Where It Is Safe to Sleep
She had no recollection of how she managed to leave the rendezvous point.
Her mind had locked onto a single thought as her small feet stumbled forward: I can't fall. Whatever happens, I must not fall.
Fleeing like a hunted animal, Lefonya dashed back to the luxury boutique. She had to get back under the protection of House Craitan as swiftly as possible. The suffocating terror that any stranger in this dense crowd might be an assassin sent to kill her felt like a tightening noose around her throat.
Every fleeting glance from passersby pierced her with dread.
Don't look at me. Please, nobody look at me.
“Ponia!”
Lefonya snapped her head up.
A frantic shout tore through the bustle of the street. It was Pelens, who had been desperately scouring the avenue in search of her.
“Ponia!”
Wreathing his feet in aura, Pelens closed the distance in the blink of an eye.
“Do you have any idea how worried I was?!”
Large, strong arms swept down, gathering Lefonya tightly into a fierce embrace as if terrified she might vanish into thin air. At that very moment, the desperate strength holding up her trembling legs completely gave way.
“Ponia! What's wrong? Are you alright?!”
As she went limp against his chest, Pelens frantically checked every inch of her.
How bitterly ironic it was.
“Oppa……”
House Craitan, the legendary Guardians of the Empire, was supposed to be the sworn enemy—the very house she had been trained as the Pope's blade and spy to fear and deceive.
“Oppa, please……”
Yet the moment she saw Pelens's face, an overwhelming tide of relief washed over her.
Relief.
To feel such profound safety in the arms of a Craitan—a sensation she had never experienced once in her entire miserable existence—defied all explanation.
“Ponia, what happened? Did someone bully you? Tell me what's wrong. Which bastard did it… no, are you hurt somewhere? Look at me, please.”
Lefonya shook her head violently, burying her face even deeper into Pelens's chest to shield herself from the surrounding gazes. Taking in the gathered crowd, Pelens stripped off his outer coat, draped it gently over her head, and lifted her securely into his arms.
“Let's go home, Ponia.”
Lefonya nodded weakly against his shoulder.
Let's go home.
Never in her life had those words sounded so sweet and comforting.
The moment they returned to the ducal estate, Lefonya shut herself in her bedroom.
The news that a five-year-old child—who had always brushed off every crisis with astonishing composure—had skipped dinner and locked herself away threw the entire residence into sheer turmoil.
“My Lady! Look at this, a cute little teddy bear is waddling about!”
“My Lady! What about the toy teapot from the boutique earlier? Shall we have a tea party together?”
“My Lady, would you like to go for a ride on a wooden horse? Ah, your usual hobbyhorse is still undergoing repairs, so Sir Canwell has volunteered to be your steed! You can ride on Sir Canwell's broad shoulders!”
“My Lady, should I fetch more desserts? Sweet fruit, perhaps? Ah, meat! Shall we bring you roasted meat?”
The household servants pleaded through the thick wood of Lefonya's bedroom door, but not a single sound answered them. Because she had adamantly stated that she wished to be left alone and refused entry to anyone, not even the most senior maids dared cross the threshold.
Standing outside with his arms crossed, Pelens let out a ragged sigh.
“Ponia.”
He knocked gently, keeping his voice uncharacteristically soft.
“Are you angry with me?”
Terrified that she might have disappeared from the room altogether, Pelens channeled his aura to scan for signs of life. Feeling her faint presence just past the door, he released a quiet breath of relief. Still, no reply came.
“Young Master. Did something happen while you were out?” the butler inquired carefully. Pelens's jaw clenched as he recalled her pale, trembling figure.
“I don't know.”
It was painfully clear that something terrible had occurred, yet he had no clue what it was. He desperately wanted to comfort her, but the words refused to come. If Brother were here right now, what would he say to her?
As Pelens bit his lip in frustration, a deep, commanding voice broke the silence.
“Ponia skipped dinner?”
The household staff bowed hurriedly as Pelens turned around. Having just returned from the aristocratic council, Duke Craitan was striding down the hallway.
“Father.”
“Where is Ponia?”
“Still inside her room. Ever since we got back, she hasn't taken a single step outside. She won't answer, and she won't let anyone in.”
