The Second Suicide (1/7)

A bead of blood rolled off the tip of the sword and dropped. Diana stared at it, hollow-eyed. The coppery reek of it spattered across the floor. It had been a long time since she had last seen blood. She watched its cruel gleam with a distant gaze.

"AAAARGH!"

The wounded man clutched his mangled arm and groaned. A shade deeper, and the blade would have taken the arm off entirely. No—perhaps that arm was already beyond saving. Diana studied the man's injury with a strange detachment. She felt no particular pity for him; he had tried to toy with her. The problem was the man who had saved her.

Giscard Lodbrok.

The man who had ruined her life. The man who had hurled her into the pits of hell and watched the spectacle right up to the last moment of it. Her monster—dazzlingly lovable, once, in her girlhood.

"Why... just why..."

She had thought it would not follow her into her second life. She had fought fate with everything she had. She had believed he would never go to such lengths to hunt her down. And yet, just as the prophecy foretold, the monster had found her again.

Beautiful violet eyes turned toward her. Diana averted her gaze as those eyes traveled over her body—and at that, his brow knitted.

"Wh-what is the meaning of this! Who do you think you are!"

"The price for toying with my wife."

Wife?! A married couple. Diana's lips parted. The man who had found her, who had torn so brutally into her world, said that word as though it cost him nothing! Her refined lips all but spat a curse. She plunged into despair.

"Wife? Your wife? What are you talking about!"

When Diana shouted, the monster replied.

"Exactly what it sounds like. My lady."

She shook her head. But the monster didn't much care. Of course he didn't. He had been exactly like this in her past life, too. It was marriage that had been the shape of past-life Diana's damnation—living tormented at that monster's side. And now she was bound for that hell all over again. Diana shook her head in disbelief. No. It shouldn't come to this. I tried this time. Unlike my first life, I tried so much harder in this one—

To keep from marrying you.

Diana shook her head wildly.

Marriage? I'm to be married again? I married this bastard in my past life and was that miserable, and now—marriage, again?

Diana looked around her. Knights of Lodbrok had her ringed in on every side. Escape was impossible. Which meant... which meant there was only one thing left to do.

She drew the dagger from her bodice.

"I'd rather die than marry you."

Gritting her teeth, she turned the blade toward herself and drove it into her slender throat.

Now the dagger would tear her throat open. But the pain would be brief, and then she could die quickly.

'So this is my second death.'

Diana, in her arrogance, was certain of it.

Diana's first death had been rather more theatrical than this. What had she been hoping for, to make such a spectacle of her end? In later days Diana would sneer at the memory of it. That first death had been more emotional, more desperate, more agonizing.

"My Queen."

A woman sat perched precariously on the railing of a snow-white balcony. Platinum hair the color of moonlight billowed beautifully against the night sky. A fluttering white dress hung from her frail frame, and beneath its hem her small, pale feet hung suspended in empty air. She looked like a fairy about to dissolve into the sky.

"Yes?"

Her silver-grey eyes curved gently. She gave a soft smile. She had never known a liberation like this. And in the very instant she felt it, the monster's face began to freeze. He knew what choice she was making. Was this what he looked like when the rabbit he held by the throat in that crushing grip finally bit his hand?

Either way, she found it delightful. She was defying him now with all the strength she had.

"Come down. Right now."

Her face, usually so composed, glowed with the bright animation of the girl she had once been. It was the very face that had been mocked as a corpse's face.

Diana's face, contemplating her own end, was maddeningly beautiful. Did he covet that beauty—or was he frantic at the thought of losing it? The monster moved toward her, step by step, and with each step a hairline crack split across her expression.

"Don't come any closer. If you do, I'll jump. Right now."

Diana chewed the words out. Behind her there was nothing at all. If she let go and tilted her body, she would plummet to the earth below. The monster stopped dead. She smiled, satisfied, and watched him.

"Her Majesty the Queen—what in the world is the meaning of this!"

The chief chamberlain shouted. It was only natural he was disgusted—a queen of an entire nation, staging suicide spectacles. He had always held her in contempt anyway.

"Shut your mouth."

