Chapter 188

The maid’s rummaging hands went still at my question. She froze, shocked, then stiffly turned in my direction.

“M-my lady,” she stuttered.

Thanks to the cloth knotted at the back of her head, I couldn’t see her face, as expected, but her shaky blue eyes couldn’t be hidden by a mask.

“I asked you what you were doing,” I demanded. The maid flinched, then stuttered, “W-well... Emily asked me to clean up around your room while she ate lunch. I was just about to leave.”

“Is that so?” This was known to happen occasionally since it was difficult for Emily to clean this big room all by herself every day.

That is a fairly plausible excuse. I wandered closer to her casually.

“Move,” I said, and the maid flinched as she backed away.

I sat down at the dressing table, skimming my eyes over it and the still-open drawer. Nothing was missing—she probably wasn’t here to steal anything in the first place. Even so, I pretended to look. I grit my teeth when I glanced into the mirror over the dressing table. If I hadn’t, I’d probably have screamed.

Doing my best to conceal how tense I was, I slowly said, “That’s enough for today. I need to get ready to leave, so get out.”

“Ah… Understood, my lady,” she said.

I heard rustling from behind me. The maid was probably bowing and turning to leave. Though I was looking directly into the mirror, nothing was visible in the reflection. I could only rely on the sounds she was making.

Please, just leave already… My hands were sweating as they rested on the dressing table’s surface. The maid took a single step to leave and I stifled a sigh of relief, but then she stopped.

“My lady. Why do you... keep staring at the mirror like that?”

I very nearly screamed and was unable to hide the way my shoulders tensed. My breathing grew fast with fear and I clamped my eyes shut. I slowly opened them again moments later and turned my head to see that the girl was still standing only a single step away.

The room was so quiet—I could have heard a pin drop in the silence. The maid didn’t seem at all flustered, even though I was looking directly at her. She had decided to drop the act.

Left with no choice, I said casually, “It’s curious.”

The maid tilted her head to the side. “What is?”

“I’m fairly sure you’re not a vampire, so why is it you have no reflection?”

“...”

“Ivonne,” I said quietly, and the maid’s eyes narrowed as she smiled. “I knew it.”

The maid—that is to say, Ivonne—pulled the mask from her face.

“So you knew all along, Penelope.” Ivonne smiled prettily, identical to how she’d looked in the in-game illustrations. She’d revealed herself so proudly, that it was now I who felt dazed and at a loss of what to say.

“Was it you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Did you have Father suddenly ask me to have lunch in the greenhouse?”

“If you knew as much, Penelope, you should have taken your time,” Ivonne said with an innocent smile.

The tearful, fumbling way she usually spoke was nowhere to be seen. My throat felt tight, but I pushed through the sensation. “Are you done playing pretend?”

“What about you?” Ivonne asked immediately, looking amused. “Are you done pretending not to recognize me?”

“Isn’t that why you were standing in front of the mirror? So I’d have to acknowledge it?” I asked.

She frowned. “That was a mistake. I didn’t expect you to return so quickly. As if it’s not already annoying enough that I had to come back... nothing is going according to plan.”

She rubbed her forehead. Thinking to herself for a moment, she then glanced over at me slowly. “Tell me, Penelope. Have you returned as well?”

I couldn’t make sense of her question. Before I could formulate an answer, she furrowed her brow and muttered, “No, that can’t be the case. If you had, you’d have done something to change things before I even arrived. You wouldn’t have just let the coming-of-age ceremony happen the way it did...”

“...”

“You wouldn’t have been stupid enough to just do nothing, would you, knowing what a terrible death awaited you? Am I right?” Ivonne rambled, tapping a finger against her lips nervously. She then turned to me suddenly as I watched her silently. “Who are you, actually? You are too vastly different from the Penelope I know.” Ivonne glared at me with a scowl, as if she were looking at a stranger. “What is happening? In the past, we never encountered one another before my return to the manor... but this time everything has changed.”

“How?” I finally asked.

Ivonne replied, “You should be overcome with jealousy right now, doing everything in your power to kill me. I didn’t even have to brainwash anyone... You couldn’t stand me taking even the littlest bit of the family’s attention away from you, Penelope.”

I froze. She seemed to know exactly how the real Penelope would have behaved.

How does she know that? My thoughts were a confused mess. Even if she was secretly evil, she was still only one of the characters from the game. Wait... is Ivonne someone from the real world, too? But that hypothesis didn’t hold water. If that was the case, she wouldn’t be asking me if I’d “returned.”

