Chapter 14
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The atmosphere had shifted into something undeniably heavy. Adi felt a strange urge to cower, shrinking away despite having done nothing wrong.
The Duke’s eyes traveled from her face down to her closed fist. He seemed to realize she was concealing something, as his focus remained fixed there. Adi slowly uncurled her fingers.
“A butterfly.”
A snowy white insect sat motionless in her palm. Only its delicate antennae and wings twitched with life.
Yuls reached out a hand. Without hesitation, the creature fluttered onto his skin. Adi watched it crawl across his fingers, surprised by its lack of fear. She found herself noticing that the Duke’s hands were significantly larger than she had previously imagined.
Standing up, Yuls tossed the butterfly out the open window. He returned to his seat on the couch with total indifference. It was as if Adi weren’t even there; he looked at her with a silent, questioning stare, wondering why she was still standing in his path.
Adi took a hurried step back.
“They said you stayed up all night working.”
“I did.”
“If you require any assistance…”
“Your help?”
He looked ready to dismiss her, but his eyes caught the massive stack of inventory lists sitting on the table. If the paperwork was this dense, finding the specific item would take forever.
A week remained. He had already endured a decade of waiting, so another few days should have been trivial. Yet, because a deadline now existed, the time felt excruciatingly slow.
“These papers are the records of gifts received.”
Adi followed Yuls’s gaze to the scattered documents.
“Go through them. Point out anything that strikes you as peculiar, rare, or just plain odd.”
She began to flip through the pages, searching for the strange or the bizarre.
The list was a fever dream: a horn from a unicorn, the severed hand of a mermaid, a hoof taken from a three-clawed deer. There was star-shaped coral from the Eastern Continent’s edge, a starfish from the North, and even a strand of elven hair.
“Which of these qualify as things I should highlight?”
She continued reading. There were vessels from the East, a mechanical doll that functioned without a drop of mana, and a painting supposedly rendered by a dwarf. She saw entries for a preserved gargoyle from Jenui, a tooth from an ogre, a stone cut from the stomach of a man in agony, and scorpions drowned in jars of spirits.
“Anything you find unusual, Sir.”
To her, nearly every item fit that description. She considered asking if there was a specific level of weirdness he was looking for, but she held her tongue. “I understand,” she replied simply.
The room grew quiet, save for the rhythmic rustling of turning pages. Some entries were recorded on thick parchment, which gave off a heavy, dull thud as they were flipped.
During her time guarding the Duke, she had only once seen a gift actually enter the drawing room—and that had been from a relative. The sheer volume of names on these lists suggested that most offerings were sent directly to the vaults without ever being seen.
Yuls looked up, a shadow of annoyance on his features. “Adrian,” he called out.
“Yes, Your Excellency?”
“Sit. It will be faster.”
“Understood.”
Adi took the seat across from him. She unbuckled her sword and leaned it against the chair, ensuring the hilt was within immediate reach.
Gemstones were the most frequent entries, followed by various works of art. Typically, a noblewoman would be well-versed in such luxuries, but Adi’s upbringing lacked any training in the arts. She couldn’t tell a masterpiece from a trinket.
Count Grimaldi had never cared for the finer things. Culture was currently flourishing, but for the Grimaldi family, the past had been consumed by the violence of war and the cruelty of witch trials. Books appeared on the list as well, though she had no way of knowing which were precious. She wondered if the object he sought was truly hidden in these mundane records.
“Your Excellency.”
“Speak.”
“Would an orc’s head, mounted as a trophy, be of interest?”
“……”
His silent stare provided the answer. Whoever had sent a decapitated, decorated monster as a token of affection had truly wretched taste.
Besides, such creatures were rare in the civilized world now. They were still rumored to haunt the deep woods and the lawless borders, but a vast divide had long since been established between the realms of man and beast.
Had these monsters been a genuine threat to humanity, men would have spent their time warring against them rather than hunting their own kind.
Time slipped away as they worked. The pile of documents showed no sign of thinning. The Duke remained intensely focused. Despite his youthful appearance, he studied the ink with the gravity of a man carrying the weight of the world.
Whatever he was searching for was clearly vital, yet Adi couldn’t fathom why he was only looking for it now. Why hadn’t such an important item been cataloged separately the moment it arrived?
She picked up a new sheet, but it was just a tedious list of coins and jewelry, so she scanned it at a glance. Yuls watched her from across the table, though she didn’t notice his scrutiny.
