“Dad!”
“Vincent, you found Idel!”
Judging by their sweaty foreheads, the two had rushed over as soon as they heard the news.
Rowena approached, panting heavily; her eyes widened in surprise at the sight of Idel.
“Idel! Could it be that she’s seriously hurt?”
“No. I’ve checked. She’s just sleeping.”
“But she’s covered in dirt, and her forehead is swollen… We should call the doctor, just in case. What if, as Gianna said, she got lost on the mountain path and was chased by a wild animal? She might have stumbled and taken a bad fall or fled from a ruffian.”
“Rowena, calm down.”
Vincent gently shook his head as he held his pale-faced wife.
He then analyzed the situation and conveyed his conclusion.
“It’s highly likely that this is an intentionally staged act. She probably saw Gianna’s note and thought she’d seize the opportunity.”
A staged act?
Idel almost opened her eyes to the duke’s inference, which was even more extreme than the plan she had devised.
Regaining her composure, she perked up her ears.
“If she had truly gotten lost on the shortcut, she would have been wandering around that area or returning to her room exhausted, not hiding in the bushes like this.”
She just returned late.
“And her disheveled appearance is too exaggerated to have just come from walking on the mountain path. This looks like she deliberately made herself dirty.”
That’s because she got into a fistfight with the future villain in the back alley.
“Vincent!”
“She reminds me of myself.”
The Duke of Clementine gritted his teeth for a moment, then reluctantly dredged up his past.
“I, when I was young, rebelled against my father in the same way.”
Listening to the complicated words of Duke Clementine, Idel quietly muttered to herself.
‘…What do I have in common with him? I’m not even his real child.’
But it wasn’t entirely bad.
If they come to this conclusion, it will be more difficult to find an opportunity to move forward, but the fact that she left can be perfectly hidden.
Idel swallowed nervously, slightly narrowing her eyes at the somewhat bitter but appealing idea.
She had been quietly observing the situation, planning to intervene at the right time…
“…!”
At the very moment she opened her eyes, her gaze met Gianna’s.
Gianna, who had been about to make a sound reflexively upon the sudden eye contact, quickly covered her own mouth.
Having recently experienced a similar situation, Gianna’s eyes recognized Idel’s appearance. Especially her expression.
‘It’s the same as back then! That’s definitely a look of resentment.’
Gianna looked back and forth between her parents and Idel, then nodded with a determined expression and began to speak.
‘What is she saying? Is she going to… help me?’
Help her?
…with what?
Idel’s heart, which had somewhat calmed down, started beating anxiously again.
Though he was focused on calming his wife, Vincent Clementine was not someone who would miss the subtle movements of Idel.
He quickly sensed the slight movement behind him and shifted his gaze to the back of Rowena.
Feeling her husband’s gaze leaving her, Rowena also turned around with a short exclamation.
“Oh, Idel!”
“……”
“You’re awake. How are you? Vincent said, you’re not seriously injured; are you alright?”
Still looking half-asleep, Idel pursed her lips tightly and rolled her eyes as if the people around her were unfamiliar.
Rowena, undeterred by Idel’s slightly sharp gaze, leaned in to check if the child had any other injuries.
– Slap!
The moment she tried to touch her body, Idel rejected her.
“Don’t… touch me.”
“Ah…”
Rowena, looking at Edel with a small gasp of surprise as if she hadn’t expected it, even forgot to rub her stinging hand.
The child crouched down a little more, distancing herself, looking like a spiky chestnut.
Just as she was about to apologize for making her uncomfortable, her beloved’s voice cut through the air before she could.
“Idel Clementine.”
The Duke, who had called the child’s name in a cold tone that even Rowena had rarely heard, had a stiff and stern expression.
The child, who had just been sharp-tongued towards Rowena, now tightly shut her mouth and looked up at him.
‘…just by the look in her eyes, I can tell.’
Idel’s blue eyes held a peculiar stubbornness.
Sensing the wariness that seemed ready to pounce at any opening, he ran a hand through his hair.
The Idel he was facing now was not much different from Sylvia’s report, to the point that he couldn’t understand why Gianna and Rowena were protecting the child.
She was self-centered, recklessly wielding her twisted intentions, and behaving in a disorderly manner.
