Maylily - Chapter 61

Maylily opened her eyes on a blanket spread out in a narrow room. Her vision, which had been bleached white by the thin light coming in through a small window high on the worn wall, slowly came back into focus.

A floor where dust rose in a hazy cloud, odds and ends piled haphazardly on old furniture, the heavy, stale air.

The space with barely enough room for Maylily to lie down was closer to a storage room than a bedroom.

“Where… am I?”

Looking around at the unfamiliar sight and trying to remember, Maylily recalled the chemical smell she had inhaled in the dark alley. Her memory cut off right after that.

Had she been dragged straight here like that?

Overcome by a sudden surge of fear, Maylily jumped to her feet and grabbed the doorknob, shaking it. It must have been locked from the outside, because all that came back was a loud clatter of metal, and the door did not open.

“Is anyone out there? Please open this door.”

It was when Maylily swallowed back her tears and pounded on the door with her fist, calling for help.

“So you are finally awake.”

From beyond the door, along with the creak of floorboards, she heard a familiar voice. Maylily’s damp eyelashes fluttered slowly.

“…Father?”

“I put water and bread in there, so fill your stomach with that.”

Only then did Maylily notice the glass of water and the dry bread on a tray by the door, and her face turned ashen. She had long since lost her trust in Victor, but it had never once crossed her mind that he would go so far as to kidnap and imprison his own daughter.

How could someone who called himself a father treat his child this cruelly? Resentment and anger rose up inside her, but there was nothing to gain from reacting emotionally in this situation. Maylily forced herself to speak in as gentle a voice as she could manage.

“Please open this door, Father. If you need money, I’ll give you the wages I’ve been saving up all this time.”

“Do you have any idea how much money I lost because of you? Viscount Dawson promised one hundred thousand grand as your bridal price. One hundred thousand grand!”

“….”

The amount was beyond anything she could imagine, and Maylily was at a loss for words. One hundred thousand grand. She would have had to save every penny of her salary as a chorus member for ten full years without spending a single coin to reach that sum.

“You suddenly got quiet. Well, with your pitiful little salary, it is nowhere near enough.”

Victor gave a cackling laugh, as if he had expected it.

“Because you have been throwing your body around, my plans have gone awry, so you will have to help me, Maylily. My pretty daughter.”

There was an abnormal madness in his voice. A primal fear swept over Maylily.

“I’m going to help you, Father? How… exactly?”

“You’ve already taken a man, so you’ll do well. You’re pretty, so there will be plenty of customers looking for you.”

When the words she had dreaded hearing rang in her ears, her heart dropped and her vision went black. Maylily’s legs gave out, and she sank down right in front of the door.

“This is ridiculous. This is completely insane….”

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to sacrifice yourself than for me to fail to pay back my loan and end up as a mine slave? The sin of how much trouble you have caused me isn’t small, but I will consider this enough to say you have fulfilled your duty as a child.”

Loan sharks. Mine slave.

The words that laid bare the true nature of Victor, who had called himself a wealthy businessman, slammed into Maylily’s mind.

The more she learned, the deeper Victor’s vile depths became, and she couldn’t stop the sense of devastation. The fact that a man like that was her father, that she carried his blood, made nausea rise in her throat.

And in this horrible reality, the only person Maylily could think of, pathetically enough, was that man.

“Father, please… don’t do this. If you let me go, I’ll go to the Count of Everscourt and talk to him. If it’s him, he’ll help.”

“You stupid girl!”

Victor flew into a rage at her tearful plea and kicked the door as if to break it.

“You still don’t understand. That bastard completely toyed with you, Maylily.”

Startled by the violent shock that ran through the door, Maylily jerked back, her eyes blinking blankly.

“What… do you mean….”

Before she had any time to brace herself, the cruel truth dug into her ears.

“He used you to get revenge on me. And without even knowing it, you gave your body to that bastard. Foolish girl.”

