"My, you've been sleeping less lately, haven't you."
After sending Count Versi away, I sat in my chair and sipped at the disgustingly sweet fruit wine. I was alone with my thoughts. These days, the time I spent just sitting idly had noticeably increased.
"After all, there's no particular need for me to sleep for long."
"That's not the kind of sleeping I meant, Father. You haven't had a single intimate encounter since that woman died."
"I'm curious when you started having such a clear understanding of my... lower affairs."
I sneered.
"So, now that your head's gotten a bit bigger, you've developed an interest in that area too? Don't bother. There's not a soul out there who'd bother with a brat who still smells of milk like you."
"Don't try to change the subject. It's already been a month. For someone like you, Father, who's always in heat, to go a whole month without is extraordinary."
"It's only a month. Even I have periods where I want to rest."
"I know you very well, Father."
I narrowed my eyes and glared at Daisy.
Daisy's lips were twisted in a smirk. She had such an obnoxious expression, it was clear she'd taken after someone.
"You really don't think he married that woman sincerely, do you?"
"......"
"Your methods are always the same. You remember the dead in your own way, so that no one else notices. If I may dare to say so, it's utterly pathetic. There are limits to wallowing, you know."
I snorted, holding the fruit wine in my mouth.
"So Raura and Ivar have been pestering you about it."
"Incredibly enough, even Demon Lord Gamigin met with me to demand information. To be frank, it's a nuisance. Why don't you just grab some random woman and sleep with her? After all, the only useful parts of your body are your mouth and your lower half. Are you trying to halve your own value?"
It was obvious how this had happened. I'd suddenly stopped being intimate, so everyone was asking the designated maid, Daisy, what was going on. What a bunch of absurd women. There are questions you can ask a fifteen-year-old brat, and questions you can't. Tsk, tsk...
"Don't go meddling in things that don't concern you. Stick your nose into someone else's love life and you'll end up in a sorry state. So how about your own love life—any progress?"
"I have never dated anyone in my entire life."
"But you have that handsome brother of yours, don't you?"
Now it was my turn to mock her. Sure enough, Daisy's expression curdled like something found in a gutter.
"……I am not dating Luke."
"Oh? Is it because you're a lesbian? Heh, now there's a convenient excuse. The way you're desperately pretending to hide the fact that you're in love with your own brother—truly a sight to behold. You touched Ivar's backside, didn't you? So tell me, did that at least make you feel a little better?"
"……."
I taunted her further.
"Oh, suddenly you've gone quiet? Go on, talk big like you usually do. Say 'I know Father very well.' Oh my, still nothing? Well, I suppose when you've gone so far as to cut ties with your own birth parents just as a precaution, you wouldn't have a thing to say even with two mouths. Your romantic devotion is truly something, daughter—this father can't help but be moved."
"I will kill you."
"Now that's the most terrifying threat in the world."
I shrugged my shoulders.
I looked at Daisy, ready to land a final uppercut with my words. Suddenly, it struck me just how much the little girl I'd brought home at age ten had grown. It had been a joke, but Daisy really was almost all grown up.
"Hmm."
I ran my hand through Daisy's hair. Beautiful black hair flowed through my fingers. Her skin, white as fine porcelain, caught my eye as well. Her chest wasn't particularly large, but for an assassin, that was actually a plus.
So that's how it was. It had already been over five years...
Even though I was idly playing with her hair, Daisy didn't seem to mind. Her face, perpetually expressionless by default, carried an intelligence that had been cultivated deliberately since childhood. In terms of languages alone, this girl had mastered ten of them to perfection.
"Do you want to get married?"
"……."
Daisy blinked.
A moment later, Daisy made the kind of face a passerby would make upon spotting someone's vomit on the street.
"Are you out of your mind?"
"If you want to marry some ordinary person and spend the rest of your life that way, I could certainly take it into consideration. You're fifteen now — old enough to make decisions about your own life. So be honest. Do you want to get married?"
She must have picked up on the fact that I was being surprisingly serious.
Daisy fixed me with a gaze that had grown even colder.
"……Rene, Alber, Brunois, Jean, Tobi, Abel, Bruno, Thibault, Lucien. Nine people in total. Do you know who they were?"
"No."
"They were villagers from my town. You killed them."
A venomous light flickered in Daisy's eyes.
"Uncle Rene would wake up earlier than anyone else and inspect the village palisade every dawn. Uncle Alber never had enough food to feed his own family, yet he always helped when he saw families starving to death in winter. Grandfather Brunois, the village chief, always led us wisely. You slaughtered them all like they were nothing — like swatting flies."
"……."
"Don't play the saint now. You are an irredeemable villain whose very core has rotted through. The only reason I sometimes comfort you is purely because it would be inconvenient if you fell apart before I get to kill you with these two hands."
Daisy gave a bitter, twisted smile.
"You killed a single woman and now you're falling to pieces? It's so pathetic I can't even laugh. You've already slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. Every last one of them was someone's father, someone's child, someone's lover. Ha. And now you've suddenly found the energy to mourn death? She was a prostitute anyway — what does it matter?"
I hurled my fruit wine into Daisy's face with a splat.
The crimson liquid dripped from her hair in rivulets. Daisy, however, didn't so much as blink.
"Paimon……wasn't an ordinary person."