The sound of the door clicking open broke the silence. Adi’s hand flew to her sword instantly at the intrusion.
It was only a servant she recognized. The man paused, looking confused at the sight of Adi sitting with a sword in one hand and a document in the other, facing the Duke. He bowed low and retreated.
Before Adi could process the odd encounter, the Duke told her to get back to work. She sat down again.
The door opened once more. The same servant returned, this time pushing a cart. He placed tea and small cakes on the table before sliding a cup toward Adi. The porcelain was warm to the touch.
She watched the tea stream into the cup in a perfect curve. Adi picked it up, took a drink, and immediately returned to her reading.
Both the Duke and his servant stared at her with bewildered expressions. It was clear they hadn’t expected her to drink without hesitation. After turning a few more pages, Adi spoke.
“It isn’t poisoned.”
She had simply been waiting to see if her own body would react to a toxin.
“Of course it isn’t. He is my personal servant,” Yuls remarked. While he had survived many attempts on his life in the past, those days were largely over. He wouldn’t have hired a man he couldn’t trust.
The staff Yuls kept might look like simple servants, but the group included an assassin, a healing mage, and a knight in disguise. There was only one actual valet among them.
In truth, the only person in the room who posed a threat was Adi Grimaldi. That was precisely why the servant remained standing behind the Duke, keeping a watchful eye.
“Is the heir of the Grimaldi line moonlighting as a royal taster?”
“I am here to be your shield, after all.”
While true, the servant behind him was far better equipped to handle a poisoning than she was.
Yuls found the situation baffling. Had this knight been so neglected due to the family curse that he hadn’t even learned basic etiquette? The more time he spent with Adrian, the more bizarre the man seemed. He had expected a predatory fox like Spencer Grimaldi, but instead, he found a man whose loyalty was almost absurd. It was too much for a temporary seasonal guard.
Curiosity began to gnaw at Yuls. He didn’t want to ask about Adrian directly, so he searched for a different opening. “Your sister,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“Tell me about your twin.”
“I am simply curious.”
Adi was speechless. She stood there with her mouth slightly open, failing to ask why he cared or what he wanted to know. To Yuls, she looked like someone who had never received a proper education.
He briefly wondered if the blank look was a mask, as he couldn’t imagine Spencer raising a son to be this slow-witted.
“What exactly do you wish to know?”
“How it ends for someone taken by a curse.”
“Why ask that…?”
“I wanted to know if that is the fate waiting for me.”
Adi blinked at the unexpected confession.
Death felt like an impossible concept for the Duke. Men of his rank were always in danger, yet he seemed untouchable. It wasn’t just his youth; there was something fundamentally strange about him, as if time had simply forgotten to touch him.
“Many have been cursed. Their deaths are well-documented.”
“But none share my specific affliction.”
“Then perhaps the curse has nothing to do with you at all, Sir.”
“The world says otherwise. They claim I am cursed.”
“But you are still here, aren’t you?”
“And so are you, Your Excellency.”
Yuls let out a short laugh. The circumstances of their survival were vastly different, but the core fact remained. They were both still breathing.
He gestured for her to continue and went back to his papers. Adi felt a wave of panic. What was she supposed to say? Should she talk about herself or Adrian? Her memories were beginning to bleed together.
Perhaps it was the nature of being twins. Sometimes, she felt as though she possessed memories from Adrian’s perspective. She could see her own long, golden hair, but the image felt like it was being viewed through someone else’s eyes. It was as if the girl who died still occupied a corner of her mind.
“Death.”
He had asked about the end.
“It seems to be the only thing that is truly impartial.”
The image of a cold, blue-tinged Adrian flashed in her mind, his body draped in hair that looked like spun gold. Had that been her own reflection she was remembering?
“She was sickly for a long time, and then she simply faded away. She was born frail.”
“I was told you were the one born with a weak constitution, Sir,” Yuls countered. He looked at her sharply, wondering if his information was wrong.
“And because of that, your sister bore the blame.”
“…That is true. But it was my twin who suffered the long illness and passed.”
“Did you feel responsible? Like it was your fault?”
“Me?”
“I… I am not certain.”
Guilt? Adrina had never known the feeling. People claimed her birth had doomed Adrian, but Adrian had never whispered such a thing. Adrian had only ever…
“My memories of the North are fading. Sometimes I doubt the place even existed; the images are so dim.”
He told me he was happy I was there.
“I remember nothing clearly. Except for the winter.”
