Chapter 113

He stared down at Erabelle as he kept moving against her.

...She’s so beautiful it’s driving me out of my mind.

After a while, Dezeb leaned over her again and kissed her as she struggled to catch her breath. Even knowing how thoroughly she had him under her thumb, he felt a sweetness that seemed to melt through him. He kept kissing her.

“This is noise that built up because of you. You have to take responsibility for it.”

He said it after losing count of how many times they had gone on. Erabelle endured him for a while longer after that excuse, then abruptly fell asleep, as though her consciousness had cut out.

“...”

Dezeb brushed the tears pooled beside her closed eyes with his fingertips.

“...Dezeb.”

The eyes that had sought him all night were shut.

“Dezeb... I want to go home.”

Closed as if she had simply fallen asleep... and would never...

“Please, let me go home...”

“...I want to go home. To my home...”

As if they would never open again.

Her closed lips, her breath that had stopped, those two eyes shut beneath the blood, never again...

He hurriedly checked her breathing, then froze with his palm held beneath her nose.

A faint breath tickled his hand. Only then did he twist toward the edge of the bed and vomit.

“What the...”

His voice trembled thinly. Dezeb lifted his head and glared at the woman asleep from exhaustion. Tears fell from his eyes one after another. He watched them drop past his chin.

“...Come back to me now.”

He hastily gathered her into both arms and buried his face against the warmth of her neck, listening to her faint heartbeat.

He desperately pressed his face against the very thing he had reduced to an imitation of life, the obsession that had once made him laugh at himself.

“My lady.”

The woman, asleep as though she had fainted, did not wake.

“Erabelle. My lady.”

“...Mm.”

After several attempts, she made a small sound. It lasted only a moment before she fell asleep again.

Only then did Dezeb feel the tension leave his body.

“...This is driving me mad.”

He closed his eyes and sagged against her. She groaned beneath his weight but seemed too deeply asleep to open her eyes.

She finally woke at 7:10, when a small clock began making a terrible racket.

“Ugh...”

Clutching her lower back and groaning, Erabelle groped for the alarm.

7:10.

She barely managed to turn it off, then tried to stagger out of bed. A man’s arm curled loosely around her waist.

“...Where are you going?”

He really must have lost his memory.

“To work...”

“Work? Ah.”

He gave a soft, incredulous laugh.

“This is where you work.”

“It’s where you work too, Division Commander.”

“Do I look human to you?”

That sounded like a line from a horror movie. The hairs on her arms rose.

“...I have to go to work.”

Ignoring her, he kept an arm around her waist and rested his head on her soft thigh. His ink-dark hair spread gently across it.

Her vision blurred a little. Erabelle bit down hard on her lip.

“You’re leaving me here alone?”

“You have to go to work too, Division Commander...”

“Go on. I’ll see you when you get back.”

Erabelle blinked. Something about that sounded odd.

“...What?”

“I said, go on.”

“Then, um, what will you...”

“I’ll wait.”

Wait? Here?

He turned his head and gave her a faint smile. His red-rimmed eyes softened as he looked up at her, as though coaxing her closer.

“Why, don’t you want me here? Now that you’ve had me, are you throwing me away?”

“I’ll be back early.”

“Good.” ℴℴ𝘮

He smiled again, almost absently.

Only then did he release her. Erabelle hurried out of bed, then started at the sight of vomit on the floor beside it.

...Did I drink last night after all?

It was possible.

Shake someone who had been drinking and that was what happened. At least she hadn’t thrown up on the bed. Keeping an eye on Dezeb, she quickly cleaned it up and got ready for work. Apart from taking out a cigarette and putting it between his lips, he lay facedown without moving the entire time.

“Well, then...”

“Mm. See you when you get back.”

Ready at last, Erabelle gave him an awkward farewell from the doorway. He remained sprawled across her narrow, standard-issue bed, lazily waving a hand.

“...”

After Erabelle left for work, Dezeb stayed facedown on the damp bed for a long while, cigarette in his mouth. Then bitter fluid rose in his throat again, and he spat it out.

“...Hah.”

He held the back of his neck with the hand that held the cigarette. When he had finished retching, he put the cigarette back between lips that still tasted bitter.

