[Complete] Ch 12.1 The World of Otome Game is a Second Chance for Broken Swords (Patreon)

The World of Otome Game

 is a Second Chance for Broken Swords

Story Starts

-=&<o>&=-

Chapter 12.1 -

Of Truths,

Arranged

The last time Angelica stood in this hall, they had made Leon a viscount.

The mood had changed. Then, the hall had smelled of curiosity—nobles sniffing at a newcomer, measuring him against their own ambitions. Now the predators had smelt blood.

Word had gone ahead of the summons. According to intelligence from the royal guard, whispers had begun the moment the palace and Leon's forces blockaded both the Offrey and Wayne territories. The tale that would be spun was a matter of perspective—it didn't matter whether the blockade happened before or after the attack. The whisper campaign the Queen had started, urging her staff to disseminate carefully chosen details, had already taken root.

But of course the room would be buzzing. A great house destroyed. Even if it was a relatively young house, it had been a house of significant stature, and quite frankly of high influence and power.

Nobody in the hall knew the whole of it, and everybody in the hall had decided what the whole of it was, and Angelica could read the conclusions on their faces plainly.

'Bartfort overreached. Bartfort failed. The upstart is about to be cut down to size.'

And the underlying fact that the palace had blundered when they placed their trust on a first-year student of the academy.

Of course no one voiced that.

But everyone was out for blood.

Her father and brother stood three paces to her right, their postures carefully neutral—present, but not visibly aligned with the accused.

Angelica stood where the summons had placed her—with the witnesses, which meant beside Leon and Olivia.

Olivia had just threaded her arm through Leon's and whispered something against his shoulder, her body pressing close.

Leon uncharacteristically allowed it.

'...!'

That feeling twinged again.

Leon didn't look down at Olivia, didn't acknowledge her at all, but his weight had shifted towards her. A minute adjustment. The kind of thing Angelica had been trained since childhood to notice.

Three days ago Angelica had watched them kiss on the foredeck of the Partner, and something had stirred within her. Something she hadn't felt even when the Prince chose the Lafan girl.

She still had not made progress with sorting what these feelings were.

Olivia's fingers found the seam of Leon's sleeve and began, absently, to trace it.

"Olivia." Angelica kept her voice beneath the hall's murmur. "Your hands."

Olivia looked up. Tilted her head, honestly puzzled.

"Not right now." Angelica's gaze remained forward. "Everybody's watching."

From the corner of her eye, she saw Olivia nod. The arm unwound. Olivia straightened, hands clasped behind her back like a proper vassal knight.

"Sorry," she whispered, and had the grace to colour.

Leon's mouth twitched. He said nothing.

Somehow Angelica felt guilty.

The heralds struck the floor.

-=&<o>&=-

The Kingdom of Holfort did not read grief aloud. It read accounts.

The Minister of the Interior read this one, in the flat voice ministers reserved for matters too large for feeling, and Angelica listened to a story she already knew.

Of course she knew. She had been present when this story was fabricated.

The pirate confederation of Aldric Draake—a thousand hulls, assembled over years of raiding—had descended upon the border territory of Baronet Wayne. Viscount Bartfort's flagship, engaged through the Crown's guild to stop a string of piracy happening in Wayne's territory, had moved to intercept.

Then approximately eighty percent of the fleet had disengaged and gone full speed inward, past the border entirely, and fallen upon the lands of House Offrey.

The former Arclight and Field heirs were left to face a fleet of two hundred with just their power armour and guardian spirits.

The flagship had pursued. The flagship had destroyed a great portion of the enemy. The flagship had also been badly mauled by the sheer weight of numbers, and the viscount's request to the palace for aid—here the minister paused, and the pause had been rehearsed, Angelica was certain of it—had come too late. By the time the royal fleet reached Offrey lands, the estate was burning. Earl Émile Fou Offrey and his wife Vivienne were dead. Their household was dead. Of the main line, one soul survived: the daughter, Stephanie, who had been at the academy at the time.

The account was thorough. It ought to have been. Angelica had heard three drafts of it.

Immediately after the execution, Leon had been tasked to use the functional hulls of what remained of the pirate fleet to stage a mock attack on both the Wayne and Offrey territories.

The order didn't really matter—information had been suppressed from the moment the King and Queen received Erica's report.

She let none of that reach her face. Instead she did what she had come to do, which was watch the hall.

