Roxana
Chapter 51
Chapter 51
The Way to Protect the Female Lead’s Older Brother
Chapter 51
If only she could, she wanted to rush outside right this second and let everyone in Agriche know.
She wanted to shout at the top of her lungs for them to look.
That she had finally, truly succeeded in deceiving them all.
A soft click.
The firmly closed bedroom door swung open at that exact moment.
A thin sliver of light seeped into the darkness-engulfed room. There had been no presence felt outside, yet someone stepped through the doorway without the slightest forewarning.
Through the gap of the open door, an arm that seemed to belong to Emily could be glimpsed sprawled limp upon the floor.
But before Roxana could look closely, the door clicked shut once more.
Ah, what a nuisance.
Seeing the man towering before her, Roxana slowly closed and opened her eyes.
“It’s quite noisy outside. They say you fed Cassis Pedelian to your poison butterflies.”
Having perhaps just returned to the mansion, the man who stepped inside carried the faint scent of a dense forest.
It seemed the party that had left for the Karantul’s habitat had already returned.
“And?”
Roxana slowly wiped the corner of her mouth with her sleeve, her voice entirely impassive.
“What does that have to do with you that you’d come all the way here to talk about it?”
But at the low voice that followed, Roxana’s movements froze.
“Cassis Pedelian isn’t dead, is he?”
It was no longer a question seeking an answer from Roxana.
“Where did you smuggle him off to?”
With heavy footsteps, Deon, who had been standing rooted like a tree, began to move.
His steps came to a halt just a single pace away from Roxana.
A soft splash sounded as his black boot stepped into a small pool of blood gathered on the floor.
Deon’s gaze slowly swept over Roxana’s blood-stained figure.
The room was so dark that nothing should have been clearly visible, yet his eyes felt as though they were piercing straight through to her core.
“Shall I take a guess?”
Deon soon whispered in a low voice and leaned down.
Crimson eyes, gleaming sharp in the moonlight, locked onto hers from up close.
“There is only one place that has remained out of my sight until now.”
A cold smile crept across Deon’s lips.
“The Black Forest at the northern boundary.”
At that moment, the faint sound of wind drifting in from outside died away.
An ice-sharp silence descended upon the room’s thick, stifling air.
Not a single ripple of emotion showed on Roxana’s face.
The gaze she fixed on Deon remained just as coldly detached as when he had first stepped into the room.
Not a flicker of emotional turmoil could be detected within them.
Yet Deon was not dissuaded in the slightest.
“I don’t know what method you used to sneak him out, but it was quite plausible. Right… Then are these perhaps poison butterflies that cast illusions?”
Seizing upon Roxana’s moment of weakness, poison butterflies had materialized in midair, fluttering around her. Deon’s gaze brushed over them.
“To think what you possessed wasn’t a slaughter butterfly. Or perhaps the poison butterflies you hatched weren’t just one.”
Deon’s words were astonishingly close to the truth. Roxana, who had been quietly watching the face before her, finally opened her mouth.
“Your delusions are running wild.”
“You know better than anyone that it’s no delusion.”
Roxana’s gaze silently lingered on Deon’s face once more.
After a moment, she asked softly.
“So, you’re going to go outside right now and tell everyone that story?”
“What should I do?”
The corners of Deon’s lips curled into a languid arc. Then, he whispered cruelly.
“Shall I send a search party to the northern boundary first? Bringing back Cassis Pedelian’s torn corpse and tossing it before you sounds rather nice too.”
He looked just like a hunter who had succeeded in cornering his prey into a trap.
Deon reached out and closed his hand around a butterfly fluttering around Roxana.
As if that fragile thing were the very person standing before him.
“Though I haven’t the faintest idea why you’d go to such lengths just to keep that bastard alive.”
He clenched his fist tightly, as though ready to crush the butterfly within his grasp.
Holding Roxana in his quiet gaze for a long moment, he soon relaxed the tension in his hand.
Slipping through the opened gap, the butterfly fluttered out and drifted into the air.
Immediately after, Deon straightened his body to leave.
“Don’t go.”
Or rather, he was about to—if not for the voice that pierced his ears in the next breath.
“Don’t go, Deon.”
The faint whisper leaked once more into the ears of Deon, whose movement had ground to a halt.
It was a voice impossibly soft and sweet, hard to believe it was directed at him.
Even if this were an auditory hallucination conjured by Roxana’s butterflies, he would have believed it.
But the hand that touched Deon’s cheek right after possessed unmistakable substance.
The man, who exuded a bone-chilling aura as if born from the very womb of winter, stared at the person before him as though time itself had frozen.
Roxana moved her hand against him.
Gently caressing his face in that manner, she soon curled the corners of her lips upward.
“How utterly dull.”
As if all that sweetness from a moment ago had been a complete lie, the smile piercing his vision was chillingly cold.
“You truly are such a dull creature.”
As though she simply could not help finding him pitiful and pathetic, Roxana looked upon the man holding his breath beneath her touch with eyes filled with a mixture of sympathy and derision.
“Deon. Did you really think I wouldn’t know what you truly want?”
At that moment, a thread-like ripple surfaced in the crimson eyes reflected in Roxana’s sight.
It was an infinitesimal tremor, yet because it came from none other than Deon, it felt like a tempestuous upheaval.
“During Lady Maria’s tea party last time… the subordinates who impersonated the name of Deon Agriche.”
A breathy, faint whisper flowed from her crimson lips as they slowly parted.
The quiet darkness blanketed the overlapping shadows of the two upon the floor.
“The ones who were ordered by me to invoke your name and bring Cassis outside. You killed them, didn’t you?”
Those mentioned by Roxana were known to have met an unfortunate death that day at the hands of the monster unleashed outside the breeding grounds.
Yet that was not the real truth.
Though nothing but chilling silence pooled within the room, Roxana read the answer straight from Deon’s eyes before her.
“Right… You could have dragged them before Father to clear your name before killing them, yet you didn’t.”
“…….”
“And just as I wished, you obediently left the mansion and went to the monster habitat.”
Even asking Deon the reason why was utterly pointless.
For through the eyes she met in this very moment, everything hidden deep within him was laid bare for her to see.
Had the person before her been Jeremy, she surely would have showered him with lavish praise.
To clean up behind her even at the cost of sacrificing himself for her sake—how delightfully commendable.
But Roxana merely let out a shallow breath steeped in languor and mockery toward the man before her.
“Even after I told you not to overstep your bounds.”
A gaze like shards of glass that could cut at the slightest touch melted into the moonlight’s shadows.
“I truly never needed anything you had to give, whatever it might be.”
She despised and loathed the man before her to the point of shuddering revulsion, so much so that she did not even wish to allow his gaze to touch her.
Yet no matter how much she rejected and shoved him away, this pitiful and dreadful man relentlessly chased her shadow.
“Deon. You see, I find you utterly sickening.”
At Roxana’s words, Deon did not flinch in the slightest.
As if he had known all along, the eyes quietly gazing back at her were as deep and dark as the abyss of the sea.
Yet within them, an unfamiliar yearning silently lurked like a tiny ember.
“But… fine…”
Roxana met his gaze steadily and smiled coldly.
“If you want so desperately to hand me your leash.”
Frigid moonlight seeped in from outside the window. The warmth radiating from their touching bodies was gentle.
Yet, bizarrely, it felt piercingly cold, as if slicing into flesh.
“Since for both you and me, the only place left to go is hell anyway.”
That day, Roxana forged a new covenant of shackles with the black dog that had willingly crawled beneath her feet in submission.
What awaited them at the end of it was bound to be none other than the abyss.