“What…….”
I couldn’t believe he was going to kill me while I was still alive and well.
It was ridiculous. I scrambled for a suitable excuse.
“Noah Esperd killed my health, all my chances of living a normal life, and I almost died without even knowing the name of the man who killed me. Why didn’t you tell me? How stupid were you going to make me feel?”
“How did you know? Did Scott tell you?”
“It doesn’t matter if if I went out on my own to find out, what matters is that you lied to me. I had a right to know. I should have known.”
Noah Esford hunted me down. I ran like a dog, coughing up blood.
If he had any idea what it felt like to be murdered so brutally just a few months ago by the man who had nearly killed me so long ago, he’d know how miserable it was.
“What else are you keeping from me, would you ever thought to tell me?”
Susan kept her mouth shut and watched with an unreadable gaze that made me feel sick to my stomach.
“Since you won’t say anything, I won’t say anything either.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Why, because I wasn’t even born then, or because I don’t know my mother’s face? Ha, yes. You can’t understand me, just as I can’t fully understand what was going on back then. What do you know about a dying body?”
Instead of calming me down, Susan kept her mouth tightly shut so that I would lose my temper. I blamed her endlessly.
We were thirteen years apart and she was the only sister in a family of brothers. So as much as I trusted her, I felt betrayed.
“I don’t want to see you for a while, so don’t visit. And don’t put me under surveillance.”
Late in the evening after Susan left, Scott’s papers arrived.
Julia Esford was a cheap woman from the Chersonian kingdom, bouncing from one man’s concubine to another.
She chose my father as her final destination, and it is unclear exactly who the father of her son was?.
From an early age, Noah Esper looked exactly like his mother, and she strongly insisted that her son was White blood.
My father also claimed that Noah Esper was his son. But that’s just a cheap lie told by a man having an affair to win the affections of a woman.
“Dirty.”
And my mother was unbowed, even though she was extremely weak from the premature birth.
She removed all of my father’s rights and handed them over to my brothers, who had just come of age, and wouldn’t let Julia Esperd take a fork.
After living with my father in his mansion in the capital, she left the city and disappeared after he died in a carriage accident.
And now, after all these years, she has reappeared before me.
* * *
“It’s so dirty.”
In the dump of the capital, where the streets are filled with garbage and filth, it’s a fitting place for an adulteress to end up.
But not a suitable place for me to stay because of her. I closed the carriage window and grumbled to Scott.
“If I come to a place like this one more time, my lungs will rot, they’re too weak to handle the stench.”
I’m still at a loss.
How could I torment this woman and lure her son away?
And what the hell happened to Noah Esperd that he’s not on Scott’s radar?
“You can’t possibly know where Noah Esper is and then lie and say you don’t, can you?”
“I’ve always been truthful with you, and you don’t believe me?”
“Let’s call it reasonable doubt. There’s no truth to Kravitz’s information.”
“We’re a group of people. We’re not gods. How can we know everything?”
Exactly. We are all born human, but some of us grow into beasts, and some of us remain weak human beings.
“Here we are. Be careful, this is a woman’s street, not a man’s, and you shouldn’t be walking alone.”
Escorted by Scott, I step out of the carriage. It’s been a while since I’ve walked hand in hand with Scott.
“It’s like being a kid again.”
“That’s awful. I wouldn’t want to be a child again. I swear, even with Abigail and Isaac stuck with me, I wouldn’t be any worse off than you, no matter how stubborn you were. You cried and screamed and……. Ugh. It’s hard enough raising you, so I decided to declare myself unmarried.”
“Don’t make excuses with me. Why do you blame me for your first love failing?”
“I forgive you because you turned out well.”
Scott patted me on the back.
Inwardly, I thanked him for being so caring about my sister, even though he was only thirteen years older.
I wondered if I would have been raised by my mother if my father hadn’t had an affair, or if I would have been raised by my father even without a mother.
John, the oldest, was only twenty-one when she died.
My brothers and I were also removed from our home. John, Aaron, Susan, Scott. And Andrew. My immature brothers were forced to become adults before they were ready.
And I was robbed forever of the chance to have a proper family.
“Wasn’t it hard, raising me?”
“It was hard, but it was worth it.”
I lifted my head and looked at Scott.
The tallest person in our house, Scott was a full head taller than me, which made him seem like an adult to my young eyes.
As I grew older, I realised that he was a young man who was a long way from being an adult.
“We shared the time, effort, and responsibility of raising you.”
“Yeah. I liked it too. The love I received was five times more.”
Scott smiled vaguely at my answer. We pulled up to 85 Dahlia Street just in time.
“You’re not going in?”
“I don’t want to see her.”
Scott replied, pulling a lollipop from his arm.
“Carly.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever you do, I’ll support you, and whatever you want, I’ll help you, don’t forget.”
The words seemed to ease my mind, telling me that I could take whatever revenge I wanted.
With a little shakiness, I knocked on the door. There was no sign of anyone inside, so I knocked a few more times and heard a muffled voice.
“It’s open, come in.”
