Finally, Ariella reached the front of the suite and looked through the open door with a nervous heart.
Soon, something as red as Aaron’s hair filled her vision.
“Eek…!”
One of Bedford’s knights, who had arrived a beat late, gasped deeply.
Inside the dimly lit suite, a shocking scene unfolded.
Aaron was lying on a bed stained crimson red, and next to him, Countess Anabel was standing in only a chemise dress, holding a blood-dripping weapon.
A weapon that had probably been used to repeatedly dig into Aaron’s lower abdomen, tearing his flesh indiscriminately.
“Save His Highness immediately and restrain the Countess!!”
A thunderous roar erupted from Duke Bedford’s mouth.
The knights, who had been frozen in shock, finally came to their senses and quickly entered the suite.
“No, no. The Crown Prince attacked me first…!”
Countess Anabel, who had stained her white chemise dress with Aaron’s blood, shook her head desperately. But no one listened to the words of the person caught red-handed in the attempted murder of the Crown Prince.
The knights roughly subdued the Countess, and the people who had gathered in front of the door glared at her as if she were the most heinous villain, cursing her.
“No! I had no choice! I had no choice! The Crown Prince forced himself on me-!”
Even as she was being dragged away, she shouted her innocence, but no one listened.
Before dawn, the entire Juvenil was in an uproar.
The Imperial Family pressured the newspapers to prevent articles from being published as much as possible, but no matter how powerful the Imperial Family was, they couldn’t gag the public.
The Emperor’s mistress had tried to murder the Crown Prince. In a luxurious hotel suite, no less.
The unprecedented event drew great attention from the public, and the Imperial Family suffered a corresponding headache.
Countess Anabel was caught red-handed and immediately imprisoned. From the moment she was captured, she consistently repeated the same claim.
She was simply resting at the hotel when the Crown Prince suddenly broke into her room and tried to r**e her.
But unfortunately, there was no evidence to support this, while on the contrary, there was plenty of evidence to prove her guilt.
When Crown Prince Aaron, who was receiving treatment, briefly regained consciousness, he said this about the situation at the time of the incident.
“My body, it was strange. My head was dizzy, and my whole body was hot… It seems like it started after I smelled a pungent scent in that room.”
Several scented candles were lit in the suite. As a result of the investigation, they were all found to be used to stimulate arousal.
Not only that, but among Countess Anabel’s belongings, tea leaves were found that could not have been obtained through normal channels, and it was found that these also had the same effect as an aphrodisiac.
Given the situation, the investigators came to this conclusion.
‘Countess Anabel used an aphrodisiac to incapacitate the Crown Prince and then tried to kill him.’
‘No, she probably didn’t intend to kill him from the beginning. She tried to use an aphrodisiac on the Crown Prince and frame him as a rapist, but she lost control and stabbed him in a moment of panic.’
Whatever the answer, the fact remained that Countess Anabel had committed a serious crime.
Then the question remained: why did the Crown Prince go up to his mistress’s hotel room in the first place? The clue was solved by an anonymous tip.
[Countess Anabel, despite receiving the Emperor’s favor, dared to bring another man into her bedroom, defiling the Imperial Family. As a citizen of Juvenil, I reported her crime to His Highness the Crown Prince, and His Highness went to the Countess’s hotel room himself to confirm it.]
In other words, the conclusion was that the Crown Prince, who had gone up to confirm Countess Anabel’s infidelity after receiving a tip, had been helplessly affected by the aphrodisiac.
Later, Aaron, who had fully regained consciousness, did not reveal that his real purpose for going up to the suite was Ariella.
It was only natural. It was much better to say that he had been attacked while trying to correct the Imperial Family’s laws as the Crown Prince, rather than admitting that he had mistakenly thought that the ‘blonde woman’ mentioned by the informant was Ariella and had suffered an accident.
He seemed to suspect for a moment that Ariella was involved in this situation, but he dismissed the suspicion because he thought that Countess Anabel’s infidelity and Ariella were completely unrelated.
The identity of the anonymous informant was not revealed. But in the end, the Emperor learned of Fabian’s existence, which was why Countess Anabel, imprisoned in jail, screamed, ‘Fabian Robinson was with me until right before that, so call him as my witness!’