The monster growled. For a heartbeat, killing intent flared and spread. Killing intent. The very thing that had crushed Diana all her life—the thing that had kept her cowering in fear. But it frightened her no longer. She was about to end it all.

"Your Majesty, the years we've known each other have grown far too long, haven't they? Counting the marriage, it's been well over ten years now."

"..."

"And every one of them has been utterly insufferable."

As Diana spoke calmly, the monster—no, her husband—looked up at her.

"Revenge. Yes, revenge. That threadbare, tiresome old thing."

"..."

"I don't blame you. I bear no grudge over your trampling my country, your crushing my family—God knows I wanted to kill you for it, but it's true that my country and my family insulted and abused you, a prince."

"..."

"Isn't that right? That's the law among nobles and royals. You dragged me here like a dog while I wept over my father's and my brother's severed heads, and even forced marriage on me—and I have nothing to say against it."

The words were barbed, but they were the truth. Her tone was calm against the blood-red cruelty of them. These were words she had never once been able to say—for fear that if he carried any guilt, they might lighten it, or because, trapped in his grip, saying such a thing would only make her a groveling dog baring its belly for favor. Her pride had never allowed it.

"But... I can't go on living for you a moment longer. You son of a bitch."

For the first time, filth left her elegant lips. The vilest words ever spoken by a graceful noblewoman, a refined queen.

"What? What, in God's name—"

He said it as though he genuinely could not understand. Exasperated beyond words, she gave a hollow laugh. She had been a queen in name only. Queen of a kingdom already fallen—and a noblewoman, not even of royal blood, at that.

Revenge. For revenge alone she had been dragged to this place; they had trampled and insulted her noble pride and turned her weeping into a hymn of their own triumph. Having dragged her into this hell and back—and he asks what? What could he possibly not understand?

Diana bit her lip and looked at her husband—no, at the monster who had ruined everything she was—with a face full of loathing. Then her stomach flinched, and her hand drifted to her belly.

She had endured so much. Diana had done her utmost to disappoint those who waited for her to shatter and weep. But she had reached her limit at last.

"Alexa—my beloved little sister—they tell me she is already dead."

"..."

"I thought if she were alive, I might see her again someday."

The monster flinched. It had been a long while since she had seen him thrown off balance. Diana stroked her belly slowly. A quiet satisfaction welled up inside her.

In truth, she had known of Alexa's death long ago. She had already shed tears of blood in silence as she sent her poor sister off. What she spoke of now was an excuse—because she refused, even in dying, to give this man the true reason she was dying.

'I'm sorry, Alexa.'

She apologized to her sister for making even her death into a pretext.

"Diana—let me explain that."

His face had turned urgent. Diana regarded that look with perfect calm, and gave him the gentlest smile she could manage.

"Explain? Why bother, darling? It would hardly suit the likes of us."

"Diana!"

Why is he making that face? Why is he looking at me like that? You watched me be unhappy and enjoyed it, standing right beside me. You let my misery run on and on—you wanted me begging at your feet, didn't you?

"Please. Please come down, Diana."

Her eyes grew hot all over again. The grief she had wanted so much to show him surged up in her throat. Don't be taken in by that face. His pleading voice shook her resolve, just a little.

"Your Majesty. There is nothing left of me now."

No reason left to live, no meaning—all of it had vanished. She had stretched out a life that should have ended. She knew she was a spoil of war. Dragged in with a collar around her neck from the very first day of the marriage—who could fail to know it?

A queen's crown with nothing beneath it. A noblewoman, not even royalty, of a kingdom that no longer existed, scorned forever as a foreigner.

And yet she had always chosen to stay alive. Because dying, she had believed, meant losing. But she admitted her defeat now. The time had come to stop.

"I am carrying His Majesty's child."

One day, not long after the news of her sister's death had hollowed her out, Lady Ruvian had come to call. Caressing her own belly with a confident, triumphant smile, she had said sweetly:

"That empty shell of a queen's seat—I'll set you free of it."

The woman who had killed Diana's child had come to her announcing that she carried one. The woman with hair the lovely pink of cherry blossoms, fine enough to scatter at a breath, and eyes the green of shallow water—she smiled so very beautifully.