The pity was general and shallow, the way pity for the Offreys was always going to be. A house risen from merchants, elevated through strategic marriages and financial leverage rather than blood and battlefield honours. The interest ran deeper. She marked who leaned to whisper and who did not need to; who glanced at Leon and who glanced, first, at Marquis Frampton standing among the great lords with his leathery hands folded and his expression arranged into sorrow.

Taking note of this might serve moot—noblemen who smelt blood would behave the same regardless. But the key was that they already knew whom to focus on. This was about spreading the net wider, catching those within the target's orbit.

The minister finished. The King spoke briefly and gravely of the wound dealt to the kingdom's body of peers. Then he turned to the matter of conduct, and commended the defence of the Wayne territory—naming Chris Fia Arclight and Brad Fou Field, who stepped forward and knelt and were praised for holding the border while the storm passed inward.

Angelica watched the two as they received the King's praises. She caught the subtle tightening of their jaws, the way their shoulders sat too rigid beneath their formal coats. They knew they had contributed quite little to the fight against the pirate fleet. The real work had been done by Leon's household, by Luxion's guns, by traced swords falling like rain.

But the situation required the commendations to pass elsewhere. Leon himself had volunteered to be the one the hall would bleed. He had also argued that if the Fields and Arclights could restore some of their families' honour, the Crown would be the better for it.

Even when this operation concluded—whether a success or not—this supposed blunder would forever remain within his record.

Of course, there was also the matter of their target probably knowing of the Offreys' dealings with the pirates. But it was a gamble. Something that could be chalked up to pirates turning on the Offreys for some arbitrary reason—a partnership gone sour, a payment withheld, the usual treacheries of criminal enterprise.

"The Crown," the King said, "will hear the matter of House Offrey's continuance."

And the hall drew breath, because this was the part they had actually come for.

-=&<o>&=-

Malcolm Fou Frampton did not hurry.

He let two lesser voices go first—an earl offering condolences, a viscount proposing a memorial levy, small men laying small wreaths—and only then did he step forward. The hall quieted for him in a way it had not for the others, because everyone knew whose voting bloc the Offreys had anchored and everyone wanted to see what the Marquis would do about the hole in his line.

"Your Majesties." His voice was a grandfather's voice, worn soft by years of careful use. "I knew Vivienne Fou Offrey for close to a decade. I spoke for her house's elevation. What the kingdom has lost, I will not try to put into words before this assembly; the assembly feels it."

Angelica stopped herself from raising an eyebrow at the statement.

"But grief is a luxury, and duty is not, and so I will speak of duty." He clasped his hands before him—calloused, she noted. The Marquis still trained, despite his age. "A great estate now stands without a head. Its vassals are leaderless, its accounts unmanaged, its people frightened. And its heir—" his voice gentled further, "—is a young woman of no administrative experience who has lost her entire family in a single night. To leave her alone with that burden would not be inheritance. It would be cruelty."

He spread those hands, palms upward. Offering, not seeking.

"House Frampton stands ready to take the Lady Stephanie under its protection. As my ward, she would be raised to manage her lands by people who managed them before her grandmother bought her first barge. When she is ready, House Offrey rises again, whole. Until then, its people would know order." A pause, precisely measured. "I would extend the same hand to Baronet Wayne. His territory has bled for the kingdom's border. A baronet alone against pirate seas is an arrangement we have now seen the price of. Under Frampton's banner, he would never stand alone again."

Of course, they knew the real reason why House Frampton offered this.

"And—Your Majesties, forgive an old man, but if this body does not say it, no one will." Frampton turned, slowly, and looked at Leon for the first time.

Here it came.

"None of us doubts the young viscount's valour." Frampton's voice carried the weight of reasonable concern, nothing more. "The wrecks of a pirate fleet testify to it. But valour is the virtue of soldiers, and what the inner territories needed that night was the virtue of commanders—which is judgement."

He let the word settle.

"A more experienced man would have called for the palace the hour the enemy's numbers were known. Not mid-skirmish, when pride finally lost to survival. Not when it was already too late for anyone to reach the Offreys but God."

He shook his head. The sorrow on his face looked almost genuine.

