“Miss Cherry?”
I scrambled to my feet.
As I turned to leave the room, I suddenly heard another voice behind me.
“Don’t go.”
The voice was hoarse. A hoarse voice that sounded like an iron scraping against a wall.
It was so small and faint that I couldn’t tell if I was hearing it right or if I was hallucinating.
I turned around, startled, and scanned the room carefully.
The room was pitch black and as silent as an abyss. I couldn’t see straight ahead, it was just eerily silent.
I stood still and listened for any other sounds, but whether I was hallucinating or not, I heard nothing.
‘Maybe I’m just tired.’
I shake my head and leave the room. Ethan was coming out of the room opposite the one I had left. I turned to him.
“Did you just tell me not to go, Sir Ethan?”
He raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t know what that meant. That’s how I knew it wasn’t him.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. This is some kind of horror novel? I thought it was cheesy when they were cleaning out the Happy House before the apocalypse, but this is getting pretty weird.
“Do you think anyone’s here?”
Ethan clutched a revolver in his hand that I couldn’t tell when he’d picked up. He scanned his surroundings with a vigilant eye. I turned back to the room.
There was something very strange about the intruder, both the content of his words and the tone of his voice. Maybe I was just tired and hearing things.
” I thought…… No, I must have misheard.”
Ethan lowered the gun he was holding with a grimace. He checked the revolver’s magazine.
“Anyway, if we can’t get a phone connection to the capital, we’ll come back here. I’d suggest we wait in one place until we get reinforcements from the capital, I doubt the whole country is like this.”
I swallowed hard, wanting to tell him that unfortunately, the whole country was like this. Ethan slid the revolver he was carrying into the holster on his thigh.
“I don’t think we should use the gun, the sound of it will only draw more attention to us. This is a last resort weapon, do you have anything else?”
At my question, Ethan pointed to something on his waist. It was a sword sheath.
A real sword. You know, the kind of longsword that knights of the old times used to carry.
“Oh, I thought it was decorative.”
“Decorative, yes. I use it mostly for that.”
This time he pulled out an inch-long black stick from the back pocket of his trousers. He held it in his hand, flicked it lightly, and it extended. It was a police baton. I clapped my hands.
“You carry three weapons?”
“Yeah, well. It’s protocol.”
Ethan replied curtly, then shortened the baton and slung it around his waist.
I slung the holster Nautium had used at 61 over my shoulder and sheathed my axe. Ethan looked at me curiously, then shook his head.
“So Miss Cherry’s powers are congenital?”
“No, I think it’s a side effect of the medication my parents gave me.”
Ethan gave me a funny look. I thought it was weird, too.
But my family is no longer around to ask about it, so there is no other way to explain it.
“An axe on waist, it’s a perfectly match…….”
Ethan’s words trailed off. At the same time, I had a flashback.
The brooch I dropped at 61 Nottingham Street.
Oops. In the rush of the situation, I had completely forgotten. It was an obvious mistake.
I stumbled backwards and Ethan grabbed my arm, his jet-black eyes glittering with the ferocity of a predator on its prey. I was surprised by his sudden change in demeanour.
He looked at me like a stranger, a 180-degree turn from his earlier, if somewhat poorly behaved, greeting.
“Is that you?”
He looks like he wants to eat me alive. My breath caught in my throat and I stuttered like an idiot.
“What, what?”
I asked, stunned that I could be so powerful and still be crushed by this kind of momentum.
“The woman who killed the monster at 61 Nottingham Street. You’re the one who dropped this, right?”
He rummaged in my jacket pocket and pulled out a rubellite brooch. The brooch was engraved with the initials “C. S.”
Damn, I had been caught.
“What do you mean, what is this?”
But I stopped playing dumb.
When I squinted my eyes and made a puzzled face, Ethan smirked.
“Ah. You’re going to pretend you don’t know?”
He grinned in amusement, and the way he looked at me was like watching a child’s play. He still had a tight grip on my arm.
Still closing the distance between us, Ethan leaned down and whispered in my ear.
“Don’t play games. It’s ‘C. S.’, Cherry Sinclair, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll tell you. Tell me why you ran away that day. Tell me what you know about this situation.”
There was no emotion, let alone mercy, in his voice.
“Now that I think about it, you would not save me, if you had no purpose, because I feel like I’ve been played by Miss Cherry.”
I tried to stay calm. My fists curled into balled-up fists, my fingernails digging into my palms, nervous.
