Chapter 83
>’Please don’t misunderstand—this is not to protect my mother. This is for my younger sister, Stella, who knows nothing and whom I hope will never know.
And it’s also for Rachel, your wife. I hope they, at least, never have to live with the pain and hatred that we endured.
>I’ll leave the matter of my mother to you, Your Grace. I’m sure there are many ways to separate her from Stella and Rachel. Please handle it as you see fit.
>Thanks to your consideration, I’ve safely relocated to the Huawol Continent, but I plan to move again once conditions improve. You don’t need to worry—I will never return to the Merwin Empire.
>I hope you and your wife will be happy. I know it’s shameless of me, but please take care of Stella.
>For the past twenty years, you have been the perfect older brother and family to me. Please don’t feel guilty or blame yourself.
>Live peacefully, free from our mother. I’m truly grateful for everything.’
> ‘—Sincerely, Susan Jacotfield’
At the bottom of the letter, her name was signed with Thomas’s surname. Upon seeing this, Stefan slowly placed the letter down on his desk.
“What was the purpose of my life, then…?”
Slumping into his chair, Stefan looked as though he might cry.
He had endured the last twenty-one years on vengeance alone—against Rita—and it now felt unbearably meaningless.
It was bad enough that he had lived such a pitiful and tormented life himself, but it seemed there were so many others around him whose lives were also ruined because of Rita.
“Finn and Bell, Thomas and Susan… and now Stella and Rachel, too…”
With all these tangled circumstances, he couldn’t even expose Rita’s crimes to the world. It was disheartening.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine how carefully one had to calculate their actions to create a web of evil so intricate it couldn’t be unraveled.
“What could possibly be inside that woman’s head…”
Thinking of Rita’s face, Stefan shuddered and closed his eyes.
He had long believed that if he could just find the evidence of her misdeeds, everything would be resolved.
But now, even with the truth in his hands, he had to keep it hidden—and that was maddening.
Just as Susan had said, he realized that the thick fog surrounding Rita was reaching Rachel.
Rachel had only just begun to recover from the loss of her parents; he couldn’t bear to drag her back into despair.
Opening his eyes slowly, Stefan scribbled something down and placed it into a message tube. He then gave instructions to the carrier pigeon.
“Take this to Bell.”
***
Rita truly was like a cursed potato—you dig up one, and a whole chain comes tumbling out.
For every person you found connected to her, a long list of misdeeds followed.
Bell, who had literally come back from death at the age of twelve, was normally unfazed by most things. But the deeper he dug into Rita’s past, the more he was consumed by fear.
“Can we really face someone like this…?”
Rita had been married off by her uncle like a pawn, only to have her elderly husband die on their wedding night.
The official cause: death during intercourse—a preposterous claim.
Even if it hadn’t been her first time, Rita had only been twenty years old. Her husband either died of old age or possibly from the shock of some unsettling truth.
Unwilling to tarnish their family name, his children pinned the blame entirely on Rita and drove her out.
“They called her a woman who would ruin the household and kicked her out.”
With this, Bell launched an investigation into the family Rita had married into.
That household turned out to be a notorious crime syndicate, involved even in human trafficking.
Most likely, Rita’s elderly husband met a swift death due to the sins he had committed.
Not long after Rita was thrown out, the Imperial Knights raided the estate and tore it apart.
Rumor had it someone tipped them off, and Bell had no doubt that “someone” was Rita.
“She wasn’t even there for a week. How did she find evidence of their crimes? It shouldn’t have been that easy…”
After being cast out, Rita didn’t return to the Count of Rewin’s house.
She knew her uncle would either sell her again or drive her away.
Instead, she obsessively searched for the now-vanished House of Burke.
She believed that kind-hearted Rafael wouldn’t ignore an old friend in need.
She also seemed to have a strange confidence—an irrational belief—that if she played her cards right, she could move him to pity and maybe even become his wife.
