Chapter 37
It was a voice thick with hoarseness. A raspy sound, like iron scraping against a wall.
It was so faint and thin that I couldn’t tell if I had actually heard it or if it was just a hallucination.
Startled, I spun around. I scanned the room with narrowed eyes.
The room, shrouded in deep darkness, was as silent as a distant abyss. I couldn’t see a thing; there was only an eerily chilling stillness.
I stood perfectly still, straining my ears for any other sound. But whether it had been a trick of the mind or not, nothing followed.
‘Maybe I’m just tired.’
I tilted my head and stepped out of the room. Eden was just emerging from the guest room I’d assigned him across the hall. I asked him,
“Sir Eden, was it you who just told me not to go?”
Eden arched an eyebrow, his face a picture of confusion. That was enough to know the voice hadn’t been his.
Ah, this is driving me crazy. Is this a horror novel now? Something felt off even when I was cleaning the Happy House before the fall, but this feeling is exceptionally strange.
“Do you think someone is here?”
Before I knew it, Eden had a revolver in his hand. He scanned the surroundings with a look of extreme caution. I looked back into the room once more.
If it were an intruder, the words “don’t go” and the tone of the voice itself were far too strange. Perhaps I really was just tired and hearing things?
“It’s just… No, never mind. I must have misheard.”
Eden lowered his gun, looking unimpressed. He checked the revolver’s cylinder as he spoke.
“Regardless, if we can’t reach the capital by phone, we should return here. It’s best to wait in one place until reinforcements arrive from the capital. Surely the entire country isn’t in this state.”
Regrettably, I bit my tongue to stop myself from telling him that the entire country was, in fact, in this state. Eden tucked the revolver back into the holster on his thigh.
“It’s better not to use the gun if possible. The gunfire will only draw more attention. We should save that as a last resort. Do you have any other weapons?”
At my question, Eden pointed to something at his hip. It was a scabbard.
It looked like a real sword. The kind of longsword used by knights of the old era.
“Oh, I thought that was just for decoration.”
“It is for decoration. I usually use this.”
This time, he pulled a black rod about a span long from his back pocket. With a light flick of his wrist, the rod extended. It was a police baton. I clapped my hands.
“You carry three weapons?”
“Yes, well. It’s regulation.”
Eden gave a curt reply and retracted the baton, hooking it back onto his belt.
I slung the holster I’d used at Notium Street No. 61 over my shoulder and slotted my axe into it. Eden watched me with a peculiar expression, tilting his head.
“Is Lady Cherry’s super strength innate?”
“Not exactly. It seems to be a side effect of some medicine. I became like this after taking medicine my parents gave me.”
Eden made a face that suggested he found that very strange. Even I thought it was odd.
However, since my parents, who could have answered questions about it, were no longer in this world, there was no other way to explain it.
“Super strength and an axe… they certainly suit—”
Eden’s voice trailed off abruptly. At that same moment, a memory flashed through my mind as well.
The brooch I had dropped at Notium Street No. 61.
Oh, no. Things had been so frantic that I’d completely forgotten. It was a blatant mistake.
The moment I tried to step back, Eden lunged and seized my arm. His sapphire eyes flashed with a predatory intensity, like a beast that had found its prey. The change in his demeanor was so sudden I didn’t even have time to be surprised.
The man who, until a moment ago, had been maintaining a modicum of polite—if somewhat rough—decorum was now staring at me with a completely transformed, lethal face.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
His gaze felt like it could devour me alive. Meeting those eyes, my breath caught in my throat, and I ended up stammering like an idiot.
“W-what do you mean?”
Even with incredible super strength, to be pinned down by mere aura alone—I really was hopeless.
“The woman who killed the monster at Notium Street No. 61. It’s you. You’re the one who dropped this, right?”
He reached into his inner jacket pocket with a violent motion and pulled out a rubellite brooch. The initials ‘C. S.’ were engraved upon it.
Damn it, he found out.
“What are you talking about? What is that?”
But for now, I feigned ignorance.
When I widened my eyes and put on a look of utter confusion, Eden let out a sharp, mocking laugh.
“Ah. So you’re going to play dumb?”
He looked at me with a smirk playing on his lips, as if he were watching a child’s clumsy performance. His grip on my arm remained tight and unyielding.