‘If the child is like this, I can’t just leave it as it is.’
Her childishness and grumpiness had to be addressed.
The child was acting wildly without any regard for what was to come, so he must make sure she doesn’t cross a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
Having already concluded his own inference as fact in his mind, Vincent snapped his fingers sharply.
“Idel, stop your whining and stand up properly. Do you even realize what you just did?”
“……”
“Because of your foolish actions, all the servants had to go through the trouble of searching the entire Clementine estate and even the back mountain with the shortcut. Rowena and Gianna couldn’t even have a proper meal all day, worried that something might have happened to you.”
“……”
“And now, in front of these people, what are you doing? I don’t see an ounce of remorse in your eyes.”
“Vincent.”
Rowena quietly called him, but Vincent shook his head firmly.
While Idel had gotten up from her seat as he had instructed, he still couldn’t sense any guilt in her expression.
What’s more, Idel was occasionally glancing at Gianna, as if targeting her, even though Gianna was the most uninvolved in this incident.
Seeing Idel stubbornly pursing her lips and furrowing her brows, the image of Melisa Lopez once again overlapped with her.
Shaking off that sight, Vincent gritted his teeth.
“Idel, apologize to Gianna and Rowena. And to the others who were deceived by your petty, self-imposed drama and wasted time instead of completing their tasks: Then we can consider this matter settled.”
“……”
“Idel, answer me.”
The moment he called Idel in a somewhat coercive tone, an unexpected voice suddenly interrupted the flow of the conversation.
“Don’t say anything to Idel! Because it’s Dad who’s wrong!”
“What?”
“Idel didn’t do anything wrong! I was the one who guided her to the shortcut.”
Startled by the sudden intervention, the expressions of everyone present were filled with bewilderment at Gianna’s bold lie.
Of course, the most bewildered of all was Idel, who received a reassuring smile from Gianna, as if asking her to just trust her.
Idel had been keeping her mouth shut, not knowing how Gianna would act, but she didn’t expect her to drop this bombshell.
Idel barely gathered her wits and denied Gianna’s words a beat slower.
“No, you didn’t…”
“Idel, I understand how you feel, but this isn’t right! Lying is bad!”
Ah, so who’s the one lying here?
Just as the momentarily speechless Idel was about to sigh in frustration, her savior, the Duke of Clementine, posed a sharp question to Gianna.
“That’s right, Gianna. Lying is bad. So don’t try to cover up like last time, and tell the truth. How did you get to where Idel was in the first place?”
“…In the early morning, when Sylvia was still asleep, I snuck out through the secret passage. Dad, you told me about it, remember?”
“The secret passage… Ah, yes, I did tell you about it. Then why didn’t you say from the beginning that you took Idel through the shortcut? You clearly told your mother and me that ‘Idel seemed to be lost because she didn’t know the way,’ and you even cried while saying it.”
“That’s, that’s……”
Watching Gianna hesitate, Idel unconsciously clenched her fists.
Gianna glanced at Idel’s reaction, then took a deep breath and shouted with an even more resolute expression than before.
“I, I hid it because I was afraid I’d get in trouble! I dragged Idel to the shortcut, but I lost my grip on her, and Idel got hurt! I was afraid Mom and Dad would be… disappointed…”
Gianna, not used to lying, mumbled with flushed cheeks.
She had delivered the lie forcefully, but her lack of confidence was evident as the words kept getting tangled.
To Idel, who had been casually lying as if it were her daily habit since recalling her past life, Gianna’s struggle was as clear as day.
Watching Gianna’s restlessness, Idel inwardly sighed in relief.
‘It’s a good thing that she can’t lie well. At least this way, they both should notice that Gianna is trying to cover for me.’
However, what she overlooked was the truth that ‘people see as much as they know’ and the fact that ‘one’s usual behavior determines everything.’
Just as the servants had not believed in Idel’s innocence due to her accumulated misbehavior, people did not even consider the possibility of Gianna lying.
In other words,
“So Idel is behaving in this manner because she was upset after fighting with Gianna in the shortcut? And the reason she didn’t speak up, even when Vincent questioned her sternly, was because she didn’t want Gianna to get in trouble?”
That meant there were people who would believe in her clumsy lie.
