Evelyn wanted to kill. She needed to kill them. Words like authority and justification didn’t register in her brain, and her desire to kill and shred to pieces those who had set her house aflame and killed her family possessed her entire being. Yes, she would kill them now.

“…” But for reasons unbeknownst to her, her body refused to carry out her thoughts. Her gripping strength slowly weakened, and she took two steps back.

Clang! The sword slid from her grip.

“…My lady?” The lord’s expectant eyes twitched. Evelyn shook her head. She didn’t know why she was behaving this way. Strong loathing soared in her chest even at this moment, but there was this voice she had been hearing inside her head since she first met the lord; it told her that she mustn’t do what the lord told her to do and pulled her back. It rang louder than ever, and Evelyn felt a greater sense of danger from the lord than usual and resisted.

“Ah…” Evelyn looked at her family’s cold corpses. “Ah, ah…” Then she looked back at the villagers kneeling on the ground.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” She clutched her head with both hands and screamed. It was a desperate, sorrowful cry. ‘Why? How? For what? I’m sorry, dad and mom. How painful it must have been, my brothers and sisters! The lord? The villagers? Do I kill them? No? Why?’ Thoughts stirred and jumbled together inside her head, and emotions tumbled out of her without a place to go.

Quite a bit of time passed as she struggled with great inner turmoil, and Evelyn stopped moving. She was no longer shrieking, and her incomprehensible whimpering didn’t last long. Eventually, she pressed a hand to her mouth. Having been watching from afar, the lord sensed that something was going wrong, but by the time he realized it, Evelyn’s had already swallowed the item in her grasp.

Ever since her secret was...