LTSV - Lost & Found 17 (Patreon)

Mira nodded.

“Why have you allowed that woman into your home?” He was attempting to keep his tone even, Mira could tell, but his control slipped as he asked and, wow. He really did not like Cecily.

‘On what basis does he dislike her?’ Mira wondered. Colvin and Cecily acted like they hadn’t met before when Vesper introduced them. Just what then, exactly, was the newspapers saying about Cecily? Mira had wondered about that earlier, but now she realized she might actually need to know. The game didn’t specify what the newspapers reported beyond Sir Rousseau ’s fit at the beginning of the game and some background conversation between NPCs that implied that it wasn’t complimentary, but public sentiment hadn’t seemed to be against her in the game.

“She’s my sister,” Mira replied as blandly as she could. “Where else should she be?”

“With her father or in a separate residence arranged by him,” Colvin countered without missing a beat. “Is there any good reason why she should be supported by you, of all people? The fourth prince pays very close attention to her. She’ll bring him straight to your door, which could very well kill you right now.”

Mira looked away without really meaning to. “My older sister and I have agreed that this is for the best. Vesper will be responsible for her living expenses and schooling. You don’t need to be concerned.”

“I see.” Colvin did not sound like he actually did, though. He stood facing slightly away from her so she couldn’t see his face all that well. 

“Cecily isn’t responsible for what he does.” Mira was a little flattered that he was this pissed on her behalf based on basically nothing, but she did need to get Colvin on the same page with her. His game antics were very cathartic on the screen, but she didn’t need to live through it in reality. “How do you think it would go if she were to tell him no?”

Colvin turned back to face her, his expression neutral. “I think she has always stood the greatest chance of bringing him to heel and chose not to,” he said.

Not for the first time, Mira wondered if Colvin had some hidden history that didn’t get revealed in the first two games. That sounded an awful lot like he knew more about Violet’s school years than he ought to. 

Time to go fishing.

“Are you familiar with his highness?” she asked. “You sound as though you have personal experience with him.”

“The Crown Princess has primary custody of all her younger siblings, including the Prince Regent’s extramarital get,” he explained. He started picking books out of the giant crate that had been delivered to Mira’s room again and looking at the spines. “I have been dispatched to deliver things to his manservant at school on occasion and to make observations about how well he integrated with his classmates. She has also asked my opinion on his relationship with you.”

“Oh?” Mira tried to hide her surprise. She hadn’t realized that the Crown Princess was that involved in her youngest brother’s affairs, much less hers.

Colvin nodded. “To summarize; he and I have not been introduced, but I am familiar with him.”

Mira turned in her seat to drape her crossed arms over the armrest of her chair. Colvin had been slowly moving into her blind and deaf spot and she wanted to hear him. “What did you tell the Crown Princess? About our relationship,” she clarified, when he looked over at her with a brow raised.

“I told her that he did not appreciate the gift he’d been given,” was Colvin’s grave reply. “I told her that he would not care for it.”

Mira’s vision blurred for a second and she had to look away from Colvin’s quiet and unashamed sincerity as her heart rose into her throat. ‘It’s not him,’ she told herself. 

It was never him. 

That person had only ever appeared in her first life and he never came back to her, no matter how many lives she endured. She sometimes saw brief echoes of him in other men, but it was only ever that; a reminder of what and who she’d lost. Colvin Adelram was one more in a long string of ghosts that she’d long since tired of chasing, but never could manage to stop.

‘No wonder I was so obsessed with trying to unlock his route,’ she sighed at herself. ‘How embarrassing that it took me this long to realize why.’

“Are you alright, miss?” A shadow crossed her lap and Mira looked up to find that he’d crossed over to come stand by her chair. His red gaze had softened from his earlier disapproval and Mira’s heart started to hurt. 

Adra used to look at her that way, back when they were first getting to know one another and she suddenly missed him more than she ever had before. She hadn’t thought that was possible. 

“I’m fine,” she reassured him. “It was just a stray thought. You don’t need to worry about me.”

A complicated look flickered across Colvin’s face and the fine hairs rose up on the back of her neck when he replied, “I’m afraid that I can’t help it.”

She was still trying to convince herself that it was just a coincidence by the time Anna helped her into bed. He’d just been responding to what she said. He’d been hired to look after her wellbeing so of course he said that. 

Just because another man, hundreds of lives ago, had once said the same thing to her in exactly the same way was irrelevant. 

000

Mira had shared living spaces with countless other people over the course of her lifetime; some better, some worse. What all cohabitation experiences involved was a period of acclimation while you learned things about how to function within that specific domestic unit and, unfortunately, Mira had very few ways to make this particular getting-to-know-you phase easier on anyone.

She herself was still getting used to her various disabilities. The seizures had distracted her from her missing eye and ear for a time. She slowly acclimated to having no depth perception to the point where she didn’t need to keep one graceful hand on the furniture anymore when she was moving around. Unfortunately, her damaged hearing was harder to compensate for. 

