The Countess's Night (2)
Morning sunlight tapped at my eyelids.
I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling — ah, that's right. The villa.
Shit. Perfect.
Warmth pressed against my side. Margareta was asleep on my arm, brown hair spilled across the pillow, the blanket slid halfway down to bare her shoulder and collarbone.
Her sleeping face looked at ease, as if last night's ferocity had been a lie.
There was no clock to tell me the exact hour, but judging by the angle of the sunlight it was around eight in the morning.
Just as I started to rise, Margareta stirred.
"Mmm..."
Her eyes opened slowly. Unfocused green eyes searched for me, then fixed on my face.
"...Ah."
Memory must have come back. Her cheeks flooded red.
"Good morning."
"Good... morning..."
Margareta pulled the blanket up to her chest.
"...So it was real."
"Would you rather it had been a dream?"
"No."
She said it flatly, then looked startled by her own answer.
"I mean — no, I'm glad it wasn't a dream."
That drew a laugh out of me. A genuine one.
Shit. Sometimes it cracks me up that this is a mission — because even I can't tell anymore whether I mean it.
My eyes lingered for a moment on the bare curve of Margareta's stomach where the blanket no longer reached. All four rounds from last night had been emptied into that warmth. She'd fallen asleep without even washing, so even now my seed would be pooled in the deepest part of her belly — which meant a womb that had borne two children was sleeping peacefully cradling what I'd given it, not her husband's. Thinking about it made my gut go heavy first thing in the morning.
Come morning, last night's emotions had to face reality.
Margareta boiled the tea with my shirt draped over her shoulders. Her movements were awkward, but she neither ran away nor pretended to regret anything.
"Do you remember the promise from last night?"
At my question, Margareta set down the teapot.
"That we'd decide again this morning, with clear heads."
"Yes."
"I don't regret it. But today's choice — ask me again."
She took my hand first. I halted the motion I'd already begun — pulling her into my arms from behind — and turned to face her.
"Do you want to continue?"
"Only when I say I want it."
We went over contraception and the risks that still remained. We didn't declare her cycle on the strength of yesterday's traces or this morning's sensations alone — that wasn't something [Mental Interference] could tell me, either. Margareta promised she would stop the instant anything felt even slightly uncomfortable, and I answered that I would never make her say it twice.
Margareta hesitated a moment, then closed the distance herself.
"Then right now — I want you."
The morning's intimacy was calmer than the night had been. More than once Margareta asked me to slow down, and I obeyed without a beat of hesitation. I didn't skip the check-ins just because we'd grown familiar, and even afterward I neither fanned the possibility of pregnancy with suggestive words nor promised her she was safe.
The tea had gone cold.
"I'll have to boil another pot."
Margareta laughed.
"This time we really do start with the tea."
We carried the cold kettle back to the kitchen together.
Breakfast didn't happen until after ten.
Sitting across the table over bread and jam and fruit, Margareta said,
"Do-hyun."
"Hm?"
"You're not actually human, are you?"
"Where did that come from?"
"Your stamina is abnormal. Four times last night, and then again this morning? You never wear out."
"My constitution is a little... special."
Margareta set down her fork and looked straight at me.
"May I be honest?"
"Go ahead."
"You frighten me a little, too."
"..."
"Why would a man this good come to a married woman like me? I keep wondering whether you have some kind of purpose."
Her green eyes had gone sharp. The intuition that thirty-eight years of living will build.
This woman was no fool.
Her body catching fire hadn't melted her mind along with it.
"And if I do have one?"
I asked it point-blank. In this situation, a lie would only backfire.
"..."
Margareta's eyes went wide. She must have expected me to deny it.
"It's the Queen's will. The vote on the tax reform bill — you know of it?"
"...I know of it."
"They mean to get the Count's vote through Margareta."
Silence settled over the table.
Margareta's face had gone rigid.
"Then... all of this, it was..."
"Not all of it."
I took her hand.
"It's true that I approached you at the start. Because it's a mission."
"..."
"But the loneliness I felt in you was real. And last night was real too."
Half truth, and half...
No. Time to be honest.
Seven parts in ten had been genuine. As for the remaining three, I didn't care to dissect them. I knew perfectly well it was fucking self-justification.
Margareta studied me for a long time.
