Don't Keep a Dog in the Garden - Chapter 12

There had been an irreverent word mixed into his mention of the Crown Prince and the Prince’s deaths, but Jachim did not pick at it.

Instead, the twisted corner of his mouth drew an even longer arc upward.

“For the Grand Duchess’s sake as well, the culprit should be caught as soon as possible.”

“I intend to hurry, as it is. It seems we do not have much time.”

“I wish you success.”

Whisker and Jachim exchanged oddly similar smiles, but Cassia could not see it, blocked by Whisker’s back.

Even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared.

To her, the Third Prince was someone she wanted to avoid as much as Whisker.

Cassia stepped around Whisker’s back to the front and bowed her head to Jachim.

“I will take my leave, Your Highness.”

“My, I was blocking your way. Until we meet again, Grand Duchess.”

Jachim replied with a courteous attitude and stepped aside, and Cassia turned her back on the imperial palace without looking back.

Whisker followed after her like a puppy trailing its master.

As she headed straight for the carriage depot, Cassia suddenly stopped. She looked as if she were thinking about something, then started walking again, only to stop again after just a few steps.

Whisker, following her, also repeated the pattern of walking and stopping along with Cassia.

Cassia, her brow tightly furrowed, turned back to look at Whisker.

“What is it?”

Whisker tilted his head with an uncharacteristically gentle face and asked.

But instead of explaining, Cassia only let out a long sigh and withdrew her gaze.

Then she started walking in the opposite direction from the carriage depot.

Where her footsteps led was the imperial infirmary in the outer palace.

After entering the infirmary, Cassia spoke to Whisker, who had followed her in with a bewildered expression, “Take it off.”

At the unexpected words, Whisker, usually shameless, was rarely flustered.

He stared at Cassia with his red eyes wide, blinking, then belatedly understood her intention and burst into laughter.

He was wearing a shirt that belonged to some guard; he did not even know whose.

Last night, Captain of the Guard Mikhail had torn his own shirt to shreds so he could whip him.

Blood seeping from wounds that had not healed would be staining the shirt.

To think a wound he had already forgotten would leave a stain on Cassia’s heart as well.

After stifling his chuckles and finally stopping, Whisker crossed his arms over his chest and, with a coy face like an innocent young man, muttered, “With this many eyes watching….”

Ignoring Whisker’s mischief that never cared for time or place, Cassia spoke to a physician standing nearby, “Strip him and treat the wounds on his back.”

The physician, singled out, startled and glanced back and forth between Cassia and Whisker.

The descendant of the Golden Dawn had barged in out of nowhere and was telling him to undress the Bureau Chief of the Inspection Bureau.

The infirmary, which had been bustling with physicians and patients, fell silent as if dead, and only Whisker was smiling.

At the Grand Duchess’s stern command, the blameless palace doctor stammered as he addressed Whisker.

“Um… Duke Mastiff….”

Whisker swept his eyes over the palace doctor, who could not even dare meet his gaze, and let out a small laugh.

Then, looking straight at Cassia, he slowly began to undo his buttons.

Below his long, straight neckline, a pair of neat collarbones sat in place, and over finely built pectorals, countless traces of malice were exposed without restraint.

The dense scars were so grotesque that the palace doctor, who had been fidgeting and stealing glances at Whisker, sucked in a breath in shock.

Cassia, who had faced him without wavering even under Whisker’s provocative gaze, frowned and turned her head away.

The scars that remained in her memory had grown along with the years, holding their place.

Not even a little fainter than when she first saw them. No, if anything, darker.

“Why are you….”

She started to ask why nothing had improved at all, but Cassia closed her mouth.

Ten years had passed, so why were you still covered in wounds?

She swallowed the words, unable to tell whether they were a question or a reproach, and recalled the day she first met him.

When she was young, Cassia liked to read alone deep in the garden, avoiding the servants who fussed over her.

That day was one of those days.

On a sweltering day, when long-stretched tree shade lay over a fountain that murmured with cool water, she met Whisker there.

More precisely, she should say she discovered him.

Seated beneath the shade of a great tree, reading, Cassia spotted Whisker approaching the fountain cautiously, glancing around to make sure no one was there.

He seemed unaware that it was a place the Grand Duke’s daughter often visited, and that she was watching him.