“Thanks to your vile antics, taking control of the manor has always been such a simple affair,” she mocked playfully in her beautiful voice, even as I tried desperately to figure out what was going on.

I stared at her, shocked.

She licked her lips, smiling prettily. “They were so delicious—your father and brothers.”

A chill ran down my spine and I held my breath. Revealing just how terrified I was would do me no good.

“But why?” Ivonne asked, tilting her head to the side once more as she examined my carefully schooled expression. Her neck was more than just tilting now—it bent noisily at an unnatural angle, crunching and snapping grotesquely. The sound was loud and terrifying, echoing around the room, and she only stopped when her neck was bent more than 90 degrees sideways. “You don’t seem to recall anything from the past... and yet you act like you know everything. You keep avoiding me and you even went so far as to claim that the incident at the ceremony was all your doing...”

“I saw what you really are on Solael,” I said, trying not to shake. It felt as though this monster of a girl would charge at me and demand I answer otherwise. I no longer wondered if Ivonne was like me, someone who’d found herself waking up in a stranger’s body. If that were the case, her neck would not be bent at such an unnatural angle.

“Of course. You learned what I was on the island,” Ivonne said, blinking and easily accepting this new information.

I wondered for a moment if it would be enough to satisfy her.

“But you haven’t once tried to tell anyone the truth about me. That isn’t like you. I wonder why that is, Penelope? You used to fear nothing... Do you fear me now?” Ivonne snickered as if she already knew exactly how I felt, even as my eyes remained glued to her mangled appearance.

My lips were pale and trembling, but I managed to reply, “Does that matter?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve already told you before. Whatever purpose you have in coming here, I don’t care.”

“Hmm...” Ivonne hummed, perhaps trying to gauge if I was telling the truth.

I forced myself to keep eye contact with her cold, lifeless eyes and said, “I plan to leave this place, so do whatever you want. Take over the manor if you wish or eat everyone here. It’s none of my business.”

“No.”

The sound of crunching bone resumed as Ivonne returned her head to its normal position. Unable to watch, I looked away.

“You ruined everything.”

“I didn’t do anything—”

“All of them are crazy about you. They won’t let you go. It’s hindering the effectiveness of my spells,” Ivonne spat, her head back in its proper position. Her innocent expression resembled that of a disgruntled child’s. “It was fun, you know, taking everyone precious to you away one by one and seeing the scowl on your face... So why is nothing going my way this time?”

“That’s also got nothing to do with me. I’m not brainwashing them like you have been, Ivonne,” I answered sharply. “Isn’t it better that I just stay out of your way, rather than trying to stop you, knowing what you really are?”

“Yes. That’s true, but...” Ivonne’s expression changed rapidly as she nodded. All emotion slid from her face as if the entire conversation so far had merely been a passing amusement to her. “Where is the fragment?”

“What fragment?”

“The mirror fragment you stole from me,” she clarified, and my stomach dropped.

It made me dizzy just thinking about what would have happened if I’d ignored the quest and just left the fragment lying around.

“Return it to me, Penelope,” Ivonne said in a cajoling tone. “Then I’ll leave you be, as you asked.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.

Even though I still felt like I couldn’t trust Winter, I hadn’t known it would end up being such a good idea to get the fragment out of the manor and leave it with him.

Ivonne’s eyes narrowed. They were as cold as a snake’s once more.

I continued quickly, “Oh. I do remember picking something up off the ground... but I threw it out on the way back. I don’t have it anymore,” I shrugged, palms up.

Perhaps she’d know that I was telling the truth when I said I didn’t have it with me.

Ivonne moved on to another question. “Where did you learn to use ancient magic?”

“Magic?”

“Yes, the spell you used back on the island.”

“That wasn’t me,” I argued. The spell I cast was certainly not something that could be explained without revealing I was from the outside world.

“It wasn’t you?”

“No. I was in the company of a mage that day. You probably mistook his spells as mine.”

“Winter Verdandi?” she asked without pause.

F*ck. I thought she wasn’t supposed to know the mage’s identity yet. I forced my trembling lips to smile. “Marquis Verdandi? No. His name is Windsor and he works at a merchant guild, often doing charitable work helping those in need.”

“Is that right? I see,” Ivonne clapped her hands together as if she’d just realized something. She muttered quietly, “So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?”

The hair on my arms stood on end.

I need to meet with Winter right now. But first, I needed to get out of this situation safely. I watched her closely, tense. Ivonne, who’d seemed lost in thought for several long moments, suddenly grinned.

“Let’s try something new, Penelope.”

Before I could even react, she’d whisked something from her pocket.

“Dee asoom.”