Chương 303: 66. Parasites 1

By the time we returned to Thornhold, the sky had already begun its slide toward evening. The chill from Iron Fir Town still clung to my cloak, like cold that hadn't fully shaken loose. The image of those two hanging beneath the old iron fir hadn't left my mind either—but it no longer stung. It sat quietly at the back of my thoughts, like a long-overdue debt that had finally been crossed off the ledger and filed back exactly where it belonged.

When the gates swung open, the sentries on duty straightened almost on instinct. I recognized that reaction perfectly. It wasn't simple formality. It wasn't fear turning knees to water, either. It was the collective, silent realization: Ah. So he really did hang both young masters. At the most visible spot in Iron Fir Town. Three full days on the frame, waiting for the public cemetery cart to collect them. Right. Thornhold really does have a new master now.

Human sentiment, sometimes, is more practical than any wall. Cutting down the two people who most deserved to die accomplishes far more than a hundred beautiful speeches ever could. I swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to the waiting groom. Charlotte must have heard the commotion; she came hurrying in from the inner courtyard. The first thing she did when she saw me wasn't ask whether it was done. She looked me over head to toe first, checking whether I'd come back missing a limb. Very her.

She was probably the only person left who, at a moment like this, would still ask whether I was cold or hungry before asking who I'd killed today.

"You're back?"

"Mm."

"Fina asked twice."

"Where is she?"

"Just finished her medicine. Not very steady, but refusing to sleep." Charlotte lowered her voice.

"She knows what you went to do." I nodded. If she knew, she knew. At this point, there was no reason to shield anyone's eyes. This family had rotted to the marrow. Better to let Fina see it clearly than leave her drifting through life in a half-lit fog—at least this way, she'd never again waste mercy on people who didn't deserve it.

"And Lorelei?" I asked. Charlotte gave me a sideways glance—the kind that couldn't quite decide whether to laugh or sigh.

"With Fina."

"... Ah."

"Nothing to add?"

"Aunt Charlotte, that question sounds like you're waiting for me to confess to something."

"If you'd confess on your own, it would save me the trouble of guessing." I coughed and pretended not to hear that. Jessi nearly lost it beside me—I could see the effort in the rigid set of her shoulders. Fortunately, she had just enough survival instinct to clamp her mouth shut before I looked her way, though her shoulders still gave two very undisciplined shakes.

Alvira stood behind me, expression as flat as always, as though nothing any human being said or did in this world was interesting enough to move a single muscle in her face. Good. One walking disaster, one walking blade of ice. Both still standing—which meant things probably hadn't hit rock bottom yet. Unfortunately, I couldn't go see Fina yet. Couldn't go see whether Lorelei was standing under a lamp again, watching me with that expression that made my chest feel entirely too crowded.

Because there was still one last thing to do. The last thing—and the one piece of House Rosa's business that most needed a quiet room to settle in. I pulled my gloves off slowly and looked toward the depths of the inner keep.

"Bring Rosalind out." The air seemed to pause for a beat. A Yinglong Guard bowed at once and turned to carry out the order. Jessi, who'd still been wearing the tail end of a smirk, let it fade. For all that she often acted like a bard who'd wandered onto the wrong stage, her head carrying ten times more nonsense than sense—she had one genuine quality: when it was actually time to be quiet, she understood the value of silence better than most. I didn't head for the interrogation cells.

I walked instead into the smaller drawing room adjoining the main hall. This had once been where my mother received the ladies of the inner household. High windows, sparse light, tapestries softer than the ones in the formal spaces. But however elegant the room, nothing could quite mask the smell of a house preparing for a wake. I stopped at the table and, without thinking about it, picked up a wine glass. Poured a measure of red. The dark liquid shifted at the bottom of the cup, thin as a layer of blood. I sighed.

Then I drew a small vial from inside my coat and let one or two drops fall into the wine. I'd gotten it from Yozora privately before setting out. She hadn't asked many questions—hadn't even bothered with a what are you planning to use this for. She'd simply laid out the dosage and the method, as if she'd always known I'd eventually arrive at this door. —Two drops is enough. One is too slow. Three is too painful. —Don't mix it with strong spirits. It'll hit too fast. —After they drink it, the throat tightens first.

Then the chest goes cold. Finally, the breathing falls behind the heartbeat. —Not pleasant. But it won't drag on. She'd said it all in the same flat tone someone might use to explain how to prepare an herb. I'd only nodded. Because I knew clearly: Rosalind wasn't suited to hang before a crowd the way Chris and Boris had. Not because she was nobler. Because she was the last thin, rotten layer of skin stretched over this household—stubbornly refusing to fall away. That layer needed to be peeled off indoors.

Footsteps sounded outside. Then Rosalind was brought in. Her hands were bound. Her dress was still reasonably neat, but that neatness was no longer poise—it was the last scrap of dignity someone clutches right before they stop needing it. Her face was paper-white, though her lips still held a trace of color. If not for the deep shadows beneath her eyes, she might almost have passed for a lady on her way to a tea table, ready to discuss fabric and flowering seasons.

