Roxana
Chapter 14
Chapter 14
How to Protect the
Female Lead’s Older Brother
Chapter 14
* * *
“Lady Roxana, what should we do with the toy?”
After Lant Agriche departed, the subordinates tasked with moving Cassis asked me.
“Take him to an empty room in my quarters.”
Cassis was unconscious. His body was already in tatters, so it was only natural after having to endure yet another round of Lant Agriche’s merciless violence in full.
Still, considering he only let go of consciousness after Lant Agriche had vanished completely from sight, Cassis’s willpower deserved recognition.
“What a wretched sight.”
I glanced down at Cassis, battered and drenched in blood, and spoke.
“I won’t have the slightest desire to play with him in this state. It seems he’ll need some treatment first, so see to it.”
“Yes, understood.”
Cassis was dragged away by two subordinates holding him by the arms.
A distinct trail of blood lingered where he had been. Naturally, Cassis’s body—the very source of that blood—was an unbearable sight.
I gazed with pity at Cassis, who had known nothing but torment ever since arriving at Agriche.
Then, at a certain moment, a faint sense of incongruity struck me.
As I looked at the bloodied Cassis, a subtle question flickered across my mind.
Narrowing my eyes, I kept my gaze on his receding figure for a brief moment.
Soon enough, I decided to verify this question the next time I saw him, and turned away from the spot.
* * *
“Sana noona, you’re only coming back now?”
Why are you coming out from there?
I halted my steps upon seeing Jeremy sitting on the staircase landing.
“Jeremy, why are you sitting like that?”
He was seated on the stairs with his arms resting on his knees, chin propped in his hands as he looked up at me.
Because the mansion was so grand, the staircase was wide as well, making Jeremy’s solitary figure sitting there stand out even more.
It seemed he had been waiting for me…
Not in front of my room, but perched right on the stairs—I couldn’t fathom what he meant by greeting me like this.
“I heard you went to see that bas… that toy, so I thought I’d come by, too.”
Jeremy’s voice as he spoke was somewhat chilled.
Seeing the discontent bleeding through his expression, he seemed displeased that Cassis had become completely my toy today.
Last time, he had been in high spirits all on his own, declaring that even after Charlotte finished her punishment, he wouldn’t let her near Cassis.
This boy Jeremy was truly fickle—though I already knew it, his moods swung wildly back and forth.
“Then you should have come down to the first floor. Why are you lingering here like this?”
A troublesome brat, as always. Entertaining his whims was exhausting.
While part of me wanted to flick him sharply on the forehead, I instead reached out and gently brushed aside his bangs.
“Father was beating the hell out of your toy, so I just watched for a bit and came up.”
Though Jeremy’s tone remained somewhat sullen, having me touch him seemed to improve his mood.
Or perhaps recalling the sight of Cassis getting beaten had cheered him up.
“Your toy—can I go see him separately later?”
Jeremy took his hands from his chin and asked me.
I tilted my head slightly as I looked at his face.
That’s the look of someone with an ulterior motive.
Even so, I answered without letting the pause linger.
“Sure. But not right now—later.”
“Why?”
“You said you saw Father beating him earlier. He’s in terrible shape right now. I don’t feel like playing with him like that either, so I had him taken to an empty room for now.”
Hearing the indifferent cadence of my voice, Jeremy dusted off his pants and stood up from the stairs.
“Fine. Then I’ll go see him once his sorry state improves a bit.”
Since I had expected Jeremy to come see Cassis at least once anyway, his abrupt words didn’t catch me off guard.
Rather, what made me freeze for a brief moment was what Jeremy added offhandedly right after.
“Oh, right. I just saw your mother.”
Yet I soon spoke as if it were nothing.
“Really? Where?”
“In front of your room. She’s probably inside waiting for you right now.”
I wondered where the two of them could have crossed paths, living in different buildings with entirely different routines—so it was in front of my room.
Having seen her not too long ago at the Grand Banquet, I grew slightly curious about why Mother had sought me out again so soon.
“Looks like she heard the news that you got a toy.”
At Jeremy’s subsequent explanation, I understood.
Ah, so that was it.
“Did Mother say that to you?”
“No. I overheard her talking briefly with Emily in front of your room.”
Jeremy then twisted his lips into a smirk, whatever he was thinking.
“Your mother’s face was fucking hilarious.”
His foot lightly kicked against the stair banister.
I realized the reason Jeremy’s mood had been low wasn’t because of Cassis.
“Your mother or my mother. Fuck, do they think they gave birth to some kind of monsters? Why the hell are they trembling and throwing a fit?”
Both his tone and words were venomous to the extreme.
No wonder he was waiting for me on the landing instead of outside my room.
It seemed seeing my mother today had rubbed him the wrong way in particular.
I knew that Jeremy was projecting his own mother onto mine.
As expected of a master of dark, angsty fiction, the author of this novel had granted the villain Jeremy a bleak past as well.
His mother had feared Jeremy terribly from a very long time ago.
With each passing year, as Jeremy grew more and more like a true child of Agriche, her condition only worsened.
In the end, starting from the moment Jeremy was first invited to the Grand Banquet, she would scream as if on the verge of fainting and flee whenever she laid eyes on him.
How a woman so frail-hearted ever married Lant Agriche was something I could never comprehend.
In any case, Jeremy’s mother had died a few years ago.
That day, too, Jeremy’s mother had run away upon unexpectedly encountering her son in the corridor.
Under normal circumstances, Jeremy would have simply pretended not to see her and walked on by, but on that day, overcome with a surge of emotion toward his mother, he chased after her.
Jeremy suffered from a deficiency of affection, as children unloved by their parents often do.
Unable to express it, he had kept it bottled up tight, only for it to finally erupt all at once.
Their game of tag ended quickly.
Jeremy’s mother reached her room and locked the door, but Jeremy, consumed by fury, broke through the door and barged inside.
Having lost anywhere left to hide, what his mother chose was to throw herself over the terrace.
When Jeremy rushed over in shock, she was fortunately clinging to the railing. But the hand Jeremy reached out to save his mother never reached her.
Rejecting her son to the very end, she chose to fall instead.
They were on the third floor, so with good luck she might have survived.
Yet in the end, Jeremy’s mother died on the spot with a broken neck.
“Still, I thought your mother was a bit different, but look at her, rushing over in panic just because you brought in a single damn toy.”
I had a good idea of what Jeremy saw in my mother to make him act like this.
At some point, while my mother felt proud of me for being favored by Father in my own way, she also began to show a gaze that felt distant.
At times, she would even show a subtle fear toward me, as if dealing not with her own daughter, but with some unknown entity.
Mother likely thought I was unaware of that fact.
Yet isn’t it the nature of children to react sensitively to their parents’ emotions?
“Let’s go to the room.”
I reached a hand out toward Jeremy in front of me.
He was still lightly kicking the stair banister with one foot.
“I told you your mother is in your room right now. I’m not going.”
“No, not my room. Yours.”
At that moment, Jeremy stopped kicking the railing.
“You’re not going to see your mother? She’s waiting for you right now, isn’t she?”
Originally, Jeremy and I were similar in height, but perhaps because of the difference in stair levels we stood on, I had to look up at him.
I took Jeremy’s hand and stepped down another stair. This time, Jeremy was pulled along obediently.
“Yeah. I don’t really feel like seeing her right now either.”
Whether it was a lie told to draw out a sense of camaraderie from Jeremy or my genuine truth of not wanting to see Mother, even I couldn’t clearly tell.
If so, let’s just consider it the former.
Jeremy’s hand, quietly clasping mine in return, was warm.
I took my steps, trying just a little not to feel that warmth.