The light that had been streaming through the window gradually shortened, then disappeared, and dusk began to fall. From early evening, the loud shouts and songs of people making a racket in the streets seeped all the way into the room.

Sitting with her back against the door, looking up at the bluish sky outside, Maylily’s eyes were as lifeless as those of a bird with its wings broken. Beside her, the water and bread she hadn’t touched all day sat just as they were.

The story she had heard from Victor a few hours earlier still circled in her mind. He had gone into more detail than necessary about his bitter connection with the Count of Everscourt, clawing at Maylily’s heart over and over, as if scolding and punishing her for the foolishness of defying him and choosing the count.

Suddenly, she remembered a conversation she had once had on a bright spring day about the count and his parents.

“My mother was the disgrace of the family.”

What had he thought, all that time, as he looked at the daughter of the man who had made his mother a disgrace?

As Maylily recalled again and again the cold, bluish gray gaze she had brushed off as her imagination that day, her heart turned cold and rigid.

Every moment she had spent with the count had only ever been a part of the revenge he had planned. From the very beginning, he had known about Maylily when he approached her, and he knew things about her that even she didn’t know.

And she had had no idea….

Whenever she stood in front of that man, who always shone brilliantly like the sun in the sky, Maylily had struggled desperately not to let her own insignificance show.

To hide the fact that she had been abandoned before she was even born, she lied and said her father had passed away, and she worked so hard to conceal the way the father who appeared after twenty years treated her like an object.

And in the end, she threw herself straight into the trap the count had set.

“I… like you so much, Hugh.”

How much must he have laughed at and despised the confession she had blurted out, lost in the ecstatic illusion that she had become something to him.

Only now did she fully understand the meaning behind what the man had done that night, when he treated her roughly and then left money behind.

“Hic.”

The tears she had held back for so long finally burst.

Even the small hope she had foolishly kept in one corner of her heart, that maybe, just maybe, she could go back to how things had been with the count, shattered into pieces.

In that moment, Maylily realized that the past she thought they could go back to had never existed in the first place. Her most radiant spring had been a mirage created by the count’s deception.

Behind the gentle eyes and kind voice that had treated Maylily as if she were precious, the count had only been looking through her pitiful state to the very bottom with a cold gaze and making a fool of her.

She no longer wanted to ever see that man’s face or hear his voice again. Never.

Letting out a long breath to steady her breathing, Maylily wiped the tears that covered both cheeks with her sleeve and tidied her disheveled hair. Wasting any more tears on the man who had deceived her would have been pathetic.

More than anything, there was a more pressing problem right in front of her now.

Even though, against her will, a few more tears fell, in the end Maylily stopped crying completely.

In the meantime, stars had risen in the darkening sky and were sparkling. Quietly taking that light into her eyes, Maylily began carefully thinking of a way to get through this crisis.

***

Ten days after his last visit, Maylily’s house looked desolate, as if no one had lived there for a long time.

The mantelpiece above the parlor fireplace was bare, and the vase on the bedroom dressing table was empty.

As Hugh looked around the bedroom, filled with sunlight steeped in the heat of early summer, he spotted luggage neatly arranged in one corner.

It seemed she had packed up all of her belongings, leaving in the wardrobe only a few clothes suited to the current season and the dress Hugh had given her as a present. As if she had made up her mind to leave this place at any moment.

He had clearly told her he intended to continue his patronage.

It wouldn’t do for you to already be thinking of leaving me, Maylily.

Unlike the cold gaze that skimmed over the small, crude painting of the sea set like a lid on top of a small box, the bottom of Hugh’s chest burned as if a fire had been lit there.

That made it clear. He still had unfinished business with Maylily.

Once he accepted that fact, it became easy to decide the issue he had been agonizing over ever since hearing David’s report yesterday.

“Last night, Victor Heywood kidnapped Miss Aile and confined her in his house in Buhin. It seems he intends to sell Miss Aile… to human traffickers.”