"...Idiot."
"Hm?"
"Who says it that honestly?"
Margareta laughed. A lonely kind of laugh.
"I already knew."
"Knew what?"
"That there was no way a man this good would come to a married woman like me for no reason at all."
"Margareta..."
"But it doesn't matter."
She squeezed my hand tight.
"My husband can't be bothered to spare me a glance — all he does is pile up money and sleep with the maids. The Queen wants to reform the taxes? Good. It should happen. I've watched the nobles of this country dodge their taxes with my own two eyes."
Resolve had kindled in her green eyes.
"What is it you need, Do-hyun? Is there something I can help with?"
This woman.
This was exactly why I liked grown women. They look at reality instead of being swept away by their feelings.
A younger woman would have wailed and raised hell. Margareta weighed the situation and reached a judgment.
"Do you know about the Count's slush fund?"
Around noon. I sipped my wine and steered us into the real business.
Margareta's eyes flinched.
"Slush fund...?"
"The Queen's side has suspicions. That Count Steinfeld's real reason for opposing the tax reform is that slush fund."
"..."
Margareta set down her wine glass. Her expression turned complicated.
"Honestly, I know little of my husband's finances. He manages the household accounts himself."
"But you've felt something was off, haven't you?"
"..."
"Margareta."
"...I have."
Her voice dropped low.
"Three years ago, maybe. I heard a noise from my husband's study at night, and when I went to look, he was opening a safe built into the floor. I didn't even know a safe existed."
"A floor safe?"
"Under the study carpet. He rushed to cover it back up. From that day on, I was forbidden to set foot in the study."
Information. But this alone wasn't enough. We had the safe's location — its contents were the real question.
This was where [Memory Reading] could come in.
Chances were high that more clues lay buried in Margareta's memory: things she'd witnessed without realizing, conversations overheard, her husband's habits and patterns.
"Margareta."
"Yes?"
"I have a favor to ask."
"What is it?"
"You've caught on that I have a certain... special ability, haven't you?"
Margareta nodded. Not a fool after all.
"I felt it from the day we met. That you were... not an ordinary man."
"With my ability, I can look into your memories."
"My memories?"
"Even the ones stored in your unconscious. Even what you've forgotten."
Margareta went quiet for a moment, thinking.
"...It doesn't hurt?"
"Not at all."
"And with that, you could find my husband's secret?"
"Very likely."
Margareta took a sip of wine and made her decision.
"Do it."
Margareta lay back comfortably on the sofa. I pressed my hand to her temple and focused my mind.
Past the surface of consciousness, down into the deep strata of memory.
Her memories unfolded before me like a faded photo album.
The wedding. A young Margareta with a happy face. Otto, smiling. So things had been good, once.
The birth of their first child. Pain and joy. Otto holding her hand.
The birth of their second. This time Otto was absent — away on estate business.
From here the colors began to change. The warm tones went cold.
Her husband's absences stretched longer and longer. The estate. The capital. Business.
And then...
One memory blazed bright. The deeper the emotional shock, the sharper an impression it leaves behind.
The memory cut off there — Margareta, startled by the sound of footsteps, had fled the spot.
But it was enough.
Two million gold in slush funds. The names of complicit counts. The true reason for strangling the tax reform.
And snagged in one corner of the memory was a strange ledger mark: thirteen payments of an identical small sum, exactly. Every recipient line left blank, and stamped in the margin — a chair with no crown.
Margareta hadn't known what that emblem meant. Even her husband, whenever he went over the ledger, averted his eyes from those thirteen lines.
The intelligence had come out of a pussy.
No — to be exact, out of Margareta's memories. But the only reason I could reach those memories was that [Common Sense Alteration] had opened her heart, and the only reason her heart had opened was...
This pipeline that ran from her bed all the way to the intelligence — the essence of my fucking ability, laid bare. I no longer had any intention of denying it.
"What did you see?"
Margareta opened her eyes, her expression faintly hazy.
"Three years ago, you passed by the study and overheard your husband's conversation, didn't you?"
"...Maybe? I can't really remember it..."
"It stayed in your unconscious. This is what it was."
I relayed what I'd heard, in summary. Margareta's face stiffened piece by piece.
"Two million gold..."
"And Counts Regensburg and Hapenstadt are implicated too."