Unfortunately, no amount of performance turns a dead woman back into a living one. The moment she crossed the threshold, her gaze locked onto the wine glass in my hand. Then, slowly, it moved to my face. There was hatred in it. Fear. Resentment. And a stubbornness that, even now, hadn't fully shattered. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"Cedric." She spoke first. Her voice, against all odds, still held.

"I'm surprised you still remember my name." I swirled the glass lightly, my tone unhurried.

"I assumed someone like you would only remember herself, in the end." She ground her teeth and didn't rise to it. I wasn't in the mood to circle the point either. I turned to Alvira.

"Alvira." She looked up at me.

"I'm giving you an opportunity. This woman insulted you. You have every right to take revenge." I paused, letting a thin, cold smile touch my mouth.

"Tell me—if someone insulted you, called you an inferior breed, what would you do to her?" Alvira fixed Rosalind with a stare cold enough to have been buried in snow.

"I'd use magic to turn her into a tree." I laughed. A real one, brief and genuine. Elves really did possess a brand of creativity humans could only envy.

"There's your chance, then." I looked at Alvira, smiling.

"You're welcome to cast."

"Hey, Cedric." Alvira frowned.

"Is this some kind of test?"

"More or less."

"This woman is worth nothing to me." Her tone was frost straight through, even the ends of her words sounding crusted with ice.

"Why would I dirty my hands over her?" I paused, then nodded.

"My oversight. Apologies." I turned back to Rosalind, my voice almost gentle.

"A pity." I looked at her, then at the wine.

"I really had been thinking—if I ever found the time, I might come water you occasionally." Jessi made a short, strangled sound beside me—the noise of someone who'd nearly laughed and forcibly swallowed it back down. Honestly, if today's business had involved a potted plant instead of a person, I'd have called that one of my healthier jokes. I handed the glass to the Yinglong Guard beside me.

"Begin." Rosalind stared at the glass, and something seemed to click into place. A violent shudder ran through her entire body. Not an ordinary tremor. The kind where fear seeps out through the cracks in your bones, inch by inch, hollowing out the spine until nothing's left to hold you upright. A dry, broken sound scraped from her throat, as though a rope had already been drawn tight around her windpipe.

"I don't want—" She stared at the wine, and whatever thin thread of reason she'd been holding onto snapped, just like that.

"I don't want this! I don't want to die!" Her composure shattered entirely, her voice pitching shrill and ugly.

"Please—I'll surrender the territory, the title, everything—just let me live! Cedric, I can give you all of it, just spare me! I'm still useful, I swear I'm still useful—" I let out a heavy breath. How to put it. When a person is truly afraid of dying, the words that come out are always cheaper than usual. Someone who'd valued composure above all else in life—in the end, this was all it amounted to.

Territory, title, power, reputation—everything she'd once ground others beneath her feet to keep—the moment death actually closed its hand around her own throat, she was apparently willing to drop it all on the floor without a second thought. Unfortunately. She wanted to drop it now. It was too late. I gave the Yinglong Guard a look. Two of them stepped forward and took hold of her.

Given their build, one would have been more than enough—but two kept things steadier, and kept this final, dignified death from turning into an unseemly scuffle.

"What are you doing? How dare you—let go of me! Let go! I am of House Rosa—" She never finished the sentence. Because somewhere in the middle of it, she probably remembered: the person actually sitting in House Rosa's seat now was Fina. Not her. That realization was probably more bitter than the poison. She struggled harder, her skirt dragging ragged creases across the floor, strands of hair falling loose. She no longer looked like a lady.

She looked like a bird that knows it's about to be pressed underwater, still making one last, useless fight against the surface. I stepped close, leaned down, and spoke quietly against her ear.

"Do me a favor. Be brave, sister." She went rigid. I watched every trace of color drain from her face and lowered my voice further.

"As brave as you were, the day you threw me out of this house." The words went in like a blade, straight through her eyes. She clamped her mouth shut in terror, refusing to open it no matter what. As if simply not drinking meant there was still a way out. I sighed again. Honestly. Making me handle this last part myself, at this stage, was frankly inconsiderate.

"Hold her." I reached up and pinched her nose shut. At first she held out—jaw locked, lips sealed—though tears were already sliding from the corners of her eyes without her permission. The tangle of hatred, terror, and humiliation in her gaze was, admittedly, rather striking. On a worse day, I might have pulled up a chair to watch properly. Not today. Today I only wanted this finished. A few breaths later, oxygen won out over willpower. Her mouth opened on reflex, gasping. The poisoned wine went down her throat.

She erupted into violent coughing at once, her whole body lurching forward as if trying to cough up her own lungs. Dark red liquid ran from the corners of her mouth, down her chin, dripping onto her collar and blooming into a small, vivid stain across the once-immaculate fabric. She stared up at me, eyes impossibly wide. It wasn't simple hatred anymore. It was disbelief. Disbelief that I'd actually gone through with it. Disbelief that she was truly going to die here.

Disbelief that her final moment would look like this—held down and forced—rather than the version she must have imagined for herself, with at least some scrap of choice left intact. The poison worked fast. She drew one hard breath that didn't seem to land, her chest heaving faster and faster. Her fingertips went white. Her whole body began to tremble, as though the warmth were being drained out of her bones, inch by inch.

