Chương 92: 37-3.Cute Time for Girls

When the insurance ledger was finally closed, the table went quieter than it had been when it was open. Spread across the table, the thing had felt like a blade. Shut and sealed, it felt more like a coffin lid. I watched Victoria Rosa von Blackwell tuck it back into the black leather case, her fingertip tapping once against the cover—deliberate, measured, like she was stamping a seal or signing a sentence. She didn't speak immediately.

She simply pushed the case to one side and turned her gaze toward Vincent, who stood at his post against the wall.

"Starting tonight, there will be three versions of events circulating outside." Vincent inclined his head, with the manner of a man who had heard this kind of instruction many times before.

"As madam directs."

"First: say the ledger has been dealt with." My sister's voice was level, her expression unmoved.

"Burned, sunk in a lake, reduced to ash in a fireplace—any version will do. What matters isn't which story people believe. What matters is that they understand it's no longer in its original owner's hands." I exhaled quietly. Exactly like her. Not hiding the truth. Releasing three or four versions close enough to be plausible, contradictory enough to be maddening, and letting everyone outside tie themselves in knots trying to decide which one was real.

"Second," she continued, "something more interesting." Vincent raised his eyes. My sister lifted her wineglass and tilted it gently, watching the deep red liquid shift against the light.

"Say that someone attempted to use the ledger to buy their way out of trouble with the capital's upper houses. But they were intercepted before they ever reached the door. As for whose hands the ledger is in now—no one dares look too closely." The moment that sentence landed, I understood exactly what she was doing. She wasn't trying to put people at ease. She was making sure they couldn't afford to be. A missing ledger only made the hunters anxious.

But a ledger that had fallen into the hands of someone untouchable—that made the hunters afraid.

"Third," she said, looking at Vincent with what might, from a certain angle, be called a smile.

"Redirect the attention from Angel City toward something else. Let them believe the most dangerous loose end right now isn't our party—it's whoever failed to clean up their own people and their own lists in the first place."

"Understood," Vincent said quietly.

"I'll ensure each channel receives a different version."

"Good." My sister nodded, with the air of someone setting down a very large stone and not particularly caring where it landed. It was only then that I fully grasped what had happened. The moment that ledger passed into her hands, it had stopped being what it was when it was in ours. What had been our lifeline had become her garrote. Adeline had been quiet throughout, her head bowed.

She'd been pale since before the ledger was closed—not from fear of losing it, but from the dawning comprehension of what the thing she'd risked her life to carry could become in the hands of someone who actually knew how to use it. My sister seemed to know precisely what she was thinking.

"Don't worry," she said, without inflection.

"Taking it from you doesn't mean I intend to press you flat and file you away with it." Adeline's shoulders gave a visible flinch.

"Only—starting from tonight, there's one thing you'd do well to learn."

"... W-what?"

"Some names are armor when you know them," my sister said.

"They become a death sentence the moment you speak them." Adeline pressed her lips together and nodded, quietly. I watched her face and thought: the long disaster of Angel City is only now, in this room, actually ending. At least tonight, no one would be hammering on doors at midnight over that ledger. At least tonight.

"All right." My sister set her wineglass down, and her tone shifted—just slightly, just enough.

"That's enough business." A faint premonition of disaster stirred somewhere in my chest. Before I could act on it, she was already looking at me.

"Cedric. Come here."

"... Why?"

"Have a drink with me." My first instinct was to refuse. Not because I had anything against drinking. But because I knew, with the intimate expertise of a younger sibling who had survived multiple incidents, exactly what happened once she reached a certain point in a bottle. Unfortunately, not everything in life comes with a reasonable opt-out. Especially when your sister is Victoria Rosa von Blackwell, and she's currently in a good mood. I steeled myself and moved closer. The wine was refilled without ceremony.

My sister drank the way she did everything else—quietly, methodically, with the focused composure of someone processing paperwork. She didn't bang the table. She didn't perform the way certain nobles did when alcohol gave them permission to remind everyone of their importance. She simply drank, at her own pace, with that particular stillness that I had learned, through years of painful experience, to recognize as a warning sign. Because when she went that quiet, it meant something somewhere was about to give.

Jessi seemed to sense it too. She edged backward in her seat.

"... For the record," she said, "I've already had a terrible enough evening." My sister didn't acknowledge her. Alvira was leaning against the far end of the sofa with the expression of someone who had concluded that nothing happening in this room could possibly be worse than Angel City and had made her peace with that. Erina remained seated with perfect posture, though the regal composure had acquired a new layer—something that looked distinctly like bracing for unknown impact.

