Guidelines for the Perfect Goodbye - Chapter 76
Not able to kill? Not even able to graze?
Those words were like a curse to Dana. Her eyes, lined with blood, glared at Cecilia.
“Don’t speak carelessly.”
She forgot to use formal language. It was futile now that she was exposed.
“That bastard killed my father, took everything my father had…”
Dana remembered the past. The last sight of her father, who couldn’t bear the pain of betrayal and left his young daughter behind. That day’s image remained as a permanent scar that never faded.
Just because one dies by their own hand doesn’t mean there’s no perpetrator. Being a murderer doesn’t always require blood on one’s hands.
“My father died because of your father.”
The words she spat out ignited a fire. Finally, unable to endure any longer, she drew her hand.
“Your father! My father, he…”
The sharp blade approached Cecilia. Cecilia faced the malice directed at her with eyes that did not close.
Soon, red blood flowed from the elbow grazed by the blade.
“…!”
Dana stumbled backward. Her face paled like a corpse, and she held her breath. Her chest that had been thrust forward sank down.
“Why…”
Her brown-gray eyes shrank like dried apricots under her eyelids.
“Why didn’t you dodge?”
Cecilia, shielding her face with her arm, neither screamed nor ran. She was no ordinary person.
“…”
Dana dropped the weapon to the floor with a clang. Though it was Adam’s child who was stabbed, her wrist felt as if its tendons were severed, limp.
The aftermath of the thwarted revenge was bitter.
By then, Cecilia had bent down and picked up the knife with her uninjured hand.
For a moment, her expression soured at the sharpness of the blade, then Cecilia looked at her.
“What’s your real name?”
“What?”
“Dana. That’s a pseudonym.”
“…”
“Right? Miss Hollings.”
The woman who had lived for years under the shell of ‘Dana’ flinched visibly.
“…Diana. Diana Hollings.”
“Diana… sounds like an old-fashioned aristocratic name. Screams of middle-class aspirations, even.”
Cecilia finished her critical comment and approached her.
Holding the blood-stained knife,
Thunk!
She plunged it into the older woman’s shoulder.
“Ah…!”
Diana groaned at the unexpected attack. Cecilia tossed the blood-mingled knife aside and smeared her forearm’s blood on the sharp edge of the storage room’s shelf.
“Say you were injured.”
Her tone was serious.
“Say the injury is too severe for you to continue working, that’s what you’ll tell them.”
“Who are you to…”
“That’s how you will survive. The only way to escape my father’s suspicion is to leave the mansion on your own.”
“…”
Diana, clutching her right shoulder, asked,
“What do you want from me?”
“What do I want?”
Cecilia faced her. Blood flowed from her arm, but her luminous silver-blue eyes showed no pain.
With an indifferent face, she coldly recited,
“Revenge.”
It was like a red coal dropping into a cold bath, instantly hiding at the bottom.
* * *
“Revenge…?”
As Diana muttered in a daze, Cecilia let out a deflating sigh.
“Just kidding.”
“What?”
“I just wanted to help you. I couldn’t just leave you to die.”
A blatant lie. But sometimes, lies appear more plausible than reality.
Exposing her vile true intention to ruin her father, who betrayed her in a previous life, and seize his power, seemed less burdensome than appearing as a naive act of kindness.
“Do you… know? That I intended to harm your father.”
“Yes, I did. So?”
Cecilia’s voice was light-hearted.
“Anyway, if I save you now, both you and my father will get to live. But if you stay here, one of you will end up dead.”
“So you found a way to not kill both me and your father?”
“Yes.”
“…”
Diana looked at Cecilia as if she were a creature from the deep sea.
‘Is she insane?’
Helping someone who tried to kill her father to this extent was unthinkable in Diana’s world. It was something that should not and could not happen.
To her, parents were benefactors who taught her about the world, the bulwark that protected her from birth through adulthood.
“…Prove it.”
Diana spoke with a tone full of suspicion.
“Prove to me that your words are sincere.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I can neither trust nor understand you. Otherwise, I will never be your ally, no matter what.”
“What? Ally, huh?”
Cecilia snorted.
“You seem to be under some misconception. I’m not giving you a choice.”
“Then…”
“I offered you a chance to climb aboard a boat while you’re floundering in the deep end.”
This time, Diana scoffed.
“What if I refuse?”
“Then drown.”