"Cold…" The word barely made it up her throat. Then even that caught, turning into a dry, ragged wheeze. Yozora hadn't lied. The throat first. Then the chest. Finally, the heart outrunning the breath. Rosalind fought to swallow, to cough, to expel it—useless now. Sweat beaded along her hairline. The color fled her lips. The frantic sharpness in her eyes slowly scattered into something unfocused. Her lips trembled as though trying to shape words, but only broken fragments of air came out.

I stood in front of her and watched. I didn't step forward to steady her. I didn't step back. I only watched. She jerked once, her gaze sliding off my face as if searching for something. Someone to save her? Someone to speak for her? Or the portrait of our father, which wasn't even in this room? I don't know. But I knew this much: no one in this room was going to answer for her. Alvira stood cold and motionless, offering not a single unnecessary flicker of expression.

Jessi was, for once, genuinely quiet, leaning against the wall, every trace of her usual slickness drawn back from her eyes. The two Yinglong Guard held Rosalind down, as if restraining a stretch of old days that refused to finish dying. Her breaths grew shorter. More fragmented. Like a bellows with a split in it. At the very end, she managed to lift her eyes to mine one last time, her throat working hard. This time, she actually produced a sound.

"... Do you… hate me?" I paused for a beat. Not because the question carried any special weight. But because, even now, this was what she wanted to know. I looked at her and answered, flatly.

"I did." Her pupils trembled faintly. I went on.

"But right now, you aren't even worth the effort it takes to keep hating you." The moment those words landed, it was as though the last thing holding her upright simply gave out. No collapse. No eruption. She just caved in, from the inside. Her shoulders dropped. The light in her eyes went out like a candle in a draft. The next second, she drew one sharp, convulsive breath, her body spasming twice, fingers locking hard around one guard's arm—then loosening, falling limp. One breath didn't come. Then another didn't.

And then none did at all. Her head tilted slowly to one side. Her lashes fluttered once, and stilled. The little room fell so quiet that all I could hear was the faint crackle of the candles. I stood without moving. Without speaking right away. It was hard to name what I felt. Not satisfaction. Not emptiness. Not grief, either. Closer to the feeling of using a knife to cut away a piece of meat that had already gone bad. Not a pleasant process. But one you know has to happen.

Rosalind was different from her brothers. Chris and Boris had to die where the world outside could see it. She had to die where this house could see it. So the house would understand: that thinnest, most polished, most predatory layer of skin over the inner residence had, in the end, only ever been skin. Peel it back, and what lay beneath was still the same rot. I set the empty glass back on the table.

"Cover her," I said. The guard obeyed at once, drawing a white cloth over her face. As the cloth settled, I felt something faintly ironic. She'd spent her whole life fighting to maintain her dignity. In the end, the one who actually gave her a dignified send-off was me.

"Prepare her body according to the rites of the second young lady," I added, evenly.

"No public display. No memorial plaque. She doesn't enter the main ancestral hall. Bury her outside the Rosa family plot." Jessi finally spoke, keeping her voice low.

"Outside?"

"Mm." I looked at the unmoving shape beneath the white cloth.

"She keeps the name. She doesn't keep the place. One last courtesy—but not a seat inside the gate."

"... Understood." Alvira came to stand beside me, paused, then said, without any warning at all:"That line about watering her. That was terrible." I glanced at her.

"Critiquing my sense of humor?"

"No." Her face didn't move.

"Stating a fact." Jessi chimed in immediately.

"Honestly, though, I nearly laughed." I looked at her.

"Then you nearly earned a spot lying down next to her."

"My lord, I simply have a rich emotional life."

"That's not rich. That's a mouth with no off switch." Somehow, the tension in the room loosened, by half a degree. Genuinely unsettling. Standing in a room with a fresh corpse, and this group still finds a way to steer the conversation into a bad joke—that's probably our particular specialty. If some court historian ever has to summarize this stretch of my life, I sincerely recommend the following line: Surrounded by extraordinary talent; regrettably, most of it barely qualified as human.

I let out a breath and turned for the door. My steps slowed at the threshold, but I didn't look back.

"Fina doesn't need to see this," I said.

"Tell her Rosalind was dealt with according to family law." Charlotte would understand, if she asked. Lorelei would understand too, if she heard. As for Fina—she'd already seen enough. This last scene didn't need to be added to what she carried. I pushed the door open. Wind rushed in, thinning the smell of wine, medicine, and death that had filled the room. The sky had darkened another shade. Thornhold's braziers were being lit, one by one. Servants moved quietly at the far end of the hall.

Somewhere distant, boots marked the changing of the watch. The fortress no longer felt as dead as it had—though it hadn't quite come back to life, either. That was fine. House Rosa's threshold was, at last, more or less clean. Old debts had been crossed off one by one; the dead had been buried one by one. What remained was making sure the living could stand. Fina needed to find her footing. Charlotte and Lorelei needed to be brought forward properly.

And I could finally move the blade half an inch back from my own front door. Half an inch was enough. One step further out, and whatever the blade pointed at next wouldn't be blood kin anymore.