And Olivia— Olivia looked like the only person in the room who wasn't remotely threatened. She sat with her fingertip resting against the base of her glass, her gaze calm, her expression carrying what could only be described as measured interest. As though she had been quietly assembling a pattern from everything she'd observed so far, and was now waiting to confirm the final piece. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. I glanced sideways at her. She glanced back.

Her eyes held no plea for rescue, no inclination to retreat. Just one very clear message. Wait and watch. I felt a sudden, unexpected sympathy for everyone else in the room. My sister finished another glass. Then her gaze began to move—slowly, deliberately—across the room. It wasn't the unfocused sweep of someone looking for a target.

It was more like a very conscientious head of household surveying a group of children who had somehow all arrived at the dinner table in a state of complete sartorial disaster and seemed entirely unaware of it. She frowned. Lightly. We're done. That was the only thought I had time for.

"This won't do." She set her glass down. Her voice was soft—the kind of soft she used when commenting that the soup had gone slightly cold. Jessi went rigid.

"W—what won't do?" My sister looked at her with the patient expression of someone who had identified a fundamentally good material that had been allowed to go to waste.

"You."

"Me?"

"Your hair is a disaster. Your skirt is sitting wrong. And you've deliberately folded your cuffs like that." She raised one hand.

"Come here."

"No."

"Jessi." Still soft. Jessi went white. I watched—with my own two eyes—as the person who was never at a loss for words went rigid, then shuffled forward like someone being escorted to the gallows. The next quarter of an hour is something I will carry to my grave. Jessi went through every stage: initial defiance, followed by ears so red they looked ready to bleed, followed by the full-body paralysis of someone being held over an open flame who has also been told that moving will make it worse.

My sister wasn't playing. She was handling this with complete seriousness—combing Jessi's hair, straightening her collar, replacing the outer layer she'd thrown on with something that actually fit, and finishing by retying the ribbon at her waist with the precision of someone correcting a clerical error.

"Wait—this is too humiliating! This is genuinely too humiliating!"

"Stand straight."

"I am standing straight!"

"You're trembling."

"That's because you're touching me!"

"I'm helping you."

"This is not helping—" My sister looked up at her. Jessi stopped talking immediately. I was working very hard to maintain a neutral expression. Not because I found it funny—well, partly because I found it funny—but because I was acutely aware that the moment I let anything inappropriate cross my face, I would be next. When Jessi was finally released, her face was the color of something recently extracted from a steam room, and her eyes had gone slightly blank. Not the expression of someone dying of embarrassment.

The expression of someone who has passed through embarrassment and arrived at a place where the soul temporarily vacates the premises for self-preservation.

"... If you tell anyone," she said in a low voice as she dropped back into her seat, "I will actually kill you."

"I didn't see a thing."

"That's somehow worse." I nodded. The fact that she still had enough energy to threaten me meant she was fine. Next was Alvira. To her credit, she attempted resistance. To her discredit, she abandoned it within about thirty seconds. Not because my sister was frightening—though she was—but because Alvira quickly realized that conventional resistance was simply not effective against someone who became more organized after drinking. Every refusal was answered with three reasons.

Every attempt to retreat was met with a calm instruction to sit down. And if you simply refused to cooperate, you received the look—the one that said, do you have any idea how much you're selling yourself short? That look was devastating. Alvira eventually sat down, turned her face aside, and said, in a tone of absolute surrender:"... Fine. Do what you want."

"That's the spirit," my sister said, with evident satisfaction. I could have sworn I saw Alvira's eye twitch. But she didn't resist after that. She simply adopted the expression of someone who has made a rational decision to let their soul die for one evening, and submitted to the process with a kind of hollow dignity. Where Jessi had burned, Alvira had simply gone cold—the composure of someone who has fully accepted reality and chosen, in response, to be temporarily absent from it.

Olivia was an entirely different situation. When her name was called, she raised an eyebrow.

"Me as well?"

"Of course." My sister looked at her the way someone might look at a finely made instrument that had been tuned well but could be adjusted further.

"You especially." I expected Olivia to decline. She didn't. She set down her glass, rose with perfect composure, and walked over.

"Interesting," she said.

"What's interesting about this..." I muttered. She heard it. She tilted her head slightly.