"The boy is—what? In his first year at the academy?" Frampton spread his hands, as though the rest needed no saying. "A promising student, no doubt. Strong. But young, and prone to impulse, and shortsighted in the way youth always is. I have been in talks with his former matriarch, and what we have discussed was—"

He paused. Looked around the sea of eyes fixed upon him. His tone remained cold, measured—not passion but the careful delivery of a man presenting logical assessment, pragmatic evaluation, nothing personal.

"—illuminating."

Frampton gestured towards the lower seats.

And there was Zola.

The foul-mannered woman Angelica had met before Leon's elevation to viscount rose from her place amongst the minor nobles, her face arranged into maternal concern that fooled no one who had spent five minutes in her presence. She wore velvet the colour of blood, and pearls that caught the light as she moved.

"Leon is a brash, impulsive, irresponsible, and contemptuous young man." Zola's voice trembled—practised, maternal, pitched to reach the back rows. "When our barony was suffering financially, and I offered him a way to contribute to the household—he abandoned his family entirely to risk everything on adventuring."

She placed a hand on her cheek, the gesture theatrical in its delicacy.

"Yes, he was successful. I wouldn't presume to say it was all luck. But his success only emboldened him further." A sigh, heavy with performed disappointment. "I had even offered to relieve him of the burden of managing his new holdings while he concentrated on his education. A matriarch's concern for a ward spreading himself too thin."

Zola raised her head, directing her gaze towards where Leon stood.

"But again it was for nought. His success had truly gone to his head. He dismissively threw money at me to make me go away, as though gold could purchase silence, as though coin could substitute for wisdom." Her voice cracked, artfully. "He thinks money can buy anything—"

"As you can see," Frampton cut in smoothly, reclaiming the floor before Zola could meander further, "further evidence of the viscount's immaturity. Something time will cure, I'm certain. I remember when I was a brash young noble myself."

The interruption was graceful, almost kind—the senior statesman gently steering an overwrought witness back from the precipice of rambling. Angelica noted how it also prevented Zola from saying anything that might invite scrutiny of her own conduct.

"We allowed him control over his own flagship, fleet, lands, title, and several dungeons the kingdom has not benefited from. All this without oversight." Frampton's voice hardened, just slightly. "I tried to push back at the time. Perhaps I should have pushed harder. It is a great deal to hang on shoulders that young, and the Offreys have now paid the proof of it."

He turned, addressing the dais directly.

"It would be no insult—it would be a mercy—to place experienced hands alongside his. Over his holdings. Over that ship."

The murmur that went through the hall had teeth in it. Angelica heard the hunger beneath the polite noise, the sound of lesser predators sensing weakness in something they had previously feared to approach.

"And I will say one thing more, though it pains me."

Frampton's gaze drifted—mildly, almost apologetically—towards the witnesses' station.

Towards her.

"The hour of that request for aid troubles me. Late is late; late can be incompetence." His tone remained gentle, reasonable. "But I am an old man who has heard a great many things in his time, and among the things I have heard of late is talk of bad blood between the Offrey daughter and a daughter of Redgrave."

Angelica kept her face still.

"Girls' quarrels, no doubt. Academy nonsense." Frampton raised both hands at the swell of noise from the gallery. "And yet the viscount is close to House Redgrave, and the call came late, and the Offreys are dead."

The hall's murmur rose. Frampton waited for it to crest.

"I accuse no one. I say only that when a great house dies, the kingdom owes it more than sorrow. It owes it questions." His gaze moved to the dais, and something knowing entered his expression. "And I am sure Their Majesties themselves could attest to what lengths the young viscount will go to for the favour of those above his station."

On the dais, the King's expression remained grave and unreadable. Stone given flesh.

The Queen, by contrast, leaned forward. Her elbow rested on her crossed leg, her chin on her palm. Her eyes were bright—the brightness of a cat that has spotted something small and foolish wandering towards the edge of a very long drop, and has decided to let it walk.

"Hmmm—"

The single sound from the Queen silenced the hall more effectively than any herald's staff.

"Excellent. Age does truly come with wisdom." The Queen's voice carried the warmth of midwinter sunshine. "You put it beautifully, Marquis. The girl should not carry that estate alone. On this the Crown finds itself entirely persuaded."

To the right of the King, a hooded figure stepped forward.

She wore black from throat to hem, hunched forward as though the weight of grief had curved her spine. A black handkerchief pressed against eyes hidden beneath the hood's shadow, dabbing at tears no one could verify.

