He Left His Own Sister on a Deserted Island to Die（Nepheia's POV）

"We're leaving," Annette said, her voice low and tight with barely contained fury. She turned to the attendants behind her. "Bring the car around. I'm going to the Fatasleigh estate right now. I want to ask Jonson to his face whether he still has a conscience."

She bent down to take hold of my wheelchair herself, and the look in her eyes was murderous enough to be almost physical.

I knew, with quiet certainty, that if she went to Jonson now, Mina and Jonson would close ranks and talk their way out of it — or worse, turn it around on me, claim I had staged the whole thing to slander Mina. The timing wasn't right.

I caught her hand and drew her close, pressing my lips to her ear, my voice barely above a breath, threaded through with the tremor of tears.

"Aunt. Don't go."

Annette went still. She looked at me, uncomprehending.

I kept my voice low, measuring each word. "If we go now, there's no evidence. We'll only tip them off."

The fury in her eyes didn't vanish — it shifted, deepening into something more complicated: confusion, and a worry that ran far beneath the anger. But she trusted me. She released the handle of the wheelchair and took my hand instead, and the warmth of her grip was steady and certain.

I lifted my head and let my gaze travel slowly across the ballroom — across the faces arranged in varying degrees of sympathy, curiosity, and poorly concealed satisfaction — before it came to rest, with precision, on Koujirius and Mina. Then, a little farther off, on the man who had just pushed his way through the crowd from somewhere near the back, his face a portrait of shock and barely controlled panic.

My dear brother. Jonson.

I looked away. I turned back to Annette, and the tears came harder now, but my voice, when it came, was no longer only broken — it had found a new register, clear and deliberate, the voice of someone recounting things that should never have needed to be recounted.

"I was so cold." The words were quiet, but they carried, threading through every conversation in the room and silencing them one by one. "There was nothing on that island. Just rocks and the sea. My legs were broken from the fall. I couldn't move. I lay there and called Jonson's name, and Koujirius's name, until my throat tasted like blood." I paused. "Neither of them came back."

I raised my wrist — the one mapped with bruises the color of storm clouds — and held it up so the room could see.

"I was so hungry. I dug up grass roots with my hands. My fingernails tore back from the skin." My voice didn't waver. "It hurt. But not as much as the other thing."

Around the room, the women — many of them mothers — had gone quiet in a particular way. Their eyes had moved from my face to Jonson's, and the expression in them was not sympathetic. It was something older and colder than sympathy.

"I thought I was going to die there. I was almost unconscious when the five men found me." A tremor moved through my body, visible and uncontrolled, as though some reflex memory had taken hold of my muscles without asking permission. "They were laughing. They said I was a gift — the one my brother and my fiancé had left behind. They tore at my dress." I stopped. My voice, when it came back, was almost inaudible. "I used the last of what I had to drag myself toward the sea cliff on my broken legs. I would rather have fallen than let them—"

I couldn't finish. I closed my eyes, and the tears ran freely from beneath my lashes.

"Enough." Annette's voice had gone rough in a way I had never heard before. She was looking at her son, and what was in her eyes was no longer rage. It was something colder than rage: the flat, total weight of disappointment. "Jonson. Tell me whether what she's saying is true."

Jonson's face had gone the color of old paper. His mouth worked without producing sound. He looked sideways at Mina, the way a drowning man looks for something to hold onto, but Mina had been frightened well past the point of usefulness. She was shaking her head, over and over, tears streaming down her face. "It wasn't — Jonson didn't mean to — we thought — we thought Nepheia only wanted some time alone—"

"We."

The word came from above — a single syllable, unhurried and perfectly cool, dropping down from the shadows of the upper balcony with the quiet authority of someone who had never needed to raise his voice to be heard. Every conversation that had begun to tentatively resume went silent again at once.

Every face turned upward.

Seriomel had appeared at the balcony railing at some point without anyone noticing. One hand was in his trouser pocket; the other rested on the railing in a posture of complete ease. He looked down at the scene below with the detached, faintly contemptuous expression of a man watching something that confirmed everything he had already suspected.

"When my people found her, she was on a private uninhabited island three hundred nautical miles east of the Alps." His voice was level and factual. His gaze, however, had settled on Jonson with the focused precision of a blade finding its mark. "She was barely alive. High fever. Unconscious." He paused, giving the room a single breath of silence. "While she was delirious, she repeated one name."

He let the pause hold for exactly as long as it needed to.

"Jonson."

The two syllables landed like something dropped from a great height. They hit Jonson visibly — his body absorbed the impact the way a body absorbs a physical blow — and in the same moment, they sealed off every avenue of denial he had left.

Not Koujirius. Not anyone else. Her only brother. The name her unconscious mind had kept returning to, even after everything, was the name of the person who had put her there.

The room did not move.

The color left Jonson's face entirely. He stumbled back one step, as though something structural had given way inside him.

The slap came without warning.

Annette had risen from her seat, and she struck her son across the face with the full force of her arm — the sound of it was sharp and final in the silent room, the kind of sound that, once heard, is not easily forgotten.

"You animal."

She hit him again, backhand, and his head snapped to the side. A thin line of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.

"For a girl you took in off the street — for her — you left your own sister on a deserted island to die." Annette's voice was shaking, but not with grief. It was shaking with the effort of containing something far too large for her body. She pointed at him, and her hand was trembling. "Jonson. Did you leave your conscience in a gutter somewhere? Did everything I ever taught you mean nothing? How did I raise something like you — how did I raise a creature without a shred of—"

She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

No one in the room moved to intervene. No one spoke. The Countess of Fatasleigh's fury had the quality of a natural phenomenon — the kind of thing that is witnessed, not interrupted.

I watched it all. I watched the crimson imprint of Annette's hand bloom across Jonson's cheek, watched the humiliation work its way across his features, and felt something that had been compressed inside me for two lifetimes finally find a way out. There was satisfaction in it — cold and clean and long overdue.

In my first life, they had stood together and called me a liar. My own family had let them. No one had spoken for me. No one had so much as offered me a hand.

And now the person I hated most was being struck, in front of all of them, by the person I loved best.

So why were the tears coming harder.

One fell onto the back of my hand — hot, and entirely real. Not performance. Not calculation. Just the weight of something that had been owed for a very long time, finally arriving far too late.

Jonson pressed his hand to his burning cheek. When he raised his eyes, they were red and full of something vicious. But his first instinct — even now, even in the wreckage of everything — was to step forward and put himself between the room and Mina, who stood trembling behind him, too frightened to speak.