? Your answer?"
His words from the past and the question pressing on me now interlocked like the teeth of a saw. To think I'd stand there frozen in front of a madman. Perhaps my nerve had grown bolder than I gave myself credit for.
I hurriedly bowed my head.
"Yes, I understand, Young Master Rihardt...?"
But my head never finished its bow. Rihardt's hand had caught my chin and stopped it.
"My accomplice shouldn't go dropping her head so carelessly, should she?"
"...I'll be mindful of that."
"Besides, when you bow your head, Lucy, I can't see that pretty face of yours."
Rihardt's compliments never sounded like compliments. I had no idea what expression to make at a line like that. Maybe that was why my facial muscles twitched and squirmed as if seized by a spasm.
His fingers traveled from my chin to my lips. For all his handsome looks, they were thick, rough fingers. The hands of a man who gripped a sword, I supposed.
"It's been nothing but dreary faces around me lately, so I at least need the sight of yours."
I didn't answer. I simply watched what Rihardt would do next. He caressed my lips gently, the way a person might handle a fragile piece of glasswork.
"Not that I want you getting the wrong idea, but I have no desire to dispose of Karen either."
What wrong idea, exactly? I answered, stripping my voice of as much feeling as I could.
"Is that so?"
"Really. A nun who can brew potions isn't so easily come by."
So she was a scarce human resource, too valuable to waste on disposal. And yet, as far as I could remember, a woman named Karen Florence never once appeared in the original story. Not in the past timeline, nor the present one.
The past timeline I could write off—her part simply hadn't come up yet. But if even the present timeline made no mention of Karen Florence, then perhaps...
Don't think it. That would be a hasty conclusion. Wasn't it complacent, to begin with, to assume events would flow exactly as they had in the novel I'd read? Look at me—hadn't I survived against Rihardt himself? The trouble was that the flame looked ready to gutter out at any moment; still, variables, at least, I had managed to kindle in plenty.
Wearing a disgruntled look, I said to Rihardt, "Is there something on my face?"
I said it because his unblinking stare was starting to weigh on me. He flashed a grin.
"I was just thinking what a stroke of luck it's been, meeting you, Lucy."
Hearing that from a man gave me no pleasure whatsoever. "So when does Karen Florence's training begin?"
"Time is short, so we start tonight."
Not even a moment to steel myself. "Understood."
"Now get going."
A dismissal anyone could recognize. I started to bow, then stopped myself. He'd only just told me not to bow, and here I was about to do it again. Habits truly are a terrifying thing.
"Yes."
Before leaving, I looked at Rihardt one last time. He walked to the open window, then perched himself on the railing and gazed down at the view outside. His gaze—at once bored and world-weary—was dry, mineral, inanimate. The sky above, thick with black clouds, lent the whole scene a heavy, brooding air. Perhaps he noticed I was still watching him, because a smile spread across his face at once. And yet even watching that expression change, I somehow couldn't shake the impression that Rihardt was hollow.
Evening passed, and night fell, thick and black. Though Rihardt had never summoned me, there I was, my feet carrying me toward his room. My steps, naturally, were heavy. The hour when I would have to torment Karen was closing in on me with every passing minute.
Why is it that the things we most want to avoid announce themselves so vividly? And yet I couldn't very well not go.
Knock, knock. I rapped on Rihardt's door.
However long I waited, no answer came back.
Is he out? As if. He wasn't the sort of fool who forgot promises he'd made. Wondering if he'd simply left the door unlocked, I tried the handle, but it only rattled in its plate. Locked from the inside—which meant he ought to be in there. Doubt and dread flickered through my mind in the same instant.
"...Young Master, I'm coming in."
I drew out the spare key Rihardt had given me and slid it into the lock. If he took me to task for letting myself in uninvited, I was fully prepared to accept whatever he dished out.
Come to think of it, why not press yourself flat against the wall like last time? I'll jump out of my skin for you, all you like.
Click. The lock gave, and I stepped inside.
Apart from the window now being shut, Rihardt's room was no different from when I had left it. But its owner was nowhere to be seen.
A nameless unease began to smolder in me, like the feeling of looking at a badly misaligned row of teeth. I locked the door behind me quickly and tripped the hidden mechanism.
A low grinding rumble. The concealed door revealed itself. Tonight, of all nights, the secret passage looked darker and damper than ever. Rihardt's absence needlessly fed my anxiety and restlessness. He was a human bomb whether he was in sight or out of it.
Did he go on ahead? The scene, the circumstances, certainly seemed to say so. Why would he go down without me? Was there some reason for it? Chasing the thought in circles, I started down the stairs.
Tap, tap, tap. My footsteps echoed hollowly through the passage.
So what if Rihardt had gone ahead and was waiting for me? That was entirely possible. I was simply thinking the worst, that was all. The basement drew nearer with every step, and the closer I came, the more my unease swelled.
Drip.
My brisk stride stopped dead. Why had my feet stopped? Blood. There was no mistaking it. Anyone would have called it the smell of blood. On its heels came a scream, raw and tearing—a woman's voice, high and shrill.
I knew that voice. I knew it all too well.
My heart began to pound. My breath quickened with it. A fine tremor ran through my body. When I came back to myself, I was running. I felt no clammy sweat, none of the heaviness that usually clung to my ankles like shackles. I simply kept sprinting, like someone who could think of nothing but running.
Perhaps my haste was rewarded. I reached the iron door.
"Haah... haah... hah..."
My ragged, burning breath. My body, gone clammy and foul with cold sweat. None of it registered. Every scrap of my attention was fixed on the basement. I caught my breath and raised my head—and my face twisted all on its own.
It's closed? I had smelled the blood. I had heard the screaming. And yet the iron door stood shut. Sealed completely. Which means no sound or smell could have been leaking out.
Had my anxiety conjured phantom sounds and phantom scents? Or perhaps it was the reverse. Perhaps the room was so saturated with the stench of blood that it seeped through solid iron, and Karen Florence was screaming louder than any door could muffle. The thought made my mouth go bone-dry. For all that I had come down here as if bewitched, actually stepping through that door now terrified me.
The past few days with Karen flashed before me like a panorama. The silly jokes we had traded. The moans, hot with pleasure, that had spilled out of her when she couldn't endure my training any longer. The moments when she had seemed, just a little, to let her walls down for me.
Bang, bang. I pounded on the door. No response. Had she not heard? I pressed my ear to the iron, and as if it had only been waiting, the tearing scream resumed. It was Karen's voice. In that instant, my dark suspicion hardened into certainty.
I hammered at the iron door. I beat on it hard enough that my fists should have split open. Perhaps the desperation got through. The screaming stopped. And then the iron door began, slowly, to open.
A wave of heated air crashed against the membranes of my nose. The reek of warmed blood was rank enough to bring bile up my throat. And it didn't seem to be blood alone that I was smelling.
The one who had opened the door was, of course, Rihardt. His white hair was stained red in patches, as if he'd gone and had highlights put in. And it wasn't just his hair. His face, his torso, his legs—all of it red. He was lacquered in blood from head to toe. Whose blood it was, I didn't need to ask.
"So you came."
His tone was perfectly ordinary. And yet it pressed down on me with an unnatural weight. I'm sure my eyes, locked with his, were trembling as though an earthquake had torn through them.
"I got impatient and started without you."
Never once had his breezy nonchalance felt so thoroughly loathsome.