"Those men... they're the ones my husband used to meet with so often."
The puzzle was coming together.
Margareta clenched her fist.
"That man... he lectures me about tightening my spending, and he's hoarded two million in stolen funds..."
Rage burst out of her. Real rage.
"I spend a little on the children's education and he explodes — while he's the one diverting the country's money?"
"Margareta."
"Do-hyun, I will help you with this. Without a doubt."
Her green eyes were burning. The fury of a betrayed wife — no [Common Sense Alteration] at work, only pure emotion.
"I'll tell you the exact location of the safe in my husband's study. And his schedule for his trips to the estate, too."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me."
Margareta said it as she rose to her feet.
"This is revenge. Against a husband who ignored me for fifteen years."
The one who had poured oil on a woman's hunger for revenge was not me. It was Count Otto himself.
All I did was... strike the match.
I know that consoling myself like that is cowardly, too.
Afternoon.
Once I'd organized the intelligence, the mood inside the villa had shifted in a subtle way.
Call it becoming comrades. Accomplices sharing a secret.
Margareta said as she poured the wine,
"It's strange."
"What is?"
"I ought to feel guilty — sitting in a villa with another man, behind my husband's back."
"You don't feel it?"
"No. Not a bit."
Whether that was the afterglow of [Common Sense Alteration] or the plain truth, I couldn't say.
Probably both.
"If anything, it feels liberating. Like fifteen years of congestion has finally drained away."
She tilted her glass back. The afternoon sun lit the wine a deep red.
"Do-hyun."
"Yeah."
"Tonight, too... we're sleeping together, aren't we?"
"Of course."
"Then this time, let me take the lead."
"Oh?"
Margareta grinned. The provocative smile of a thirty-eight-year-old married woman.
"Last night it felt like I was only ever on the receiving end. I'll show you what a mature woman is."
The lead of an experienced, mature woman.
I looked forward to it. Shit — was it really all right for a mission to be this enjoyable?
Evening came, and lights were lit in the villa once more.
Margareta sat on the edge of the bed in the nightclothes she'd brought. Where yesterday's shyness had been, there was resolve.
"Last night, Do-hyun led. So tonight, I will."
"Sounds good. But the moment you want to stop, say so right away."
"The same goes for you, Do-hyun."
She reached her hand out to me first. This time she wasn't comparing me to her husband, or trying to prove five years of deprivation. She chose her own pace and her own distance. I left [Common Sense Alteration] untouched, and moved only within the bounds she confirmed in words.
At some point, Margareta caught her breath and smiled.
"I can keep deciding, can't I?"
"It should have been that way from the start."
The night flowed on without hurry. Margareta didn't declare it a 'dangerous day' on feeling alone, and the two of us both knew contraception offered no perfect guarantee. Whatever came next would follow a physician's advice — and Margareta's own decision.
Some time later, Margareta leaned against my chest.
"How is it? Different from yesterday?"
"What's different is that today, Margareta decided everything."
"I like that answer."
We laughed together for a moment. It was not a night of repaying five years of want all at once, but a night of confirming that tomorrow, too, she would be the one who chose.
By dawn, Margareta had fallen asleep first.
I organized the intelligence I'd secured.
Count Steinfeld's slush fund totaled two million gold. The evidence lay in the safe beneath the carpet of the mansion's study. Counts Regensburg and Hapenstadt were implicated as well, and their reason for strangling the tax reform was simple: to keep the flow of that money from ever coming to light.
The ledger had also shown thirteen payments with blank recipient lines — and the emblem of a chair with no crown. This went beyond simple aristocratic graft. There was now a real possibility it was the funding line of a hidden hand connected to the black faction.
The intelligence had come from [Memory Reading], freely permitted by Margareta. But the fact that I had used [Common Sense Alteration] to lower her threshold of judgment on the way to that permission did not disappear. Nor did the fact that I had made intimacy itself a means of gathering information.
Before reporting to Elena, I wrote a short letter in the villa's study.
When the grapes ripen, I'll come again. Let's meet then.
I left it beside Margareta's pillow.
I had approached her on a mission, and I had manipulated her, too. And yet I couldn't quite declare that even the laughter we had shared was all a lie.
Once again, the word probably was left behind.
A complicated night was passing.