There’s a reason Ethan’s nickname is Benton’s Mad Dog. Criminals caught on film by him are savagely bitten to the point of death. We don’t know if they’re being physically torn apart, mentally tormented, or relentlessly crushed by an intangible force, but whatever it is, they’re being torn apart by Ethan.
It would do no good to be suspicious of a man like him in this situation.
‘I’ll punch him in the back of his head and knock him out if I can.’
But there’s a monster out there, and I can’t run away, and I can’t leave him behind.
Anyway, it was clear that the worst thing I could think of had happened. It was a very troubling twist.
“I didn’t want my powers to be known. Have you heard that Cherry Sinclair has powers? No, you haven’t. If I’m so famous, why haven’t you heard? Because I’m hiding it, hiding it.”
I quickly gave up trying to be playful and admitted that the axe woman of 61 Nottingham Street was me. Not expecting me to admit it so quickly, Ethan gave me a ‘see, what I mean’ look.
“Why did you hide it?”
“Don’t you know that the virtue of a society girl is fragility?”
One of Ethan’s eyebrows shot up at my retort, and he sneered at me again.
“Oh, so that Cherry Sinclair was arguing about the virtues of society women?”
“Because I wanted to be an aristocrat.”
I answered, and then tilted my head as peevishly as he had done.
“Why, what’s the difference between that and the heir to Lancaster wanting to be a cop?”
Ethan pauses and glares at me as if he’s been hit.
Then he slowly covers his face with his large hands. His shoulders were shaking. He was laughing again.
What the hell, why are you laughing, you look awfully handsome.
After a few moments of silence, Ethan turned back to me, his face once again expressionless, as if he never laughed.
“Then I’ll change the question. Why were you at 61 Nottingham Street at that hour, and how did you kill the monster there? Are you the one who sent my sister the letter……. is you?”
“Ugh. I’m so offended.”
Ethan didn’t mind. There was even an easy, lazy smile on his face.
“No need to be offended, you saw me at the station, you know how I deal with criminals, it’s what I do.”
He tilted his head slightly and looked down at me arrogantly. There was a faint hint of madness in his intense gaze. If you could imprison a man with a look, I’d be dead already, chained to him.
He was. I knew it. He usually used a harsher tone, but this was probably pretty tame by his standards. At least there was no swearing involved, which was a good thing for some reason.
“You might want to stop dodging and start talking straight. If you had an axe, you knew there was a monster in there.”
I rolled my eyes quickly.
Come to think of it, there was someone who sent Aurora a letter.
Quickly looking for an excuse, I replied as nonchalantly as I could.
“I got a letter, too, saying that a monster was going to appear at 61 Nottingham Street and that people were going to die.”
I realised that was actually a pretty good excuse. In the future, I think I’m going to be a little more coy about the future I know from the source material.
“But who would really send a letter like that to Aurora?
As I pondered this, I heard Ethan’s disbelieving voice.
“You have to tell me who it was, and I’m curious as to why you didn’t call the police when you received such a suspicious letter.”
The sharp tone and half-assed words struck a nerve. I looked Ethan straight in the eye and retorted in the same tone.
“Would you have believed me if I told you that? You know the monster case? Nobody believed you, not even that monster ruckus that was constantly in the papers!”
“Miss Cherry?”
I scrambled to my feet.
As I turned to leave the room, I suddenly heard another voice behind me.
“Don’t go.”
The voice was hoarse. A hoarse voice that sounded like an iron scraping against a wall.
It was so small and faint that I couldn’t tell if I was hearing it right or if I was hallucinating.
I turned around, startled, and scanned the room carefully.
The room was pitch black and as silent as an abyss. I couldn’t see straight ahead, it was just eerily silent.
I stood still and listened for any other sounds, but whether I was hallucinating or not, I heard nothing.
‘Maybe I’m just tired.’
I shake my head and leave the room. Ethan was coming out of the room opposite the one I had left. I turned to him.
“Did you just tell me not to go, Sir Ethan?”
He raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t know what that meant. That’s how I knew it wasn’t him.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. This is some kind of horror novel? I thought it was cheesy when they were cleaning out the Happy House before the apocalypse, but this is getting pretty weird.
“Do you think anyone’s here?”
Ethan clutched a revolver in his hand that I couldn’t tell when he’d picked up. He scanned his surroundings with a vigilant eye. I turned back to the room.
There was something very strange about the intruder, both the content of his words and the tone of his voice. Maybe I was just tired and hearing things.
” I thought…… No, I must have misheard.”
