“…Is Father gone?”
As expected, he asked about their father’s whereabouts first.
“If you’re talking about the inspection of the territory, yes. He left early this morning.”
“How does he feel? Is he, is he very angry?”
Ariella chuckled at his nervous and cautious demeanor. He was a rough man who brawled in gambling dens, but he groveled before his own father like a servant.
“Do you think he wouldn’t be angry, given his personality?”
As she sneered with a smirk, David’s skin flushed red. His face, which had been filled with worry and anxiety, quickly turned menacing, and the atmosphere changed drastically.
“You little bitch, who gets beaten like an animal, where do you get off acting so high and mighty…!”
Perhaps because there was no one to watch him, David threw away even the slightest pretense of politeness and revealed his raw anger.
“Hey, have you lost your touch because I haven’t hit you in a while? Should I give you a taste of the old days?”
Ariella quietly stared at the blue eyes that were gleaming fiercely at her.
Because he had mentioned “the old days,” the past that she had buried for a while began to resurface. Memories of the days when she had piled new hatred upon hatred for David came to mind one by one, filling her head.
As he said, years ago, when David was even less mature than he was now, he didn’t hesitate to punch Ariella.
It wasn’t as painful as being hit by their father, but it wasn’t exactly painless either, and the pain continued every day.
However, what tormented Ariella the most was not such physical violence.
“Kyaa, kyaaaa!”
The autumn of her fifteenth year was a truly blood-soaked season.
Every morning, or evening, Ariella had to face the carcasses of animals placed in front of her door. Carcasses that hadn’t been dead for long, with blood that hadn’t even dried yet.
After Oliver’s death, David seemed to have gained some kind of realization after seeing Ariella in despair. He had realized what he had to do to get her to react, to make her suffer.
Ariella, who had no one to rely on, had given her heart, at least in part, to animals, and that was the weakness that David had found.
He killed the cat that Ariella occasionally fed whenever she encountered it, killed the foal that she had named herself and had grown fond of, and found and killed several dogs that resembled Oliver, delivering them to her door.
Such bizarre behavior only ended after she stopped reacting to the animal carcasses.
However, Ariella still often had hallucinations of animal carcasses being placed in front of her door. The terrible stench of blood haunted her even in her dreams.
“Yeah, the old days were great. Don’t you remember? I even fed you fresh food directly into your mouth.”
When Ariella remained silent, David became excited and gained momentum.
Thanks to that, she recalled another unforgettable memory.
“No! Let go, let go! Ugh, ugh!”
This was also a memory from when she was fifteen.
David, who was at the peak of his rebellious phase, was more violent and reckless than he was now.
Coincidentally, there was a major problem in the territory at that time, and the Duke of Bedford was often away. This meant that David had an environment where he could run rampant without having to worry about being watched.
Having grown tired of killing dogs, David one day brought a small box to Ariella’s room, saying that he had brought a special food for his sister.
The “food” inside the box was none other than a rat. A small, dirty rat that had been wandering around the warehouse floor and had been caught by humans, struggling to escape.
And David put it into Ariella’s mouth alive. After having the servants and knights subdue her.
“You would have eaten something like that in the poorhouse anyway, right? Hahaha! Swallow it! Swallow it!”
“Ugh! Ugh!”
She eventually swallowed the poor, dirty thing and was sick for a while.
“…I remember it well enough, even without you having to point it out.”
Ariella replied with a bright smile.
Yes, although it was fainter than her hatred for Aaron, there was no way that her hatred for David had faded away with time.
Even before Aaron ascended to the position of Crown Prince six years ago, as a result of which she was recognized as the prospective Crown Princess, David had been one of the main contributors to her miserable life.
“Go ahead and try it. If you can.”
“Ha! Do you think I can’t? Everything that could be exposed has been exposed, so I don’t have to worry about what you think anymore!”
“I don’t know. Has everything really been exposed?”
Ariella tilted her head.
David flinched for a moment at the meaningful words, but raised his chin as if nothing was wrong.
Now that he had been caught forging his academy transcript and his gambling debts, there was nothing more to fear. Ariella was just bluffing. He believed that.