"How truly fickle people are. A life is a life — yet you react with such violent emotion only toward those close to you. Demon Lord Sitri put on that innocent face and slaughtered a hundred thousand citizens with no sin just because a single lover he worshipped died……. What a remarkable way to calculate things."
Daisy pulled a handkerchief from inside her clothes and wiped her face.
"I swear to you, I have never once so much as dreamed of marriage. Don't worry. The meaning of my life was already decided that day — the day you burned my village to the ground and violated it. I am going to kill you."
"……."
"It is not merely your life I intend to take, Father. A life alone would not suffice. I shall interrogate every one of your sins, drag them into the light, and bestow upon you an end befitting each."
Daisy wiped her face clean, then smiled faintly.
"As it happens, that is exactly the end you desire, is it not? Personally, I consider myself a dutiful daughter. After all, I wholeheartedly, deeply and earnestly desire the very thing you wish for most of all."
Now that was a model daughter if ever there was one. I felt half-tempted to have a monument to her filial piety erected.
"Sleep in my bed tonight, Father."
"……What?"
I scowled. Daisy wore a perfectly serene expression.
"I am not asking you to share my bed. No matter how mad I may be, I am not so unhinged as to offer my virginity to my own father. Sleep hidden beneath my bed."
I was growing increasingly baffled. First things first — I needed to correct the way she spoke.
"I am your master. And yet you speak to me as though you were mine."
"It is a lighter request than asking to be married off, is it not? The only thing you have given me as my father, beyond torture, is nothing at all — so I would think you could at least see your way to granting a request of this sort."
The sheer brazenness of her demands — that was just like me. I had truly failed in raising her. I let out a sigh.
"……Sleep beneath the bed. What on earth is the meaning of this?"
"You will find out tonight."
And with that, Daisy offered no further explanation.
That night, I ended up sleeping in Daisy's bedroom in the Demon Lord's Castle.
The floor was cold and hard, but it posed no problem for me. After I had punished Laura and imposed the same penalty on myself, the sensation in my back had been almost entirely lost. Thanks to that, I had become the sort who could sleep soundly anywhere on any roadside. A splendid perk.
So there I was, lying beneath the bed — and what was I doing, you ask?
"……Where in the world did this thing disappear to?"
I wasn't doing anything. Absolutely nothing.
Daisy's bedroom was spartan, though the furniture itself was all top-of-the-line. The bed, too, was enormously oversized for such a tiny person as Daisy to claim all to herself — more than enough to completely conceal my entire body and then some.
And yet this mischievous little thing, the very mistress of the Demon Lord's Castle and the shadowy mastermind behind the Empire, had not only stuffed me under the bed but had the audacity to vanish somewhere with a breezy "I'll be right back." I was speechless. When I tried to scold her for it, she threatened me right back, saying, "Do not move from that spot tonight under any circumstances."
So here I lay, beneath the pitch-black darkness of the bed, staring up at the equally pitch-black underside of the mattress. A cigarette or a drink would have helped, but in this damned place, I couldn't do a thing.
"Haah."
Just how absurd a scheme did she have planned to shove me in here like this? Really.
Honestly, I still had no idea what was going on. Maybe she was simply trying to mess with me. No — with Daisy, that was entirely possible…….
About an hour must have passed.
— Creaaak.
The sound of the bedroom door opening reached me. I relaxed, thinking she'd finally come back. Then a voice — one I knew all too well — rang out from the other side of the bed.
"Ohh. So this is Daisy's room. First time I've seen it!"
……Luke?
My mouth snapped shut instinctively. It was a voice I had never expected to hear here.
"As expected, Daisy really has the Old Lord's favor. I'm jealous. I don't even have a private room in the castle."
"You're jealous of Father's favor?"
This time it was Daisy's voice. Hearing Daisy speak casually was a first for me, and quite a novelty. Still, only the sentence endings had gone informal — the tone itself was exactly the same. Flat, and somewhere along the lines of cold.
"Of course! The Old Lord is the greatest person in the whole world. I heard about it too — just a while ago, he passed a law to free every single slave in existence, didn't he?"
"Not the entire world. It only applies to the Habsburg Empire and the Demon Realm."
"Well, it'll be the whole world soon enough! Same difference, right."
Luke was clearly excited.
Come to think of it, Daisy hadn't spoken a word to Luke in about three or four years. After cutting ties with her biological parents, she had practically severed her connection with Luke as well. So from Luke's perspective, this was his first conversation with his younger sister in three years. It was understandable that he'd be happy.
"But why did you call me here in the middle of the night? No, I'm not saying I mind! I'm just wondering what it's about."
"Father talked to me today. He asked if I wasn't neglecting my relationship with my brother too much."
"My godfather…"
Luke seemed slightly moved.
"I see… I'm sorry, Daisy. I was the one who mentioned you to Father before."
"It's fine. I've been using my busy work as an excuse to neglect you, too. But starting tomorrow morning, I'll be swamped with work that'll pile up like a mountain all day long, so I had no choice but to call you now."
Luke seemed to accept this, saying, "Ah, I see." From my vantage point, I could only see Luke's ankles, but I could vividly picture him nodding vigorously.
"Brother. This is to celebrate our reunion."
The Hero siblings sat down on the edge of the bed. Then they started drinking some kind of alcohol together. The two chatted about their village, their training, their work, and their family.
I felt a strange sense of foreboding.
There was no way Daisy had called Luke over just to chat and then say goodbye. What was she aiming for now?