Lingering Trace (3)
Lingering Trace (3)
Serepina's face went blank at Levina's words.
She couldn't find her voice.
Tears blurred her vision until Levina was nothing but a smeared stain in front of her.
She'd always felt like she was suffocating around Levina — that unspoken rule that unless the esteemed Heir Apparent deigned to speak first, you weren't supposed to open your mouth at all.
Today wasn't going to be much different.
Or it wouldn't have been, if only she hadn't heard that Ravin was dead.
"Killed him?"
Serepina forced the words out as if she were wringing them from her throat.
Levina said nothing.
She simply looked at Serepina, who was crying.
"He's nothing to you anymore. Stop caring and get out. / You were the one begging to break off the engagement."
She was still staring at the stack of documents, but her hand holding the pen was trembling faintly.
Serepina didn't leave the room.
She couldn't move.
Not until she heard something that mattered.
She turned over in her mind what she and Ravin had been to each other.
Nothing much.
Attaching some grand label to a man and woman who'd split apart felt like a waste of a perfectly good word.
But in name, he'd been her fiancé. In truth, from the time they were children, there'd only ever been one person. One child who grew up alongside her, who hadn't seen the Belluz family's capable, well-connected daughter but had seen Serepina.
That had been Ravin.
And then at some point, like any empty-headed noble lady would, she'd started seeing him as nothing more than a fiancé.
So Serepina decided to deny it.
Deny herself. Deny the Heir Apparent standing before her. Deny everything around her.
She wanted to deny that Ravin was dead, too.
"How... how could Ravin mean nothing to me? We were..."
At that, Levina lifted her head.
She looked at Serepina once, then picked up the pen again.
The trembling in her hand didn't stop.
She tried to sign something on the document, but the pen tip just quivered erratically across the paper.
Frustration flaring, Levina hurled the pen aside.
The sound of it hitting the wall and clattering to the floor rang through the room.
Levina dragged a hand down her face, scrubbing at it dry, and exhaled a sigh.
Her eyes were sunken, shot through with red veins.
She looked like someone who hadn't slept in days, exhaustion caked onto every feature.
"What are you if not nothing to him? / A fiancée who didn't share a single drop of blood? / No, you're not even that anymore. You kicked him aside."
"Ravin and I..."
Just as Serepina started to speak, Levina cut her off.
"I'm sure a child you grew up with feels special. / The way you get attached to a puppy if you raise it from birth."
She rose from her seat and perched on the edge of the desk.
"So why did you throw him out like trash?"
Levina's voice dropped low.
"When I cornered Ravin and handled him however I pleased, why did you pretend not to see? / There's no way you didn't know. I did it right in front of you just to piss you off. / And still you'd encourage him from behind, cheer him on, feed him empty words, treat him like a person. / While you were capable of doing absolutely nothing."
Levina pressed at her eyes with her fingertips, then roughly swept her hair back.
"You're still scared of me. You must have been back then, too."
"Because you aren't like a person, Heir Apparent."
Serepina answered.
Her voice shook, but her eyes stared straight at Levina.
"You're too human. That's your problem. / A person with every flaw collected into one place and not a single virtue. / No decisiveness, wishy-washy, lacking in ability, and even when someone talks to you, you never fucking listen. / Even a dog knows to sit when told to sit and bite when told to bite."
Levina pushed off the desk.
Slowly, she approached Serepina.
Her heels clicked sharply across the marble floor.
She stopped right in front of her and spoke.
"I was sick of him. I didn't like him. / Nothing ever went the way I wanted. / So he acted out on his own, and I killed him for it."
She whispered it right beside Serepina's ear.
Serepina had the strange thought that her voice seemed to reverberate, a low hum.
"I took him to the estate and tormented him a little, and he said it was too hard and jumped to his death. Head smashed first, the goddamn idiot."
Levina smiled.
"I just watched him fall. Or not. / I could have run and grabbed his hand."
Her smiling lips quivered, and though her left hand gripped her right wrist, the trembling in her hand wouldn't cease.
"I don't understand why, as he left my arms for good, he smiled when he died. Smiled like he was finally relieved."
