[✓]My Fiancé is in Love with My Little Sister

Chapter 32

If this is the real end – 15

I received with resignation the shock that run along my cheek. My thoughts were in a haze, I couldn’t think of even one decent thing. When I raised my face blank in amazement, father was standing there with a grim expression. I understood I had been slapped, but even so, I wasn’t even feeling surprised. Confronted to this reality, my emotions couldn’t catch up.

*

Still hugging the body of mother who had ceased to breath, I continued to call out without stopping, and the first one to rush in the room was the steward. Then, after having lost his words for a second when confronted to the disaster inside the room, he called other people. His very loud voice made the air inside the dead silent room vibrate. It was the first time I saw the old steward who was always calm and collect, whose thoughts I could never guess, be shaken like this. But I, on the contrary, in such a situation, I was watching everything unfold as if I was an unconcerned stranger. I was strongly pressing down to stop the blood that was still flowing out in the meantime. The palms of my hands were laying on mother’s slender neck, yet the blood didn’t stop. From those hands, little by little her life was spilling out and I couldn’t hold it back. 

There was no way to stop it. Mother’s breathing had already stopped, she surely will never open her eyes again. Then why, was there a need for her to lose even more blood?

God, god, god, why? Why?

When I reflexively looked down because an unpleasant feeling seized me, like something was crawling up to my knees, I noticed I was sitting in the middle of a pond of blood. From the tip of my fingers, from the tips of my toes, from the hem of my skirt, from my sleeves, everything seemed to have slowly been soaked and dyed by mother’s red. Soon, my body started to shaken and clatter, and my arms lost their strength. I had a feeling I said something, but I also felt like I was unable to utter the slightest word. It felt like I had been crying with a very loud voice, almost as if I would split open my throat. But I think that maybe, in reality I might have been completely unable to make a sound. Even though my arms and cloth dyed in red should be the proofs of the event that occurred earlier, everything was fuzzy. My blurred vision wouldn’t return to normal, it became the same sensation as if I was having a nightmare.

However, I remembered that someone had grasped my arms which were clinging to mother’s completely unmoving body.

She has already gone, said a gentle voice to persuade me. It is enough now, it is fine. Unable to understand the meaning of these words I shook my head and my shout echoed repeatedly, “She is not dead yet.”

… … No, that’s not it. The one who said that, might not have been me.

I was forcefully torn off mother, or possibly, I let myself be pulled away, and I tumbled on the carpet. I understood that the person who had seized me had not done that on purpose. I just could not stand up. You could say it wasn’t the time to take a passive stance. When I scolded my shaking legs and stood up, I saw the chamberlain standing beside mother’s lying body. It was just like the figure of a holly knight surrounding the sleeping holy mother. This scene almost looked like he was guarding mother from me.

Then, I was driven out from the room.   

In front of mother’s room, standing with an imposing stance, the steward was fulfilling his duty as the gatekeeper, preventing anyone from entering inside. No, maybe, he might have stand on guard against me who stood dead still in the corridor. I was told, You mustn’t move from that place, but to begin with, I didn’t have the energy and willpower to move and I staggered until my back rested on the wall. Because if I didn’t do that, I would have collapsed immediately. It might have been better if I could directly faint. My legs and hands were continuing to shake, my teeth clashed against each other and clattered, I was tormented my anxiety and loneliness, as if I had been thrown out to a frozen field during a blizzard. Each time I blinked, what I saw on the other side of this darkness that visit me, was the face of mother who had stopped breathing but was intensely staring at me. Then, inside my ears, I heard the sound of her respiration. Huff, like a huge inspiration taken before screaming something. Unconsciously, I strained my ears to listen carefully, wondering if she was about to tell me something. But, that was all. Staying like this, swallowing down everything, she stopped living.