“Give me a concise report of today's events. Now.”
Pelens recounted everything that had transpired during their outing: how the small cottage she had lived in before being adopted had been reduced to a pile of ash; the chilling, frozen expression that took over her face from that heartbreak; how she seemed to cheer up while picking out trinkets at the boutique, only to suddenly bolt outside; and how, when he finally caught up to her, she was pale as a ghost and shaking uncontrollably.
Having listened to the briefing, the Duke nodded once.
“Butler.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Bring me the key to Ponia's room.”
“I took the liberty of preparing it beforehand. Here it is, Your Grace.”
Without bothering to announce his entry, the Duke slotted the key into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.
“Hah—”
Pelens gasped, his breath catching in his throat at the sight of his father barging straight into the young lady's private quarters without permission. Even a notorious rogue like himself wouldn't have dared pull such a brazen move.
“Pelens. When you were five, you locked yourself in your room every time you threw a fit. If I had waited for your permission back then, this estate would have either burned to the ground or been smashed into rubble.”
Having raised two unruly sons, Duke Craitan stepped inside without hesitation. Pelens gestured for the servants to wait outside before quickly following at his father's heels.
The bedroom was pitch black. Birdie and Becky had certainly lit the candles before leaving, yet there was not a single flicker of light to be seen. Even the fireplace was cold and dead. Though Lefonya was unaware, the fireplace had been embedded with high-grade mana stones after the previous arson scare to maintain a steady temperature and deploy a defensive barrier if excessive heat was detected. Unless someone had intentionally doused the flames, it should have been impossible for the fire to go out.
“Ponia.”
Puzzled, the two men moved deeper into the dark room. But as their eyes adjusted to the shadows, both froze in their tracks.
In the frigid gloom, untouched by candlelight, a tiny figure sat crammed into the narrow crevice between the bed and the wall.
“Please don't hit me. Please don't kill me. I want to live. Please spare me. Don't hit me. Don't kill me. I want to live. Please spare me.”
Huddled tightly in that stifling gap, Lefonya was clutching her drawn-up knees, her head buried low as she murmured the desperate, repetitive chant over and over again.
“Please don't hit me. Please don't kill me. I want to live. Please spare me.”
Her voice, thick with unshed tears, trembled violently. A five-year-old child, quivering in the dark, begging for her very life.
It felt as though they had accidentally peeked into the darkest abyss of an infant who had always insisted, with habitual stoicism, that she was perfectly fine. They had glimpsed something sacred and wounded—something they were never meant to see.
Pelens felt as if he had been struck square in the skull with a warhammer.
“Fluff—”
Shocked out of his senses, Pelens moved forward to pull her out, but the Duke calmly gripped his arm and held him back. Shaking his head, the Duke left Pelens behind and approached the trembling child on his own.
Lefonya, so lost in her chant that she hadn't registered their presence, caught the faint sound of approaching footsteps and choked on her breath. She curled herself into an even tighter ball, curling her limbs as though crushing herself into nothingness was her only hope of survival.
Rather than calling out to her, the Duke stopped before the crevice and sank onto one knee.
Sensing someone close, Lefonya's small frame shuddered violently. Paralyzed by terror, she dared not lift her buried head.
“Please don't… hit me……”
The phrases spilled out in an endless, rhythmic loop.
“Please don't kill me.”
As if the words themselves were the only armor she had left to shield her fragile existence.
“I want… to live.”
“……”
“Please spare me.”
“I will.”
The Duke answered her final plea. Then, moving with immense care, he reached out his broad, calloused hand and warmly enveloped the child's freezing, bare feet.
“Ponia.”
At that gentle, tender call, Lefonya finally, agonizingly raised her head.
“I am here.”
The porcelain skin around her eyes was swollen and raw from weeping. Unwiped tears drenched her cheeks, and those crimson irises, usually bursting with the bright vitality of ripe cherries, stared blankly forward as if her soul had drifted far away.
“Ponia.”
The Duke cupped one large hand over her weeping eyes, using his other hand to support the back of her head, sharing his steady warmth with the trembling child.