She took another step closer.
Right up to Serepina's nose.
"But you — what didn't you like so much that you threw Ravin away? / It's not like you were ever going to pick him back up, so what's this rubbish about him meaning something to you?"
Serepina couldn't say a word.
She only sobbed.
Levina cupped Serepina's cheek lightly.
Cold fingers brushed across her tear-soaked skin.
"When I killed Ravin, you just stood there and watched. You useless bitch."
The moment those words ended, Serepina stopped sobbing.
The tears kept falling, but no sound came out.
Her breath came out ragged.
It felt like her lungs were searing.
She looked at the pen on the floor.
The pen Levina had thrown.
Levina walked past Serepina, bent down, and picked it up.
She felt the cold metal in her palm.
The corner of Serepina's mouth lifted slightly.
A trembling voice leaked out.
"You're right. I wasn't the only one at fault."
Levina didn't reply.
In Serepina's head, every kind of thought churned and tangled.
That Ravin was dead.
That Levina had killed him.
That she herself had just been holed up in her room all that time, believing Ravin had abandoned her.
Levina fiddled with the pen, then glanced back at Serepina.
Seeing the faint upturn at the corner of her mouth, Levina smiled dimly.
"Maybe the reason I hated you is because you and I are the same."
"You're the last person who should be saying that."
Serepina spoke.
"I didn't want Ravin beside you. I didn't want him beside anyone else either. / Yeah. Looking at you, I think I get it."
Levina murmured.
"You're siblings."
At Serepina's words, Levina shrugged like that was hardly an obstacle.
"I want what I want."
"Was that why? All this time?"
"I don't really know."
Levina pulled out a handkerchief, wiped her hands, then tucked it back inside her clothes.
"Still, at the very end, he stayed with me."
She was staring blankly out the window.
In that profile, Serepina suddenly saw Ravin's face.
More precisely, it overlapped with the expression Ravin had worn in her nightmares.
The dream where Ravin burned to death.
The dream where he hanged himself.
The dream where she went to his room and found the Heir Apparent just holding Ravin, collapsed with blood streaming from his head.
One nightmare after another — or maybe not nightmares at all, maybe things that had really happened.
Everything felt like it was tangling together into chaos, and Serepina's eyelids fluttered.
Still, one thing was clear: this insane woman was, without question, the worst human being here.
She'd snatched Ravin away, then couldn't even keep him properly by her side and got him killed.
The moment that thought surfaced, Serepina's hand moved as if possessed.
She reached out without realizing it.
Toward Levina's back.
A tiny wisp of mana gathered at her fingertips.
The air gave a faint shudder.
Levina seemed to sense something wrong. She slowly turned to look back.
Her eyes went wide.
It was too late.
The mana leaving Serepina's hand sliced through the air like a thread of light.
It drove precisely into Levina's chest.
The sound of flesh being pierced came through with bizarre clarity.
Levina's body lurched forward violently.
A faint gasp escaped her lips.
She looked down at her own chest.
A translucent spear of mana had impaled her.
Red spread rapidly across her white blouse.
Levina turned her head back toward Serepina, disbelief written across her face.
The mana spear vanished, and her body sagged.
A heavy thud.
Levina collapsed to the floor.
Beneath her, red slowly pooled outward.
With the crack of the mana blast, the door burst open and student council officers rushed in.
They stopped dead, dazed by the scene before them.
All they could do was look back and forth in confusion between Levina on the floor and Serepina standing above her.
Serepina stared vacantly at Levina's fallen form.
What she'd just done hadn't sunk in yet.
For an instant, thoughts of her family, her house, flickered through her mind.
Her father, who'd forced the engagement to be broken no matter how much she said she hated it, wouldn't accept this. That face she'd never understood — why had he let her grow up beside Ravin and betroth them if he meant to undo it all?
A thought surfaced: Served him right.
The ridiculousness of it all welled up, and a choked, hiccuping laugh burst out of her.
Students moved in to subdue Serepina, but she didn't resist.
She just laughed and let them drag her away without a fight.