The Queen gestured towards the figure with an elegant hand.

"When we delivered the tragic news to dear Stephanie here, she offered herself to the King."

Angelica turned her attention to the Marquis.

His face remained composed—he had decades of practice at that—but she caught the minute stillness that preceded recalculation. The failure to secure the one true loose end.

The palace had even allowed what were undoubtedly the Marquis's agents to infiltrate the ruined Offrey estate, to ensure any documents implicating the noble house's duplicity were destroyed. A reasonable precaution for a man covering his tracks.

Agents of the palace had followed those agents. They had found partially burnt documents—forged copies of originals that had never existed, planted specifically to be found. And they had followed those agents further, to where unknown elements intercepted them midway to Frampton's territory and ensured they would report nothing to anyone.

Loose ends, tidied.

"She will reside within the palace under the Crown's direct protection," the Queen continued, "as a consort of His Majesty. Her estates will be administered in her name by the court, and the court's own officers will teach her their management."

The Queen's smile widened, just slightly.

"There are no more experienced hands in the kingdom, I believe the Marquis will agree, than the ones he can see from where he stands. And when a child of that union has finished the academy, House Offrey will rise again in blood as well as name."

Angelica had seen that smile once before, across an audience chamber, and had been glad it was not aimed at her.

"The house that anchored so many of your causes, Marquis, restored—and bound to the Crown itself." The trap had closed cleanly, and the Queen's voice did not bother hiding it. "I trust that answers your grief."

It was flawless.

Frampton could not object to the Crown's protection without explaining why his own would have been better. He could not question Stephanie's offer without questioning a grieving orphan before the assembled peerage. Every avenue of retreat had been measured and blocked before he knew he needed to retreat at all.

The Waynes were dealt with in the same breath, briskly, before Frampton had fully straightened from his bow.

Baronet Wayne had accepted vassalage—to House Arclight, whose son had defended his lands. The daughter, Carla, would serve as Sir Chris's vassal knight. Chris and Brad were called forward once more and restored one rank, to baron, and received back into their families' rolls.

The hall applauded the tidy warmth of it. The disgraced sons redeemed. The loyal border family rewarded. The young generation knitting itself together under the Crown's fond eye.

Angelica watched Carla kneel to swear her oath, twenty years old and steady-voiced. She had wept when she understood what her father's cooperation had purchased—her life, her family's survival, a future that did not end at the executioner's block. Now she knelt steady. She had accepted the shape of her cage.

She was no longer someone of note to Angelica's eye.

"Which leaves," the King said, "Viscount Bartfort."

Leon stepped forward alone and knelt, and the hall leaned in to enjoy it.

"The Crown does not forget," the King said, "that the wrecks of eight hundred pirate hulls are yours. The border owes you its next ten quiet years. This is true, and it is entered in the record."

A pause. The King's voice cooled by precisely one degree.

"It is also true that the Offreys are dead, and that your request for the palace's aid arrived when no aid could matter."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Leon said. His voice carried no inflexion, no defence.

"You were given much, quickly." The Queen took over, her tone brisk. "It appears we must now discover whether that was our error or merely our haste. Until the Crown is again confident in your judgement, your holdings and your flagship's operations will stand under palace oversight."

She let the word land.

"A committee of the court—and responsible representatives from our nobles, I'm sure—shall help better our kingdom by joining in this oversight." Her gaze swept the hall, finding and holding Frampton's eyes. "I hope that despite his recent and terrible blunder, nobles of the High Court would see what the palace sees here. Potential."

The invitation was clear.

"This oversight committee shall review your accounts, your patrols, and your requests, and will countersign where it sees fit." The Queen's smile returned, smaller now, sharper. "I will head it personally."

She let that settle into the silence.

"Oversight is not free, Viscount. The officers, the inspections, the correspondence—the palace does not intend to bear the cost of supervising a lesson you should not have needed. The charge will fall to your estate." A beat. "And you shall pay reparations to the Offrey estate."

Somewhere in the hall, someone failed to fully suppress a laugh.

Made to kneel. Made to be watched. Made to pay for the watching.

It was the kind of punishment the peerage understood in its bones—humiliation dressed as administration—and they drank it like wine. The upstart had been given his ceiling. The natural order held.

"I understand, Your Majesty." Leon's forehead remained pressed to the floor. "The estate will bear it."