"His Majesty... truly took you to his bed?"

"Of course he did. His Majesty is such a vigorous man. He was ever so tender with me."

Diana had known her husband resented her, hated her. And yet why had it felt like the last plank beneath her feet finally giving way? Watching Lady Ruvian's hand rest on her belly, Diana knew with certainty that nothing at all remained to her.

"He whispers it to me all the time. That you were stiff as a corpse, and holding you gave him no pleasure at all."

Diana let the words pour in one ear and out the other. She had to try, at least. She wanted to throw Lady Ruvian out of her chambers—but, sadly, the very attendants assigned to her had no strength to withstand Lady Ruvian's power.

"He says he never had any intention of borrowing your womb to continue the royal line. He regrets ever making you his queen."

Please. Forget it. Let me forget it.

"Why do you suppose I killed your child?"

Diana had lost her baby to the poisoned cup Lady Ruvian handed her so brazenly. And still the woman went about with her chin held high—having murdered the child in Diana's own womb, she paraded her face beneath the sky without a trace of shame.

And her husband! He had lain with that woman and made another child with her! He might as well have made her a slave outright, instead of swearing that revolting vow of marriage before the whole world!

When Diana's eyes changed, Lady Ruvian regarded her with a smiling gaze.

"Oh my—there she is at last, showing her true colors. I'm delighted, Diana!"

Bright, ringing laughter filled the room. Diana had to fight, in that moment, not to lose her mind.

"Diana Brien. Princess of a fallen Farnborough. You didn't dare hope for a peaceful life, not after making His precious Majesty a slave, did you?"

"..."

"Shameless woman. This is how you will live from now on—like vermin. You will crawl beneath the earth for the rest of your days, living a life where you would rather beg for death."

Shedding her mask, Lady Ruvian crushed Diana beneath her words. The woman who had wronged her now meant to take even the queen's seat from her. Everything was to belong to that woman.

Diana's hand found her belly, out of habit. She forced her fury back down. That's right. Of course. That woman isn't even wrong. I'm being punished.

The anger curdled little by little into resignation, and Diana resolved to die. She could not go on receiving nothing but punishment forever. She wanted out—through death, if that was the only door left.

"Your Majesty!"

Lost in these thoughts, Diana came back to herself only then. The voices of the royal knights rose from below the railing. She glanced down; the knights were hurrying forward, spreading out a canvas. If things went on like this, she would not die even if she fell.

The moment her body tensed, someone snatched her hand and yanked her down. Her off-balance body pitched forward—and hard arms caught her before she could strike the balcony's marble. She struggled to break free, and could not. She could not move at all, as though bound fast in a spider's web. A crushing pressure closed around her, tight enough to stop her breath. Giscard was looking down at her, and the corner of his mouth curled, cold.

"That was a charming little performance, Ann."

The fury banked beneath that low, teeth-gritted voice was bottomless. It was the voice of an executioner deciding what punishment to pass on a brazen criminal who had dared to dream of escape—and it was laced, even, with a thrill of excitement.

"Trying to run? I will never allow that. Never."

The monster declared it.

Of course. This monster had no will for conversation. To dominate, to subjugate, to bind—that was the whole of what this monster could do. The thing he had been frantic at the thought of dropping was back in his hands, and he had transformed all over again.

"You will tell me why you pulled this stunt."

Will it be violence this time? Or, as always, will he destroy something precious to me? Or will he ration what little freedom I have in this gaudy prison he at least deigned to decorate? No—no, I know. He will set Lady Ruvian on the throne and make me the most wretched creature alive. In the end he will strip away everything he ever gave me, even if only for show, and make my life a misery.

You ask why I did this? You know perfectly well why. You crushed even the tiny patch of ground I stood on. Resentment toward Lady Ruvian rose in her throat, but Diana swallowed it down hard. That much was her pride.

"No, you monster."

She whispered it through gritted teeth, and jabbed her finger on the poisoned needle hidden inside her ring. The poison was instantaneous. Her stomach lurched, and blood came up in a rush. Her lips pressed hard against his shoulder, and as something warm seeped through his clothes, he finally, finally looked at Diana's face.

"Diana!"