He was a boy who did odd jobs in the vast gardens of the Grand Duke’s residence for wages, a sixteen-year-old Whisker, who had come to the fountain to escape the heat and prying eyes.

He cupped water in both hands and washed his face again and again, then hesitated for a moment and took off his shirt.

It was the kind of day when you wanted to jump straight into the fountain.

He must have thought that if he rinsed his sweat-soaked clothes in the water and put them back on, the heat would ease a little.

Just as he was about to dunk his clothes into the fountain, he sensed someone between the mad cicada cries.

Whisker jerked his head up, and his eyes met Cassia’s as she, startled, dropped the book she had been reading.

Half-drenched clothing in his hands, Whisker fled, leaving behind a lingering image of red marks covering his back.

Crossing ten years, Cassia looked at Whisker with eyes of the same color.

Unlike that day, when he had run off with a flustered face after meeting her gaze, mixed with surprise, guilt, and pity, Whisker smiled.

“See? I told you. Not a thing has changed.”

At his voice, laughing as if he were pleased, Cassia could only be speechless.

“I thought you had changed.”

“Have I not?”

With a strange smile, Whisker stepped toward Cassia.

He stopped just barely, close enough that she could feel his body heat. From him came a scent like a flower fragrance she had smelled somewhere before.

Mixed into that strange scent, as strange as his smile, was the metallic smell of blood.

He had changed.

At sixteen, Whisker did not approach Cassia first. He could not.

Cassia had changed too.

This time, she was the one who turned away first.

Like sixteen-year-old Whisker that day, Cassia fled.

***

After the day Cassia and Whisker suffered in the Imperial Guards’ prison, the investigation into the Second Prince and Crown Prince’s murders proceeded simultaneously through the Inspection Bureau and the Guards.

With the Emperor declaring he would grant a great reward to whichever side found the culprit first, Mikhail ran himself ragged, but neither side was the victor.

If one had to say, it was the Inspection Bureau’s narrow win, for being the first to find the true culprit’s corpse after his suicide.

Captain of the Guard Mikhail stamped his feet in fury, having been searching for evidence to pin Whisker as the culprit, but the revealed truth of the case was anticlimactic.

They said the one who killed the Second Prince, who had been backed by Grand Duchess Diorent and aimed for imperial power, was Crown Prince Dion.

To frame Cassia, he had killed his younger brother, waiting for the moment she came to see Mesus.

And the one who killed him was the late Second Prince’s loyal escort knight.

They claimed he avenged his lord.

After leaving behind a suicide note that confessed everything, he killed himself, and alongside his corpse they found the Second Prince’s treasured sword, the weapon used to murder the Crown Prince.

It was the blade that had pierced Second Prince Mesus’s chest, now driven into Crown Prince Dion’s heart.

It was the very sword Captain of the Guard Mikhail had taken out of the Inspection Bureau, declaring he would catch the culprit, and then “lost.”

The circumstances and the evidence fit perfectly.

With the true culprit dead by his own hand, the investigation was over.

All that remained was the Emperor’s final confirmation, as he raged like a colt with its tail on fire.

No.

One more thing remained.

The suspicion of the one closest to the truth remained.

“It’s not this sword.”

Cassia, after examining the recovered exhibit, the Second Prince’s treasured sword, spoke decisively.

She could doubt the suicide note the Second Prince’s escort knight left behind, and she could doubt the corpse, but the sword was certain.

Because the one who pulled the blade from Mesus’s dying chest was Cassia herself.

Even if everything had been chaos, she wouldn’t mistake a sword she had held in her own hands.

As if he had expected her reaction, Whisker gave a small snort of laughter and answered, “It is that sword, Your Grace.”

“No, it wasn’t this sword. Whisker, what in the world are you plotting?”

The exhibit found at the scene of Mesus’s murder had been in the Inspection Bureau’s custody, since it led the initial investigation.

That meant the sword that left Cassia’s hands passed from the Inspection Bureau to Mikhail, then into the true culprit’s hands.

When the sword was swapped was as obvious as daylight.

“What I plot is always the truth, Your Grace. The truth that will save you.”

With a sweet smile on his lips, Whisker answered in a voice like someone soothing a child.