“It has been an exhausting day, hasn't it?”
The Duke did not interrogate her. He did not clamor loudly for answers, nor did he demand anything of her at all.
“You are safe here. I am here, and Pelens is here. You have nothing to fear, so sleep.”
Having spoken those simple words, the Duke gently stroked the back of her hair.
That was all he did.
Yet astonishingly, the moment Duke Craitan's words faded, the tension keeping the five-year-old child upright shattered, and her body collapsed forward.
The Duke caught her falling form securely in his arms.
“Father! Ponia… is she—?”
Pelens rushed forward, his voice cracking with panic.
“She hasn't fainted. She has merely fallen asleep. We must lay her down.”
“Ah? Right, yes!”
Pelens, who loathed serving others so fiercely that he routinely ignored commands from both his father and his elder brother Havelian, scrambled to smooth out Lefonya's bedclothes in a frantic blur. The Duke set her down gently onto the mattress. Yet the instant his warmth pulled away, the child's small body shuddered once more as if haunted by waking nightmares.
Startled, Pelens quickly clamped both of his hands around her tiny, cold fingers. Soon, the soft, rhythmic sound of steady breathing filled the quiet chamber as Lefonya slipped into a deep, peaceful slumber.
“Pelens. Silence the household staff. As far as anyone knows, Ponia returned from her outing, ate her dinner as usual, and went to bed. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Not a single word of what happened here tonight leaves this room. That applies to Ponia as well. Even if she remembers none of this, let it be.”
“Yeah. But Father… will Ponia really be alright?”
“…Perhaps.”
Watching the sleeping child, the Duke parted his lips, his voice dropping to a somber murmur.
“When we first adopted Ponia, I had the butler conduct a thorough investigation into her background.”
“What? Why are you only telling me this now?”
“There was no record anywhere of a five-year-old girl named Lefonya. Given her youth, it was possible she confused her own name or age, but the truly bizarre part was that no matter how deep we dug, there were no traces of her whatsoever.”
“No traces? …You mean no proof of where she lived?”
“Indeed. It is not as if she was raised confined within a dungeon, yet she had vanished so completely from the world that it was as though she had never existed at all.”
Pelens furrowed his brow in deep thought.
“Couldn't that just be… because she was an unregistered commoner?”
“Even if a child is unregistered, if she grew up in a village, someone would have seen her. Someone would have called her by name. There would have been peers who played with her. Yet there was not a single whisper of her presence.”
“Maybe our investigators just missed it.”
“Knowing her name, her approximate age, and her distinct appearance, failing to find a single trace is impossible—unless someone went out of their way to meticulously erase her existence.”
Unless someone deliberately concealed her.
At those words, Pelens's face set into stone.
Something was deeply wrong.
“It seems I must uncover exactly what was done to Ponia before she was brought to this house,” Duke Craitan murmured, his tone laced with chilling resolve.
Pelens stared down at Lefonya's peaceful face. The tiny hand cradled within his large palms felt frail, yet undeniably warm.
“Father,” Pelens said, his voice dropping low.
“I don't know what your stance is, but I have no intention of letting the Fluffball go. When I declared that I would become her escort, I made that choice knowing the weight of it. I can't quite explain why, but even if it means coming to blows with you, I will never abandon her.”
The Duke remained silent. Pelens's confession—that he could not put his reasons into words—sounded startlingly identical to the Duke's own conviction on the day he had stubbornly decided to adopt her.
A strange, inexplicable instinct that defied logic.
“Even if she really is a spy sent on the orders of some vile swindler—”
A sinister glint flashed across Pelens's sharp gaze. It was a terrifyingly vicious expression, one he had never once revealed in front of Lefonya.
“I'll simply butcher the bastard pulling her strings.”
There was not a single trace of mischief in his vow to commit murder.
“Once he's dead, the Fluffball will have nothing to do with it anymore. The evidence will be erased, clean and simple.”
A heavy, oppressive aura rolled off Pelens's body in dark, suffocating waves.
“So if some worthless dog dared use this child and sent her here for their own profit……”
“……”
“I'll wipe them from the face of this earth so thoroughly that not even a speck of bone dust remains.”