Hatred filled Diana's silver-grey eyes. Tears spilled down her cheeks. He shouldn't have touched this. Not the one last thing I had. I only wanted to say goodbye with myself still whole—but this monster's selfishness had to ruin even my farewell, right to the very end.

Blood kept pouring from her mouth, wave after wave.

"No—no! Diana, no! Somebody, help!"

She lay back in his arms without knowing quite how she had come there, her strength ebbing away.

They had promised the poison was painless, and thank goodness for that. Instead, everything was going numb. Before her tongue could stiffen, Diana seized Giscard by the collar.

"Gis...card..."

Her rigid tongue called his name, begging. It was the first time since the day she lost everything that she had spoken the monster's name. Giscard—the man who was to her both monster and husband—looked at her face.

Why are you wearing that expression? Why do you look like that—as if you'd lost the entire world? Don't you hate me? You despise me, don't you? Is it that you're sore I'm slipping out of your grasp?

Tears gathered in Giscard's eyes. The hero rumored to have slain even the dragon of Farnborough wept, helpless, beneath her death.

"No, no... don't leave me. Please..."

As though to wake the feeling in her numbing hand, he clasped it tight. A desperate, warm hand. The man called her husband—the one who had gotten a child on another woman—was weeping as he held his wife, the daughter of his enemy, like any ordinary husband keening over his dying bride.

It was that which made Diana let go of everything.

"I... regret it."

"What."

"That I ever... saved you..."

Even at that cruelty, Giscard made no answer. She had drawn the words out deliberately, to rake at him—and yet he seemed to care for nothing in the world but whether she lived. The flame of her life was guttering out. Even as she said it, Diana regretted it. What business does the daughter of those shameless perpetrators have saying such things...

"Back then... I shouldn't have saved you."

"You—"

"I never should have unlocked your Slave Restraint Collar."

"You—!"

"I regret it. I regret it so much..."

And yet she was selfish, too—and for the sake of her revenge on a life stitched over with scars, her mouth kept moving. She knew what a tremendous curse the last words of the dead could become. I only want you to know that I was in pain, too. The monster's eyes went wide, and his face began to break apart with grief.

"Gis...card."

"Don't say it—don't! Please..."

"I'm—"

"Diana, please. Please—O God, please."

You claim to hate me so—so why do you wail like something breaking? You hated me. You despised me. You meant to cast me aside. And the man who had thrown away his own god went searching for Him.

Sleep was flooding in. As peace settled over her body, she slipped free of every emotion at last. Hatred, spite—every feeling finally evaporated—and she found herself wanting to lay new words over the ones she had left behind like a curse.

She tried to say she was sorry. She wanted to say: I'm sorry. I was wrong not to save you sooner. But the poison, soaked into every corner of her body, had locked her tongue. The last of her hearing was given over to Giscard's screaming, and it was already too late to take anything back.

'If we are given another life, I hope we never come to hate each other.'

Were the tears on her face her own, or someone else's? She could still feel her face. Ah. So even my death comes to me caught in this man's arms.

Diana closed her eyes. A woman who had cut short her own life would hardly be happy in God's embrace—but even so, she took comfort in the thought that this agonizing bond had, at last, an end.

'Goodbye, Giscard.'

She thought of the bruised, empty-eyed boy who had watched her in their childhood. The boy who, that once, when she reached out her hand, had smiled so brightly. He had never once in his life smiled like that—and yet, as though it were the last time, the boy smiled.

Why the last figure her eyes would ever hold was the monster who had tormented her most—of that, she could make no sense to the very end. She closed her eyes.

"Ann! Ann!"

That was Diana's first death. Hers had been a shit life, too.

I lived as earnestly as I knew how—so where did it all go wrong? At what point could it have been turned back? Until the moment she died, she raked over her life, and raked over it again.

Diana Brien of her first life had been ordinary, if she was anything at all.

Diana Brien, eldest daughter of House Brien of the Kingdom of Farnborough, was the most sought-after bride in the kingdom. The legitimate daughter of a ducal house that stood high in the King's trust. Noble blood, a calm temperament. Her abilities were no different.