But when Rita learned that Rafael, now living under the name “Raphael,” already had a sweet and innocent fiancée named Sophia, she changed tactics.
She befriended Sophia.
According to a former maid, Rita constantly tried to shake Sophia’s trust in her fiancé.
“Sophia, how much do you really trust Count Burke?”
Thankfully, Sophia never wavered.
In fact, it was because of Rita’s meddling that Count Burke rushed to marry Sophia and drove Rita out.
“My God… Did she really order the merchant ship’s sinking just because of that?”
Bell shook his head in disbelief at Rita’s warped logic.
“How is anyone supposed to deal with a woman this deranged?”
Soon after, Rita headed for the capital, aiming even higher than Count Burke.
Rumor had it that the distinguished Duke of Edmund had taken a foreign wife.
As if fate conspired in her favor, she encountered Duke Edmund himself at a shabby inn—visibly unwell. Just as she’d hoped.
And so, she approached his aide, Thomas, exactly as she had planned.
From the maid Rita had dismissed, Bell also heard this chilling remark:
>“How can two people who don’t even speak the same language ever trust one another?”
“She knew where to lay her head before stretching her legs.”
Rita had deliberately targeted the vulnerabilities of Duke Edmund and his wife.
“She’s an unbelievably cunning woman. And thorough, too.”
Rita had never left behind a single piece of evidence of her misdeeds. It was as if she’d expected someone to dig into her past and had erased every trace accordingly.
“Hazel was the only exception—we had some evidence, so we could make a case there.”
Not long after giving birth to Susan, Rita heard of her second older sister’s death. It wasn’t uncommon for mothers to die of puerperal fever in those days.
While everyone was grieving, Rita took her crying niece outside, claiming she would nurse her, only to abandon the child at an orphanage—leaving behind a promise to return soon.
Then she returned to her deceased sister’s house, the child’s home, as if nothing had happened. When her brother-in-law eventually realized the child was missing and panicked, Rita calmly comforted him.
Once he, too, had passed away, Rita went to retrieve the child from the orphanage. Five years had passed by then, and the child had been named Hazel.
Rita then sent Hazel to be adopted by Count Rewin—falsely claiming that the girl was her own daughter.
“Why go to such lengths for revenge…?”
According to Bell’s investigation, Rita believed her second sister was the reason she had been married off to that elderly man. She blamed her, saying that if not for her, her life wouldn’t have become so entangled.
And considering how Rita caused her husband’s death on the very first day of marriage, it was clear their uncle, having received no dowry, would take it out on Hazel.
Rita had intended it that way—returning the shame and humiliation she had suffered at the hands of her father to his son, and the disgrace from her mother to her daughter.
“She’s truly monstrous… Carrying out generational revenge like this…”
But the worst part of all was that someone this depraved couldn’t even be punished.
Even putting aside Stefan’s hesitation for Rachel’s sake, there was no hard evidence to prove Rita’s crimes.
There was no way to verify that her testimony had led to the downfall of her first husband’s family. Hazel, the girl sent to Count Rewin, could not be definitively proven to be her niece—just suspicion.
Moreover, there was no proof that Rita had ever directly instructed Count Rewin to abuse Hazel. Legally, she wasn’t tied to any crime.
“…This is really frustrating.”
It had been six months since Bell returned to the Merwin Empire. He had scoured the land in search of Rita’s traces, only to come up empty-handed.
Because of this, he hadn’t even reported back to Stefan after returning to the capital. He avoided going near the jewelry shop altogether. He had also missed the messenger pigeon Stefan had sent.
***
I left the ducal estate later than usual. I figured it would be best to resolve some things first before resuming my gemstone studies the next day.
So, I visited the Marquis of Cotta’s estate to gift Lady Dorothy a handkerchief. I also gave handkerchiefs to Leopold and Hazel, then headed to the accessory shop.
That’s when I happened to spot Finn wandering aimlessly along Bayton Street.
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