“Those bastards from before at least had big dicks. Didn’t they?”

The back of Shey’s head, lying face-down and trembling, was lightly stroked. The casual touch quickly vaniShey.

“He seems to be pretty good at sucking a cunt… but you don’t suit my taste.”

Ruslan, who had been fixing his gaze on empty space as if thinking something over, extended a hand, and another waiting servant quickly handed over a fresh dagger. It was the kind of blade he sometimes used when skinning prey himself.

Spinning the dagger lightly, Ruslan gripped the servant’s hair firmly. With the head thrown back, the throat was fully exposed and easy to stab.

“P-please! Master! My father is sick! He’s sick! If I’m not there, who will look after my family, aah! Don’t come! Don’t come! Aaaaaaah!”

“You talk too much.”

The incoherent shouting was cut off all at once as a faint wind sounded through the air. The sound of tough skin being sawn open began. Shey, lying face-down, squeezed his eyes shut.

Next came the gurgling of saliva boiling in the throat. The sound of shoe soles kicking off the floor. The choking, dying breaths. The unnaturally quiet silence. The sound of the blade catching on something hard and scraping with a wet grind.

The sound of a body, tense with effort just a moment ago, dropping limp to the floor. And the smell of blood, no matter how much one tried to forget it, always appearing again somewhere.

“Ah. I used up so much strength after a while, my shoulders are about to fall off.”

Ruslan muttered, checked the headless body, and suddenly let out a snicker. He crouched under the table for a moment, doing something with the corpse, then stood. His broad frame straightened slowly, and the rustle of fabric continued. At the same time, something fell right in front of Shey.

“Look at this.”

It was a sex organ shrunk by extreme terror. Ruslan playfully poked the blood-soaked flesh with the tip of the knife and called Shey over as though showing him some curious object.

“Isn’t it ridiculous that he got hard and ruShey in with something like this? There’s a limit to how vulgar you can be.”

“Ugh…”

Shey bit his lips at the wave of nausea, and Ruslan promptly moved the flesh away.

“No. Don’t eat it. Gross.”

Then Ruslan bent over and tossed a heavy thing into the air once before catching it in a little game. The dead servant’s hair fluttered, and Ruslan soon lost interest and rolled the head carelessly across the floor. Shey kept his eyes shut and did not open them.

“Ah, right. What was that you said earlier? That your father is sick?”

“Yes. He has one sister and one father. His sister suffered an accident two years ago and lost use of one leg, and his father has been bedridden for a long time, I’m told. His birth mother passed away long ago.”

“What a shame. Send a generous compensation payment. You have to pay people for their work.”

“Yes.”

“Even if I don’t like him, he did suck it well when ordered, so give him proper value.”

Ruslan smiled and patted the headless body’s shoulder as if consoling his labor. The grotesque body still knelt there with the knife through its hand.

Ruslan lifted Shey out of the blood puddle as though rescuing only him, then sat him down on the floor. Looking faintly annoyed, he grumbled.

“Shey, can you clean this up? That bastard suddenly started licking my cock.”

Ruslan burst out laughing as though it were absurd, and shoved his cock into Shey’s mouth.

“I really found some strange pervert.”

“Ugh…”

“My cock belongs to Shey. It makes me sick.”

“Ugh, ngh…!”

The cock sliding down his throat carried a strong smell of lewd flesh. Only after Shey forcibly cleaned the cock and swallowed all the semen pouring past his throat did the log-like shaft slowly come out.

“Thank you.”

Ruslan touched the cheek of the Shey who was still dripping saliva and grinned. After pulling up his own pants, he grabbed Shey by the forearm and tried to lift him, but Shey was still so lost he remained slumped there.

After tugging at his arm a few times, Ruslan shrugged and picked Shey up himself. Carrying only Shey, even all day long, was not bothersome.

As Ruslan hummed to himself, something touched his feet. It was a headless neck rolling on the floor. Seeing that head, Ruslan naturally, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, gave it a little kick and puShey it aside. Like someone nudging a minor obstacle out of the path.

Held in Ruslan’s arms as if face-to-face, Shey stared blankly at the scenery over his shoulder.

✿ • ✿ • ✿

When he opened his eyes, it was dawn. The room was dark, so he could not make out the surroundings.

As Shey slowly rolled his eyes, his focus landed on a corner of the bedroom.

Ruslan was sitting there in the moonlight. His profile, chin propped on a hand, was pale and hauntingly luminous. Moonlight settled over his black hair, flashing with mysterious silver. Perhaps noticing that Shey had woken, he suddenly spoke.