I know what that voice sounds like. That’s the kind of voice you get when you have a lung disease.
I pushed open the blackened door and stepped inside.
It was a dark place with no light. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but I could tell how dusty it was by the smell and the stiff air.
“Kolok. Kolok.”
“While coughing, a person who lit a fire inside slowly approached with a candle in hand. Was there still someone using candles in this day and age?”
He was disgustingly shabbily dressed. I was both amused and fed up.
Who deserves to die so miserably, without the pleasure of being destroyed?
“You must be Julia Esperd, right?”
“Yes. Who are you, and are you from City Hall?”
“Don’t you recognise me?”
I took a step toward the candle. The flickering flame revealed a woman’s bony face.
The eyes were identical to Noah Esford’s, and it sent chills down to my spine.
If I hadn’t been medicated, I might have had a seizure.
“Who….”
I pulled the magic stone from my arm and activated it, a bright light shining through the darkened house.
“You’re not from City Hall. Who…… are you?”
“Red hair is a hallmark of the White family, and you don’t seem to remember the man you were sleeping with eighteen years ago.”
“No way…….”
Julia Esford’s nauseating blue eyes fluttered wildly. The wrinkled face above her covered mouth showed a life lived hard.
Her lips twisted. It was unfair that her life had been wasted on a woman who was nothing.
“Scarlett White. He’s grown up, hasn’t he? I thought you’d think of me once every time you saw your son, but I’m a little disappointed that you don’t.”
“Oh my God….”
The woman’s complexion went from pale to blue.
“I don’t know what else his father had, but he must have had a lot of money, and he didn’t give you anything, because you look so funny.”
“…….”
“What are you doing, I’m not just a guest, I’m Scarlet White, and you’re either going to serve me tea from Mamluk or get ready to kneel down, but this place…… is so dirty I can’t even sit down.”
Julia Esford gave a little shudder, and looked as if she might drop the candle at any moment.
I walked over to her and blew out the candle in my hand. I smiled and said.
“Careful, I mustn’t catch fire; my lungs are weak, and I can hardly stand the stench now.”
“Miss White. My goodness…… I can’t believe you’ve grown so big already.”
“Did you think I was going to die? Or did you expect that?”
“No, no. It’s just that I see you’re healthy-”
“Healthy? You think I look healthy? Ha!”
With every breath I took, my fluctuating mood sank to a deeper bottom.
Neither of us seems to realise how upsetting it is that Julia Esperance’s complexion is no different from mine.
“Calm down, now is not the time to be angry.
The priority is to find Noah Esper and kill him.
I forced down my anger and scanned the house. It was cramped and dirty, and that was that.
“I don’t see your son, the self-proclaimed youngest son of House White.”
“He’s out for a while, taking care of some business.”
Blatant lies.
It didn’t make sense that Noah Esperd would vanish in a puff of smoke and not be found by Kravitz’s powers.
“Really? That’s a shame, I wanted to see how much he looked like me. Does Noah have red hair?”
“Oh, no. He’s blonde.”
“What about his eyes? Are they grey like mine? Or blue like yours?”
“He looks just like me, but Noah is definitely Mr White’s son.”
“What in the …… world did Mrs White want so badly that she approached a man with five children? A senatorial seat or a noble title was John’s, the railway was Aaron’s, the bank was Susan’s, the shipping business was Andrew’s, what more did she want? Was it the mines, because I wasn’t around at the time, or the cash, or the property, or, well, anything that falls off the white stuff glitters.”
I was out of breath from the long string of words. My chest was pounding with excitement, and I felt a sense of urgency.
My head was spinning, but the words kept coming.
I couldn’t stop. Each word I spat out was only a tiny fraction of the boiling pain.
“Miss White. It wasn’t as simple as you make it out to be. We really-”
“Bullshit. I found out from Kravitz that you were pregnant before you met my father. What did you want so badly that you became his concubine?”
Julia Esford looked like she was about to die, her jaw clenching and unclenching as she spoke.
“He’s Mr White’s son, ……he’s admitted it, and he’s promised me he’ll be his forever.”
A promise? He liked her enough to recognise him as his son, even though he knew he wasn’t his blood.
The thought of being the daughter of such a man sickened me, and I had the urge to drain every drop of blood from my body.
I was impatient and couldn’t take this any longer.
“Your son, where is he?”
“Noah went out to take care of some business.”
“Where did you hide him, I know he’s missing.”
A darkness fell over the woman’s face.
She knows where her son is, and she knows better than anyone that I’m not looking for him on good terms. And yet she must tell me.
“If you don’t tell me, I will have your son’s identity erased, forever, so that he will never live as a proper person in this world. Then I’ll put out a manhunt, and as soon as I find Noah Esford, I’ll send him off to slavery in the northern coalfields.”
“…….”
“You do realise, don’t you, that the White family reaches deep into politics and society at large. Breaking your hat, that’s the embarrassing part, not the hard part.”
It’s nice to have the power to be cruel.
She grinned, more than happy to send him to the gutter.
After a moment’s hesitation, Julia Esford knelt before me.
“Please find Noah. Please!”