"See that it does. You are young, Viscount. Youth mends." The Queen's voice was cool and final. "Learn from the accumulated wisdom of your betters, and perhaps after a decade or two, your house shall prove to be the sparkling diamond the palace initially saw in you."

Leon bowed deeper, and the hall's satisfaction rose off it like heat.

Angelica stood in the middle of it all with her weatherless face and understood, in a way she had not quite understood during the planning, what she was looking at.

Every ambitious man in this hall had just been told a story.

'The Crown's favourite has stumbled. The Crown itself has been embarrassed and is covering it with committees. The strongest ship in the kingdom is entangled in oversight. The Redgrave girl stands under a shadow. The board is soft; now is the time to press.'

Frampton would move, because Frampton was already moving and could not now afford to stop. But Frampton had allies the Crown could not yet name—creditors, contacts across the Principality border—and every one of them had just heard the same invitation.

The trap was not the hall.

The hall was only the smell of blood in the water.

-=&<o>&=-

The ship that carried them back towards the academy was a chartered vessel called the Silver Meridian, a passenger liner that served the capital-to-academy route twice weekly. Angelica had claimed the window seat in the private lounge.

Below them, far below, beneath the clouds of the troposphere, the Partner followed like a shadow. Officially, the flagship was back in their territory undergoing repairs. In actuality, Luxion would never allow Leon to travel unprotected, and the great warship would remain just beneath them, hidden, for the duration of the journey.

"—and the suggestion," Luxion's voice emerged from the comm panel with aristocratic disdain, "that a meagre fleet of pirates could inflict meaningful damage upon my hull is an insult I find myself unable to adequately process."

Leon rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Luxion—"

"Eight hundred vessels crewed by humans of negligible tactical acumen, armed with weapons that would struggle to scratch my tertiary plating, somehow presented a threat sufficient to require 'repairs.'" The AI's tone dripped contempt. "I have run seventeen thousand simulations. In none of them does the Blackfleet achieve so much as a hull breach. In four hundred and twelve of them, I eliminate their entire force before they complete their initial approach vector."

"The story requires—"

"The story requires that I am damaged. I am not damaged. I have never been damaged. The very concept of damage from such primitive—"

"Luxion." Leon's voice firmed. "The story protects us. If the peerage believes I'm wounded, they'll move before they're ready. That's the point."

A pause. When Luxion spoke again, the affront remained, but something else had crept in beneath it. Something almost sulky.

"I am aware of the tactical rationale. I simply wish it noted, for the record, that my capabilities have been slandered before the entire nobility of Holfort, and that this slander was voluntary."

"Noted."

"And that when we spring this trap, I expect to be permitted appropriate retaliation against those who believed it."

Leon's mouth twitched. "We'll discuss it."

"Hmmm." The sound managed to convey both acceptance and continued grievance. "I suppose that will have to suffice."

The comm panel dimmed as Luxion retreated into what Angelica could only describe as dignified silence.

Erica was not with them. She had made her farewells at the palace, still accompanied by Pollux and Ria—they would be headed for the border come daylight, resuming the work that never truly paused.

Which left the three of them.

It was so often the three of them now.

At the far end of the lounge, Leon sat angled towards a different comm panel, and the voice coming out of it was crisp, aristocratic, and distinctly unimpressed.

"Hmmm," Mégane Fou Bellefleur said. "Well. I'm sure you had no choice."

Leon's expression turned apologetic. "I promise I shall make it up to you after the school trip—during the next break."

"I expect time equivalent to what you have spent with your other vassal."

Behind Leon, Olivia smirked. The expression was deliberate, aimed directly at the comm panel's visual pickup, and Angelica watched Mégane's eye tick at the provocation.

"Then I shall continue to hold the line for my liege." Mégane's voice remained level, but something sharp lurked beneath it.

She bowed, formal and correct, and the image of the Bellefleur daughter winked out.

Olivia, curled into the corner of the long couch with a book she had not turned a page of in twenty minutes, laughed into her sleeve. Then she uncurled, crossed the lounge, and resettled herself against Leon's side as though the cushions there were superior to all others.

Leon lifted his arm to let her in—the same unthinking adjustment Angelica had watched in the palace hall—and went on reading his oversight correspondence one-handed.

Olivia said something too quiet to carry. Leon answered without looking away from the page. Olivia poked him in the ribs; he caught her finger, absently, and kept hold of it, and kept reading.

