Swan Grave - Chapter 16

Rothbart took a long breath, savoring the aftershocks of his climax. His broad back muscles, wrapped in fine cloth, rose and fell heavily.

Rothbart opened his palm. The thin, soft scrap of cloth that had wrapped around his cock was filthy, soaked with his semen. With the satisfying feeling of having violated her twice, Rothbart let out a low laugh.

Soon his shoulders trembled. The faint laugh spread like a great wildfire.

“Whether she truly lost her memory, or whether she is pretending…”

From watching her for several days, he still couldn’t be certain. Once he faced her directly… he would grasp some sense of it.

Of course, to Rothbart, either way didn’t matter. If he blocked off her escape route and shackled her feet so she had nowhere to flee, she would eventually spit out the truth first.

Straightening his appearance, Rothbart clutched the clothes he had just violated in place of their owner and rose from his seat. His steps carried him toward the nearby fireplace.

Rothbart tossed the clothes into the fireplace where flames roared. Crackle, crackle, the blazing fire soon devoured them. Watching until they lost all shape, Rothbart whispered to himself with a face flushed as though confessing love.

“If I drag it all out and spread it before you, what kind of face will you make, Ianna…”

A strange smile spread across his lips as he watched the clothes vanish completely. Along with the black soot, his traces too were gone, but it didn’t matter. He would soon leave them again and again with the owner of those clothes. At that thought, the firelight flared as though answering him with a dance.

She should have returned earlier. Eleven years was more than enough time to burn away the wick of a man’s patience, and what remained now was only scorched poison and damp obsession.

***

“Your task is nothing special. You only need to serve the master. The master is a demanding man, so don’t be lazy and incur his displeasure.”

At Madame Dova’s words, Anna, tense with nerves, stepped at dawn into her new workplace the next day. Though she had already worked in the mansion for some time, it was her first time entering the Marquess’s office.

The Marquess’s office was decorated in an antique style, yet the atmosphere was rather barren. Anna felt that information was carefully controlled, as if it was a room meant to be shown to others.

‘At least it’ll be easy to clean.’

Though she was anxious about why the Marquess had chosen her as his personal maid, she had no thought of neglecting the work assigned to her. Before going to the bedchamber to wake the Marquess, her first task was to clean the office. Anna rolled up her sleeves and focused on cleaning.

First came clearing the ashes from the fireplace. Anna folded a handkerchief into a triangular kerchief to cover her nose and mouth, then approached the extinguished fireplace. As she scraped away the ashes, clouds of soot rose.

“Cough, cough…”

The handkerchief couldn’t fully block the dust. Though tears welled in her eyes, Anna continued scraping the ashes.

There was more ash than when she usually cleaned Svanhild’s room. Perhaps because a larger room required more firewood, or perhaps papers and other documents had been burned here… For a moment, she wondered if it had been done deliberately to trouble her.

Surely not. At that point, it would verge beyond paranoia into baseless self-importance. Anna gave a faint laugh as she scraped the ashes, when suddenly the poker snagged on something.

“What is this?”

Anna carefully drew the snagged object forward with the poker. It was something like a bent wire, about the length of her palm. Puzzled, she kept cleaning, only to discover another one jutting up.

“This is…”

She didn’t know what it was used for, yet it stirred a strange sense of familiarity. Just then, in the deep corner of the fireplace, she spotted a scrap of cloth that hadn’t been fully burned. She tried to drag it closer with the poker, but it seemed stuck to the wall and would not come free. At last, Anna leaned her body into the fireplace.

“…Cloth?”

Anna frowned at the feel in her hand. Why would there be cloth burned in the office? It wasn’t as though silk was used for firewood…

Now that she thought about it, the blackened cloth with holes burned through felt strangely familiar. The moment she tried to look more closely, a chilling voice pierced down from behind her like the blade of a guillotine.

“Was it a prostitute I hired, with her ass in the air seducing me, not a maid?”

Anna hastily raised her body. In her hurry, ashes scattered. Stained all over, covered in soot, Anna flushed red with shame and humiliation, her head hanging low.

“Stand up. I didn’t call you here to do things like that.”

Rothbart urged her with a cold voice. There was a strange power in his words, and Anna, without realizing it, staggered to her feet. She couldn’t tell if the ‘things like that’ he meant were cleaning the fireplace or raising her ass.

Only then could Anna face Rothbart for the first time under the bright light. Even in the darkness he had felt enormous, and under the sunlight he was no less so. Seeing the muscles of his body, made more imposing by the light, she felt even more overwhelmed.

Perhaps just awake, his hair fell in disarray across his forehead, yet even that looked like a painting. His inhumanly perfect features, as though sculpted by the gods, made Anna swallow despair inside. No matter what fine words were attached to him, they would not be excessive, and his existence inevitably humbled ordinary humans.

Wearing only a robe that surely felt soft against bare skin, he seemed like someone who knew nothing of shame. Half-naked, he looked down at Anna without hesitation. The red eyes under his thick brows shone with unreadable thoughts.

“The cleaning of my room will continue to be handled by the butler. It seems Madame Dova didn’t convey it properly?”

“N-no.”

At his words, as if to question Madame Dova, Anna quickly answered. Now that she thought of it, he had never said she was to clean. Only that she was to serve him. Her ears burned at her rash misunderstanding.

“I’ll change my clothes.”

With that, Rothbart turned his body from Anna. Covered in soot as she was, Anna hesitated whether it was proper to follow him in such a state, worrying she might only dirty the room.

Meanwhile, Rothbart strode ahead quickly, growing distant. There was no choice. Anna hurried after him.

***

Following Rothbart had been the right choice.

Afterward came countless conflicts that seemed trivial, but to Anna caused endless worry.

He acted as though he had forgotten it was her first day serving him, giving not the slightest hint but setting Anna to trial again and again.

To avoid displeasing him, Anna sharpened her attention to every movement and tone of his. In truth, it was an exhausting ordeal.

Most of all, confronting his bare body was deeply awkward, and each time her fingertips brushed his skin while helping him dress, it was worse. Each button she fastened on his shirt felt like walking on a blade. Rothbart stared intently at the flustered Anna, as if urging her on.

Her eyes, fastening the button on his left shirt cuff, brushed against his exposed forearm. Faint lines wrapped around his left arm like a spider’s web.

‘Scars…?’

They weren’t faint marks, but full wounds slashed properly. Was it self-harm? Or a suicide attempt? Both were words that didn’t match a man like Rothbart, yet the thought of the late Marchioness naturally tangled into them.

Now that she thought about it, Svanhild too had a long scar across his palm, as if cut by a blade. It hadn’t seemed an old wound… She had always wondered how the young master of a noble house came by such a scar, but seeing Rothbart’s injuries, she dared not ask further.