"It's rare to encounter control this absolute—without a trace of malice." This woman was genuinely not normal. Her curiosity was, apparently, larger than her sense of dignity. And so I watched my sister rearrange Olivia's hair, refasten the decorative clasp at her shoulder, and select a darker outer layer from the nearby rack—as though she were completing a piece of work that had been almost right and needed only a final adjustment. Olivia cooperated with an ease that was almost unsettling. Not ease, exactly.

Observation. She was watching my sister's method, her sequence, her judgment—treating the entire spectacle, including her own participation in it, as something worth cataloguing.

"Doesn't this embarrass you?" I asked. She glanced at me with mild eyes.

"Compared to being appraised and priced in Angel City, this registers as nothing." I shut my mouth. She had a point. An extremely valid point. But the one that truly made the hair on the back of my neck stand up was the last. Because when my sister's gaze turned, slowly and inevitably, toward Erina—the entire room went still for a fraction of a second. The princess noticed. She sat straighter, visibly preparing to meet whatever was coming with the full weight of her rank and composure.

"Lady Blackwell," she began, her tone measured, "I believe this sort of—""Your Highness." My sister's smile was perfectly warm.

"Because you are Your Highness," she said, "is precisely why this matters more." Erina went rigid. I nearly choked on my wine. Only my sister could frame I need to tidy you up as a point of court protocol so self-evident that arguing against it would seem unreasonable. Erina clearly wanted to hold her ground.

But she looked around the room—at Jessi, still flushed; at Alvira, still absent from her own body; at Olivia, who had cooperated with serene curiosity—and arrived, by some internal calculation, at the conclusion that dignity alone was not going to win this particular engagement. It was a very specific kind of humiliation. Noble, clear-eyed, entirely capable of refusal—and yet wrapped so thoroughly in an atmosphere of natural, unassuming authority that even flipping the table would have seemed unreasonable.

So she sat down. In that moment, I felt a sudden urge to observe a moment of silence for the Empire. She didn't combust like Jessi. She didn't vacate like Alvira. She didn't observe like Olivia. She simply held herself taut from beginning to end—rigid in a way that made the faint color climbing to the tips of her ears somehow all the more visible. When my sister straightened her collar, Erina's lashes trembled. When my sister refastened her shoulder drape, her lips pressed tighter together.

And when my sister stepped back, considered her for a moment, and said quietly, "There—that's right," the expression on Erina's face—the one that said she would have genuinely preferred a battlefield—nearly made me turn away. Because if I kept watching, I was going to laugh. And I was not ready to die tonight. By the time the ordeal finally concluded, the room had settled into a peculiar silence. Not the silence of the ledger—that had been the silence of held breath and sharpened knives.

This was the silence of people who had been thoroughly processed, stripped of their last reserves of resistance, and were now simply sitting and recovering. My sister, by contrast, looked entirely satisfied. She reclaimed her wineglass, leaned back in her chair, and radiated the quiet contentment of someone who had just completed a project to her own exacting standards. I surveyed the room. Jessi, still flushed, stewing in silent indignation. Alvira, unnervingly still, the lights temporarily out behind her eyes.

Olivia, smoothing her cuffs with an expression of calm that edged toward genuine amusement—as though she had, in fact, found something worth keeping from the evening's unexpected detour. Erina, seated with rigid precision, her composure intact but with something banked beneath it—the residue of an indignity she hadn't been able to refuse. Adeline, tucked into her corner, still visibly uncertain whether she had entered a noble household or a more sophisticated category of disaster. And me.

I wanted to be in my room before my sister changed her mind. I drained the last of my wine in one go and was beginning to calculate the most plausible excuse for an early exit when my sister glanced over at me with those unhurried eyes. That glance. That specific glance. A cold feeling moved down my spine. But she said nothing. She only smiled, faintly.

"That's enough for tonight." For the first time in recent memory, those words felt like salvation. The collective exhale was nearly audible—though no one dared make it too obvious, in case she heard and reconsidered. I rose to my feet. One last sweep of the room. Jessi, red-faced and quietly furious. Alvira, motionless, soul on temporary leave. Olivia, smoothing her sleeve with an expression of composed, almost cheerful equanimity—as though she had genuinely walked away from this evening with something new.

Erina, seated with cold precision, every line of her posture controlled—but underneath it, unmistakably, the banked heat of an affront she had not been able to refuse. Adeline, tucked into her corner, still not entirely certain whether she had entered a noble household or simply fallen into a more refined variety of catastrophe. And me. Just—me. Quietly, urgently, sincerely hoping to make it back to my room before my sister's attention circled back around.