“Sometimes I miss my father. He was strict with other people, and even with you too, but with me he was always very kind. Maybe it was guilt over losing his wife and child. Still, I really liked my father. Even now, I can remember the lullabies he sang me on the battlefield. When I was very little, I was afraid and couldn’t sleep well. Every time I cried, he’d hold me and comfort me until I fell asleep.”

His calm voice groped through some distant period of the past. Looking at the face of the young boy in his memory, Shey could easily imagine what Ruslan had been like as a child. Even then, that devilish beauty must have been shockingly adorable.

Listening to the past Ruslan sometimes revealed like this made it easy to guess that his childhood had not been easy. Among the things he had mentioned in passing was the story that his birth mother had separated from him around that time, then later been killed, so they would never meet again.

In the crisis where both his biological father and the current emperor’s household faced ruin, Ruslan was the descendant who had to be protected at any cost, the lamp that lit the dark road, and at the same time, the hope. His father was so tender toward the child who bore such a heavy fate that he had personally taken him to that dangerous battlefield and protected him before his eyes.

And Ruslan had personally arranged his father’s death.

“Even so, what could I do?”

The reason was not all that great. His father had struck him in anger because he had been fussing over the captive instead of doting on his own son.

It had been only once.

Being hit by him had not been pleasant, but that was not the same as being murdered by the son he cheriShey like a treasure. Shey was afraid of Ruslan.

From the time he was a child, after growing up by rolling through battlefields and going through a developmental process where any innocence should have long since died off, he still often acted affectionately toward his father. When the boy who had grown a day at a time during his growth years acted spoiled, he seemed immature, but somehow also cute.

He clearly remembered Ruslan in the camp, running toward his father like an affectionate puppy, linking arms with him, and smiling brightly when the hand rested on his head. With a grown son being so affectionate, his father would scold him to set an example, yet secretly boast to others about how obedient this precious son was.

To Shey’s eyes, Ruslan had, in some form or another, ordinary feelings toward his father and a genuine bond between father and son.

And yet Ruslan killed him. The reason he did not kill him personally, but arranged it instead, was only to avoid suspicion, not because of any minimum degree of acknowledgment.

Ruslan committed acts incomprehensible by human standards without hesitation, yet there had always been his own rules inside his own world. Anyone who violated those rules would not be spared punishment, even if they were family by blood, and the only exception to all those laws was always Shey, and Shey alone.

He truly loved his father, and he truly considered his life no longer necessary. Since both are true, he was chaos itself.

“I didn’t want to do it either. I didn’t want to do it to my father. So I warned him several times. It was Father who ignored me.”

For me, too, there truly was no other choice, Ruslan’s indifferent confession blurred through the dawn light. It was not regret, and even less was it self-reproach.

Ruslan dragged the chair and stood. In his hand was a small dagger. The blade reflected the moonlight with a sinister shine. Shey only watched the approaching man without avoiding him.

At last, standing beside the bed, Ruslan lifted the thick curtain and carelessly tossed the knife onto Shey’s chest.

“I’ll give you a chance.”

“…”

“Didn’t I give my father a chance too? I can’t not give you one as well.”

Ruslan sat on the edge of the bed. While rubbing Shey’s frail, as if about to break, fingers, he personally bent each joint one by one until Shey’s hand could grip the dagger handle.

“You stab.”

“…What?”

“You said you wanted to get out, didn’t you? This is the first and last chance I’m giving you. If I die, you win. If I survive, I win.”

“Are you insane?”

“What? You’ve always wanted to kill me.”

Ruslan looked calm, like someone who had wholly accepted the will of a lone god in holy solitude. With his hand over Shey’s, he smiled. The moonlight illuminated only half of his face exactly, and his golden eyes burned like an undying white flame.

“Come on, stab me. If you stab now… you win.”

His voice sounded somehow gloomy.

Shey looked down at the sword he had been forced to hold. Ruslan, watching quietly, lay himself down over Shey. However long he had sat by the window, the lips that touched Shey’s cheek were cold.

“Kill me. That’s the only way you can get away.”

Shey lowered his gaze, dazed. The tip of the knife touched Ruslan’s abdomen. Even though he was only wearing light indoor clothes, the garment around him felt like armor that could never be pierced.

“Shey, hurry. You only get one chance.”

“Ngh…”

“Kill me.”

He had always wanted to kill him. If the opportunity came, he was sure he would not hesitate for even an instant. That feeling had not changed now.

And yet, strangely enough, just pointing the blade at him made his hand tremble so hard he almost dropped it.

It was not that he had grown attached to Ruslan by now. That was impossible. It was simply that Shey had been someone who protected and guarded others, not someone who took lives and destroyed them.

The divine force bestowed upon him had been a gift meant wholly to save and nurture the pitiful. It existed to uphold the fate that even sinners had to be forgiven in the name of god.