Diana Brien had lost her mother to illness at twelve, and from that tender age she had been grown beyond her years. After her mother's death, it was said, she had quietly learned to keep the house.

If one had to name her flaw, it was an appearance unsuited to her age—or, more precisely, her expression. She was pretty, but perhaps because she had lost her mother so young, she wore a dark look at all times. There were those who sneered that a shadow never left her face.

But that, too, changed as she grew. As a woman's grace ripened in her like fruit, a faint smile came to rest on her lips. She lacked the girlish liveliness of her peers, but a maturity and composure beyond her years shone in their place.

As she matured, the sorrowful shadow on her face turned into a haunting pathos that made men's hearts tremble. Unlike a flower in full bloom, a blossom that bows its head, drenched with rain and trembling pitifully, is always the more heartbreaking and the more beautiful.

Born to a house of the highest rank and given a 'proper' education, refinement in just the right measure; a quiet, gentle nature without a single sharp edge; silver-grey eyes that at times seemed indifferent to everything under heaven, and at times shy. And her voice—low and level for a woman—was unbearably sweet when she laughed, like the sound of a cello being played.

So who would Diana Brien marry?

House Brien had no betrothal as yet, but people said it would surely be Ferdinand, first prince of Farnborough. And it was a fair guess. Maximus, King of Farnborough, kept Duke Brien far closer than was usual.

At the very possibility that a noblewoman—rather than foreign royalty—might become queen for the first time, Farnborough's high society watched the Brien princess and wondered aloud who her match would be.

Listening to the praise lavished upon her, wearing as always that quiet smile that gave nothing away, politely declining the suits of the men who pressed their offers, Diana Brien climbed into her carriage for the ride home.

Arriving at the ducal residence, she crossed its halls with an elegant stride—and then, gathering her skirts, went galloping off like a foal.

"Giscard!"

The composed face the world heaped such praise on, the gaze brimming with melancholy—she tossed the whole lot aside, and the face of a lovely young girl came out from underneath.

It was not a deliberate shedding of the social mask she wore; it was simply change, natural as breathing. The girl made for the boy in the back garden.

"Giscard!"

At a glance he looked scrawny, but it was only for want of flesh—his frame was heavy-boned. The boy, arms full of cargo, turned around. He was a youth of looks too impossibly handsome to be any servant. The boy with amethyst-violet eyes looked back at her with a face like stone.

"You've come, my lady."

A curt answer, nothing like her own warmth. There was loathing and contempt in the eyes that fixed on her—but the girl never noticed any of it.

"Did the people of the house strike you again?"

He was the famous 'slave' Duke Brien had brought home. The only time the daughter of the noble House of Brien ever laughed like a girl her age was in the company of this lowborn slave of a boy.

"Who on earth did this to you?"

"..."

Diana reached out and parted Giscard's shirt. He flinched for an instant, but the boy made no move to resist. Across his white skin, brown lines mottled the bruised places like blood drained dry. No new wounds lay over them.

"Thank goodness."

Diana laid her hand on the healing bruises, and the boy's body flinched all over again.

The slave boy her father had brought home when Diana Brien was about twelve—and Diana showed him kindness.

Simple pity, that was all. Her late mother had always said that every soul alive was the same as any other, and deserved compassion. Slaves were no exception.

The ruined boy kept himself alive on Diana's care, ate the meals she brought him, exchanged words with her now and then.

All she could do was slip past the eyes of Mirva—who styled herself head maid and played at mistress of the estate—and rub salve into his wounds.

What crime could this child have committed? If only Father hadn't brought him in as a slave and left him to rot. Her father watched in silence while the boy, lowest creature in the household's order, was tormented.

These were the days of Diana Brien at fifteen, who knew nothing of the world's filth—who did not even know that filth was filth.

Some envied that innocence. Others craved that innocent being so desperately they could hardly bear it.

But the boy's flesh lived in hell, and by swallowing that contradictory world whole, his heart burned there too.

Wherever Diana Brien's white hand touched, heat spread through the boy's body. His loathing violet eyes, sunken dark, watched her pale face as though starving for it.

These were the days of Giscard Lodbrok—seventeen years old, the hidden prince of the Kingdom of Lodbrok.