“What the hell...”

Those closed eyes. The breath that had stopped. The body growing pale and cold, lying limp...

He gagged again.

“Urgh—”

He hastily focused on her heartbeat. Its healthy, steady rhythm... And at the same time, he realized that making her into something that only imitated life had been for his own sake, too. He wanted to drag her back, lie beside her, and feel her skin against his.

“...I can’t keep doing that.”

He’d look like a possessive husband. He ought to act normally. He drew the acrid smoke deep into his lungs, then slowly exhaled and looked around the single-room quarters.

He thought the detention camp on Defit had been better than this.

Still, a cramped room had advantages of its own. Grinning, Dezeb got up.

He cleaned up the traces of vomit as Erabelle had, tidying the room while he was at it. There wasn’t much in the place. He was smoking and making do with a few towels when the Dogs contacted him.

“What? The Marquis?”

The Dogs were waiting beyond the planet.

—Yes. He has lodged a protest over the Marchioness’s signum being closed.

“Why? I left the planetary deity alive.”

The report continued: the planetary deity was refusing to grant renewed authorization.

—There was an attempt to contact Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion directly.

Dezeb straightened, gave a hollow laugh, and bit down on the cigarette filter. Then he turned and pulled space toward himself, fixing on the Marquis.

The Marquis’s office, where he stood pale-faced, and the small quarters Dezeb occupied came together.

Like a picture drawn in two perfectly matched halves.

“Y-you...!”

Dezeb stared into the startled Marquis’s eyes. Black snakes slowly wound across his eyeballs.

Blood began streaming from the Marquis’s eyes, nose, and ears.

“Marquis.”

Dezeb stubbed out his cigarette on the papers the Marquis had been reading. A faint smell of burning paper rose.

“You’re an intelligent man. Why do you keep making mistakes?”

He looked away from the Marquis, who had sunk to the floor, and examined the documents. Erabelle’s name was written on them.

“I-I only meant to tell you...”

The Marquis’s attempt at an excuse died on his lips. He was seeing the vision Dezeb showed him. His appearance changed by the second, as though he were aging in an instant.

“I... we...”

We’re your parents.

Dezeb reacted to the muttered words without much interest.

“I thought we agreed long ago that it meant nothing to either of us.”

Dezeb possessed every record concerning himself. There was only one record he did not have.

It had nothing to do with the marquisate. More to the point, the Marquis and Marchioness had made their attitude toward him perfectly clear.

“...”

The Marquis’s pupils lost focus.

It could hardly be a vision he wanted to see. Dezeb stopped before it drove him into mental instability.

“Just pay the compensation you owe. Unless you want to see me a second time.”

This won’t do. He tossed the documents onto the desk and turned toward the conflict zone where Erabelle was.

At that same hour, Erabelle was hard at work.

The platform was complete, so it wasn’t her own work. She was diligently doing other people’s instead.

She had looked ready to pick up a broom and sweep the corridors if they refused to give her anything, so the Dogs had reluctantly handed work over.

“...Um.”

While she was treating someone else’s work as her own, Dezeb came to the Adjutant’s Office.

It was exactly six o’clock.

The Dogs sharing the office froze. Dezeb stood in the doorway, smiling in an open-collared shirt and slacks. In place of his long drop earrings, a broad black tattoo bearing a similar pattern marked his ear.

He no longer looked like an ancient god, but his presence still made her draw her neck in.

“Uh...”

The frozen Dogs backed away. Then they dropped flat, pressing their heads to the floor. He had said he wasn’t the Division Commander, and they certainly weren’t treating him like one.

After glancing at them, Erabelle started to bend her knees too, but Dezeb came over and spoke lightly.

“You finish at six, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Let’s go buy something to eat. Your refrigerator’s empty.”

Dezeb looked remarkably cheerful.

“Yes, all right.”

Erabelle answered on reflex and left the base with him in an ordinary SUV that he drove. When had he even gotten that...?

Then again, if word got out that the commander of the 41st Division had arrived, there would be chaos. The base would probably look like an anthill struck by a natural disaster. For now, no one seemed to know, and everything remained peaceful.