Chapter 46: Past — After She Was Gone ⑤

“Haa…”

The goddess of fate, Fortuna, sometimes presents destinies that can only be described as inexplicable.
Half a year ago, the wedding of the crown prince and crown princess was held.
Naturally, Sirius, king of the realm and father of the crown prince, attended together with Queen Sierra and bore witness.

The one who became crown princess was not Faustina, who should have taken that position, but her younger sister Elvira.
This was due to a certain incident Faustina had caused more than a year earlier.
That said, it never became an actual incident.
Before it could, Bernhard noticed Faustina’s scheme and stopped it.

A plan to murder her own younger sister.
That her plot was discovered beforehand was a mistake unthinkable for someone who had otherwise been flawless, except where Bernhard and Elvira were concerned.
When Sirius read the plan, his eyes widened.
Though she had received queenly education and was far from ordinary, it was not something a noble young lady could conceive of.
It was a scenario drawn up by a complete villain.

Because of the brutality and maliciousness of the plan, and at the queen’s pleading, the initial decision was to assign a nominal charge and send her to a convent.
Bernhard himself bore some responsibility for the reason Faustina had developed genuine murderous intent toward Elvira, and that had been taken into account.
However, Faustina was not sent to a convent.
She was expelled from the ducal house.

By the mercy of her father, Citryn.

“Mercy, huh…”

A daughter who had lived as a duke’s daughter with no want for anything could not possibly survive after being suddenly cast into common life.
Calling it mercy did little to mask how cruel a private punishment it truly was.

Bernhard’s reaction upon hearing that Faustina had been expelled from the ducal house was far from normal.
He repeatedly insisted to Sirius that she should be punished according to the law.
In the eyes that shared the same lapis-blue color as his own, Sirius saw endless obsession, and at the same time, an emotion that clung desperately to the other person.

—It was then that he realized it.

“You… made the same mistake.”

Bernhard at that moment closely resembled Sirius himself when he had once regretted his mistake toward his half-brother Siel and realized it could not be undone.

When the engagement was first arranged, Faustina had been a young girl with the selfishness typical of noble daughters and a tendency to treat her sister poorly, her personality somewhat flawed.
It was so bad that Bernhard, who had been taught to treat everyone equally, had disliked her from their very first meeting, or so Sirius had heard.

According to Sierra, who had overseen her queenly education, Faustina had gradually come to recognize her own faults and made efforts to improve herself.
After her queenly education ended, her personality had apparently continued to be corrected as well.
The result, however, had been in vain.

There was something Sirius had deliberately never told Bernhard.
That the Faustina Bernhard and those around him judged, and the Faustina evaluated by a certain group of people, were entirely different.

Bernhard and those close to him said that Faustina constantly tormented Elvira, with whom Bernhard was close, and despite being disliked, clung to him by exploiting her position as his fiancée.

On the other hand, some said that when Bernhard was with his friends, Faustina showed little interest in him, instead staying by her brother Cain’s side with a clear smile.
They also said that although she and Aelia, her rival for the position of crown princess, were generally on bad terms, the two were sometimes seen together in the noble academy’s garden, gazing at flowers.
In those moments, the usual prickly atmosphere was absent, replaced by calm.
That two of the academy’s most beautiful girls were seen together like that was rare, but the fact that multiple students had witnessed it suggested it was true.

—Faustina only ever clung to Bernhard when Elvira was present at his side.

Had Bernhard noticed this?
As Sierra had said in a cold voice, had he been so infatuated with Elvira that he saw nothing else?

The look on Bernhard’s face when Sirius told him that Faustina’s fate had been decided as expulsion from the ducal house…
Sirius gathered the documents spread across his desk and tore them up together.
He threw the scraps into the wastebasket.

“You seem to have taken after me even in the parts you didn’t need to.”

Words spoken to no one.
Realizing what truly mattered only after it was irretrievably lost was the same as his own past self.

By the time he realized the importance of the person he had pushed away, he had already become the one being pushed away by them.

No one knew where Faustina had gone after her expulsion from the ducal house.
Except for a select few.

Sirius knew that Bernhard was still searching for her even now, more than a year later.

It was time to stop it, Sirius decided.
There was no longer any path left but to make him give up and continue walking the road he had chosen until death.

“Summon Bernhard.”

“Yes, sir.”

He ordered the knight on standby to go and call Bernhard.
After the knight left, Sirius unconsciously murmured the name of his half-brother.

“Siel…”

That Citryn had called the expulsion mercy was his way of atoning to his daughter.
The documents Sirius had torn up recorded Faustina’s current whereabouts.

“She really is just like Arva, to the very end.”

The smile of the noble lady who once threw high society into turmoil with her bewitching charm, and the smile Faustina had shown Sirius and Sierra at the end—

—They were identical.