It wasn’t until she felt someone tapping on the arm of her chaise seat that Mira even realized there was another person in the room with her, aside from Colvin who had the desk and was working on an expense report. She was just reading and not even taking notes, so she’d told him to use the dainty writing desk at the foot of her bed and took the divan for herself. 

Anna was standing nearby when Mira looked up with Cecily behind her, half turned away but in the process of turning back towards Mira. 

“Miss Cecily wanted your attention, miss,” Anna said quietly and Mira realized that she’d inadvertently set herself up so that her blind and deaf side was facing the bedroom door. Anna turned back towards Cecily. “You see? She wasn’t ignoring you.”

Cecily’s complexion had started out a little blotchy and got pinker when Anna said that. “I–I don’t understand?” She looked back and forth between Mira and Anna. “Am I missing something?”

“I’m sorry,” Mira held a hand out to her younger sister. She felt bad. It was stupid, but she’d somehow just assumed that Cecily already knew. There was no way her former fiance didn’t know and Mira couldn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t have shared that knowledge with Cecily when he fully believed that she’d been bullying his lover. “That’s my bad side. Did you need me?”

“What do you mean ‘bad side’?” Cecily's volume started to spiral and Mira caught Anna’s eye and nodded at Colvin.

“May we have some privacy?” she asked and patted the divan next to her after Anna got Colvin out into the hallway. “Cecily, I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I’m blind and deaf on one side.”

“You…” Cecily searched her face. “...fully blind? Fully deaf?”

Mira pulled out the big comb holding the majority of her hair up so that her silvery hair fell down around her shoulders and she could move her bangs around to show her little sister the part of her face that Anna hid away from the world with her hairstyles. 

“You can touch it, if you want,” Mira offered as she tilted her head to show her sculpted eyelid and reconstructed ear. “It doesn’t hurt.”

To her surprise, Cecily did and Mira could feel a trace of magic in that contact. 

“There’s no eye in this socket at all,” Cecily whispered. “The ear canal too, it’s completely closed!” Her face scrunched up as she investigated Mira’s ruined face. “Is–is that scar tissue?” 

Mira caught her hand and shook her head. “Leave that for now,” she said. “I don’t remember it and I’m trying not to, for now. Nanny might be able to explain it to you, if you ask, but for now; what was it you needed?”

Cecily refocused her attention on Mira’s words with great difficulty. She was upset about something, but Mira wasn’t entirely sure what aside from the obvious and her knowledge of the game wasn’t helping. 

“A special messenger reached Miss Vesper’s office today,” Cecily explained, although her gaze kept flicking towards Mira’s missing eye. “It was from Lord Coventry. He’s coming to town through the managate network. She’s gone ahead to meet him, but asked us both to stay in the hotel for now.”

Huh. Mira had expected him to reply to Vesper through the post. Was he coming for Cecily or Mira? Or were both problems combined what it took to bring him into town? She didn’t think this happened in the game or, if it did, Cecily never knew about it.

“Are you nervous?” Mira asked. “This is the father you didn’t know you had.”

Cecily pursed her lips and shrugged. “I–I suppose, maybe?” she admitted. “It’s just that Fa–Sir Rousseau was my stepfather. Mother married him when I was around four so I always knew that I had another living parent somewhere, but also that he never married my mother even after he got her with child.” Her mouth thinned further. “I don’t know what will happen to Mama once he finds out about this. It’s alright for now because he doesn’t know anyone took me in, but once the truth of my birth becomes public, I don’t know what he’ll do to her. Miss Vesper said she’d contest his guardianship of her, but that it’s hard to protect someone from their spouse.”

Mira blinked hard. “Your mother is alive?” she asked without thinking better of it first.

The game had heavily implied that Cecily suffered from Dead Mom Syndrome, but ,in retrospect, Mira realized that the devs might have faked her out again. The way the heroine described her background in-game came off as a little childish when she said ‘Mama went away when I was very little so I was raised by my Father,’except not if she was speaking literally.

Cecily cocked her head at Mira. “Did you think she died?” she asked, not taking any offense. “I suppose I haven’t been talking about her, have I? She isn’t dead, but she’s been in a hospital for most of my life.”

“Is she ill?” Mira asked as delicately as she could after her earlier slip up. Given what she now knew about Sir Rousseau, she became instantly suspicious about how ‘ill’ Cecily’s mother actually was. 

“Oh, it’s… not a physical illness,” Cecily replied as she ducked her gaze. “Mama became upset a few years into her marriage and had to take a rest cure. So far, the doctors have not permitted her to come home.”

That could mean just about anything. Mira was too familiar with people like Sir Rousseau to automatically believe it was necessarily the doctors keeping her there. For one thing, if he’d really wanted his wife back then all he had to do was stop paying for her care and they’d release her real fast. For another, packing a spouse off to a private hospital was the method of choice for certain types when it came to dealing with an inconvenient partner when divorce wasn’t on the table.