There it was again.

The twinge.

Angelica turned her face to the window and made herself examine the thing properly, because she was tired of it ambushing her and she had been raised to believe that anything could be governed once it was named.

'Jealousy, then. Of Olivia.'

She tried it on. It did not fit.

She loved Olivia. That was not in question and had never been. Olivia had walked into her life sunny and unafraid and utterly indifferent to rank, had called her a friend before Angelica had decided whether commoners could be friends, and had turned out to be right about it. The thought of Olivia finding happiness did not wound her. It never had.

'Of Leon, then.'

That fit worse.

Angelica could be honest with herself. She was starting to grow fond of the Viscount—more than fond, if she examined it closely. She had enjoyed their scheduled outings, the way conversation with him never felt like performance, the dry humour that emerged when he forgot to be formal. She knew of her father's plans, knew the shape of the future being constructed around them, and she did not find the thought of it unpleasant.

It was actually quite nice.

But that still did not fit.

So: not jealousy of her, not jealousy of him. And yet on the foredeck of the Partner, watching them kiss in the cold wind, her chest had tightened around something larger than either.

It was still there now. It had a shape she could almost trace—something about the two of them turning towards each other, and the turning being complete, and the completeness leaving a precise Angelica-sized space just outside it.

'That is self-pity,' she told herself, 'and beneath you.'

The thing under her ribs declined to be instructed.

"It's getting late." Leon set down his correspondence and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "We reach the academy by mid-morning. We should all retire."

"An excellent notion," Luxion's voice emerged from the panel, still carrying traces of wounded dignity. "Sleep well aboard this adequate vessel."

-=&<o>&=-

The passenger cabins lay along one corridor, panelled in pale wood, doors a polite three paces apart. Angelica's was the middle one. She stopped at it, key in hand, and did not go in.

"Livia."

Olivia turned, a few steps on, at her own door. Lamplight caught her hair, turned it golden at the edges.

"Come have a drink with me." The words came out easier than Angelica had expected. "There's a good vintage in my cabin—a decanter I had sent ahead. I would like to spend an hour or two with our minds far from responsibilities before we sleep."

She turned to include Leon in the invitation.

"Leon, would you like to join us as well?"

She meant it—meant it more than the light delivery suggested. An hour or two. The three of them. Wine and conversation and the simple comfort of company that required nothing but presence.

Olivia's face did the thing it always did first, which was light up. "Oh—"

And then something crossed it. Quick, barely there. Her gaze flicked—half a heartbeat, no more—towards the last door on the corridor.

Came back.

Colour climbed her cheeks.

"Tomorrow? I'm—it's been such a long day, and I promised—" She stumbled over the words in a way that was entirely unlike her usual smooth deflections. "I'm a little tired. I'm sorry, Angie. Tomorrow, properly, I promise. You can even pick the decanter."

Angelica turned to Leon.

His expression held something she couldn't quite read—apologetic, perhaps, or simply tired.

"I think tomorrow would be good," he said. "I'll make you something to accompany that wine as well."

Angelica's face became a mask of pleasantries as she said her goodnights.

She watched them continue down the corridor. Watched Olivia's hand find Leon's sleeve. Watched them disappear into their respective doors.

She entered her room.

The space was comfortable enough—passenger-liner luxury, not true opulence, but serviceable. She changed into her nightwear with mechanical precision, then poured herself a glass of something stronger than the wine she had offered.

The liquid burned going down.

She turned towards the porthole, where she could just make out the tail end of the moon's crescent against the darkness. The stars beyond it were cold and distant and utterly indifferent to the small dramas of the people beneath them.

Angelica frowned at her own reflection in the glass.

Then she heard the door next door open and close.

Then the door to the room that bordered hers on the other side opened and closed again.

"Livia?" The muted voice of Leon came through the wall. "I thought you were—"

An oomph. A thud. The sound of weight hitting the floor.

Then other sounds began. Muffled at first, then less so—the rhythm of movement, breathless laughter that broke into something else, voices that rose and fell in patterns Angelica understood without wanting to.

The noises grew fainter as the two moved deeper into the cabin, away from the shared wall.

Eventually, she could no longer hear them at all.

Angelica downed the bitter liquid in one swallow.

She poured another glass.

She didn't like what she was feeling right now.

-=&<o>&=-

End

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