Closing the distance between us, Eden leaned down and whispered into my ear.
“Don’t play games. ‘C. S.’—Cherry Sinclair. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, shall I help you remember? Tell me why you ran away that day. You know something about this whole situation, don’t you?”
His voice, sinking low into my ear, held no mercy—in fact, it held no emotion at all.
“Looking at it now, it seems you weren’t saving me, but had an ulterior motive. I feel like I’ve been played by you, Lady Cherry. You’d better choose your words carefully.”
I struggled to remain calm. I clenched my fists, pressing my nails into my palms to sharpen my focus.
There was a reason Eden’s nickname was ‘The Mad Dog of Benton.’ Any criminal he caught would be savaged until they were on the brink of death. Whether that meant being physically torn apart, mentally tortured, or ruthlessly crushed by his intangible power, I didn’t know—but either way, it meant being bitten by Eden.
In a situation like this, being under such a man’s suspicion was nothing but trouble.
‘If things get worse, I’ll just whack him on the back of the head and knock him out.’
Monsters were swarming outside, so I couldn’t run away, nor could I throw him out.
In any case, it was clear that the worst-case scenario I’d imagined had arrived. This was a remarkably bothersome development.
“I just didn’t want my strength to be known. Have you ever heard that Cherry Sinclair possessed super strength? You haven’t, right? I’m quite famous, so why haven’t you heard? Because I hid it. I kept it a secret.”
I quickly gave up on the act and admitted that I was the ‘Axe Woman’ of Notium Street No. 61. Perhaps he hadn’t expected me to confess so fast, as Eden looked at me with a ‘well, look at this’ glint in his eyes.
“And the reason for hiding it?”
“Don’t you know that the virtue of a lady in high society is fragility?”
At my retort, one of Eden’s eyebrows shot up. He threw another scoff my way.
“Oh, so that Cherry Sinclair was concerned about the virtues of a high society lady?”
“Because I wanted to be an aristocrat.”
I answered him and then tilted my head provocatively, mimicking his own posture, and asked, “Why? How is that any different from the heir of Lancaster deciding to become a police officer?”
Eden fell silent for a moment, looking as though he’d been struck, and glared at me.
Then, slowly, he covered his face with his large hand. His shoulders were shaking. He was laughing again.
What is it now? Why is he laughing? He’s annoyingly handsome, too.
After a moment, as if he had never laughed at all, Eden’s face returned to that eerily expressionless mask as he questioned me again.
“Then let me change the question. Why were you at Notium Street No. 61 at that hour, and how did you kill the monster there? By any chance… are you the person who sent a letter to my younger sister?”
“Ugh. Your drop in formality is really annoying.”
Eden didn’t care. He even wore a relaxed, leisurely smile.
“No need to be annoyed. You saw me at the station. You saw how I handle criminals. Then you should know, shouldn’t you? That this is just the kind of guy I am.”
He tilted his head slightly and looked down at me with arrogance. There was even a faint hint of madness in his persistent gaze. If one could be strangled by a look alone, I might have already been bound tight and killed by him.
Right. I knew. Originally, he used much rougher language; by his standards, this might actually be him speaking quite mildly. At least there was no profanity mixed in. Why does that feel like a relief?
“Don’t try to dodge the question; you’d better speak plainly. If you were even carrying an axe, it means you knew a monster would appear there.”
I racked my brain quickly.
‘Come to think of it, he did say someone sent Aurora a letter.’
Having found a quick excuse, I replied as calmly as possible.
“I received a letter too. Telling me that a monster would appear at Notium Street No. 61 and that people would die.”
Once I said it, I realized it was a fairly decent excuse. It would be best to brush off any future knowledge I had from the original novel in a similar way.
‘But who was the person who actually sent that letter to Aurora?’
As I pondered that, I heard Eden’s voice, thick with disbelief.
“You should also tell me who sent the letter. I’m also curious why you didn’t report it to the police after receiving such a suspicious letter.”
His sharp tone and lack of honorifics were getting on my nerves. I looked Eden straight in the eye and countered in the same blunt manner.
“And would you have believed me if I told you? You know about the monster sightings, don’t you? No one believed the reports that were constantly sent to the newspapers either!”
