Chapter 37.1

Chapter 37.1

Chapter 37.1

What on earth am I thinking?!

“You think I’m going to fall for you?” I shouted at him. He looked back at me, standing in front of the bathtub, and grinned. The light from the fireplace made his thin clothes appear translucent. His slim figure was like a sculpture. And his lower part of the body…

Isn’t that… big? I have never seen a man with such large… Ugh what am I thinking again?  I don’t even want to think about it!

I couldn’t think of a word to say. Why was I so flustered? I felt like I was actually fifteen-years-old and not the twenty-eight-year-old woman that I was on the inside. I could only stare at him. In the end, I just groaned in frustration. But he just laughed and took off his shirt.

What the hell? Why is he stripping in front of a girl?

I have older brothers so it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen half-naked men before. It wasn’t something that should make me flustered/ But still… 

“Tidy the place up before you leave,” I said. “Don’t leave a single strand of hair. I have to live in this room for the next three days.”

I stood up and left. 

I wanted to find the food taster. It wouldn’t be that difficult. I am good at remembering faces. I saw her carrying food to the princess a few times. It wasn’t hard to remember what she looked like.

I will just have to drag her to an empty gallery and make her confess, perhaps by strangling her until she fainted. That was easy too. I needed to find out how and why this happened.

The problem was I am not good at interrogating people. I did all of the above. I bound her to a chair. The girl opened her eyes after a while. When she realised that her limbs were tied to the chair and her mouth was gagged with a piece of cloth, she began to struggle. I put a knife that I had sneaked out of the kitchen to her throat. She stopped. 

Pulling at the string that was tied around her neck would be so much easier. “I have a few questions that I’d like you to answer. If you’re not honest I’ll just kill you. Got it? I don’t want to cut your fingers one by one, it’s tiresome. I hope you will cooperate.”

The girl frankly looked pathetic. She looked like someone who didn’t know what she had gotten herself into. Really? Why do these royals use amateurs?

“Did you put drugs in the Grand Duke’s food?”

The girl shook her head.

“Then do you know who did it?”

She shook her head again.

This won’t do. “I really hate to be tiresome. Do you need to be like this? Really? Why can’t you just tell the truth?”

I wondered if I should cut off her toe. I knelt down and hacked at one of her toes. The girl tried to scream but it was muffled by the gag. I waited for her to calm down.

“Did you put the drug in the Grand Duke’s food?”

The girl looked at me with tears in her eyes. She looked terrified. If she had been terrified a little earlier, she could have saved her toes. It can get messy sometimes. I needed to tread carefully to get the information.

She was doomed either way. Whoever put her up to it would discard her just as easily. “Should I cut the rest of your toes?”

The girl frantically shook her head. “Great! I don’t want to, you know. I am going to ask one more time. Did you put the drug in the Grand Duke’s food?”

The girl hesitated and then nodded. 

“Were you planning to kill him?”

She shook her head.

“Do you promise not to scream and answer me honestly if I take that gag out of your mouth?”

She nodded quickly. If I believe that, I would be the princess!

I knelt down and placed the knife at her other toe. The girl shook her head frantically with pleading eyes. I sighed. I pulled out her gag from her mouth.

“Well, answer me now,” I said. “I don’t like cutting bones too, you know.”

The girl gasped and groaned in pain. She looked at the blood and sobbed. I frowned. “Was that your first assassination attempt?”

The girl looked at me fearfully.  She licked her lips as though they were dry. I waited. She didn’t talk immediately. Maybe she was trying to buy some time. There are other toes left…

The girl noticed me looking at her toes and flinched. “I wasn’t planning to kill him!” she said. “I just hoped he would faint and stay unconscious for a while.”

“Why?”

“So that I… I could search his room,” she said. “The Glouster estate isn’t open to the public and I couldn’t go loitering.”

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