Ethan lowered the gun he was holding with a grimace. He checked the revolver’s magazine.
“Anyway, if we can’t get a phone connection to the capital, we’ll come back here. I’d suggest we wait in one place until we get reinforcements from the capital, I doubt the whole country is like this.”
I swallowed hard, wanting to tell him that unfortunately, the whole country was like this. Ethan slid the revolver he was carrying into the holster on his thigh.
“I don’t think we should use the gun, the sound of it will only draw more attention to us. This is a last resort weapon, do you have anything else?”
At my question, Ethan pointed to something on his waist. It was a sword sheath.
A real sword. You know, the kind of longsword that knights of the old times used to carry.
“Oh, I thought it was decorative.”
“Decorative, yes. I use it mostly for that.”
This time he pulled out an inch-long black stick from the back pocket of his trousers. He held it in his hand, flicked it lightly, and it extended. It was a police baton. I clapped my hands.
“You carry three weapons?”
“Yeah, well. It’s protocol.”
Ethan replied curtly, then shortened the baton and slung it around his waist.
I slung the holster Nautium had used at 61 over my shoulder and sheathed my axe. Ethan looked at me curiously, then shook his head.
“So Miss Cherry’s powers are congenital?”
“No, I think it’s a side effect of the medication my parents gave me.”
Ethan gave me a funny look. I thought it was weird, too.
But my family is no longer around to ask about it, so there is no other way to explain it.
“An axe on waist, it’s a perfectly match…….”
Ethan’s words trailed off. At the same time, I had a flashback.
The brooch I dropped at 61 Nottingham Street.
Oops. In the rush of the situation, I had completely forgotten. It was an obvious mistake.
I stumbled backwards and Ethan grabbed my arm, his jet-black eyes glittering with the ferocity of a predator on its prey. I was surprised by his sudden change in demeanour.
He looked at me like a stranger, a 180-degree turn from his earlier, if somewhat poorly behaved, greeting.
“Is that you?”
He looks like he wants to eat me alive. My breath caught in my throat and I stuttered like an idiot.
“What, what?”
I asked, stunned that I could be so powerful and still be crushed by this kind of momentum.
“The woman who killed the monster at 61 Nottingham Street. You’re the one who dropped this, right?”
He rummaged in my jacket pocket and pulled out a rubellite brooch. The brooch was engraved with the initials “C. S.”
Damn, I had been caught.
“What do you mean, what is this?”
But I stopped playing dumb.
When I squinted my eyes and made a puzzled face, Ethan smirked.
“Ah. You’re going to pretend you don’t know?”
He grinned in amusement, and the way he looked at me was like watching a child’s play. He still had a tight grip on my arm.
Still closing the distance between us, Ethan leaned down and whispered in my ear.
“Don’t play games. It’s ‘C. S.’, Cherry Sinclair, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll tell you. Tell me why you ran away that day. Tell me what you know about this situation.”
There was no emotion, let alone mercy, in his voice.
“Now that I think about it, you would not save me, if you had no purpose, because I feel like I’ve been played by Miss Cherry.”
I tried to stay calm. My fists curled into balled-up fists, my fingernails digging into my palms, nervous.
There’s a reason Ethan’s nickname is Benton’s Mad Dog. Criminals caught on film by him are savagely bitten to the point of death. We don’t know if they’re being physically torn apart, mentally tormented, or relentlessly crushed by an intangible force, but whatever it is, they’re being torn apart by Ethan.
It would do no good to be suspicious of a man like him in this situation.
‘I’ll punch him in the back of his head and knock him out if I can.’
But there’s a monster out there, and I can’t run away, and I can’t leave him behind.
Anyway, it was clear that the worst thing I could think of had happened. It was a very troubling twist.
“I didn’t want my powers to be known. Have you heard that Cherry Sinclair has powers? No, you haven’t. If I’m so famous, why haven’t you heard? Because I’m hiding it, hiding it.”
I quickly gave up trying to be playful and admitted that the axe woman of 61 Nottingham Street was me. Not expecting me to admit it so quickly, Ethan gave me a ‘see, what I mean’ look.
“Why did you hide it?”
“Don’t you know that the virtue of a society girl is fragility?”
One of Ethan’s eyebrows shot up at my retort, and he sneered at me again.
“Oh, so that Cherry Sinclair was arguing about the virtues of society women?”
“Because I wanted to be an aristocrat.”
I answered, and then tilted my head as peevishly as he had done.
“Why, what’s the difference between that and the heir to Lancaster wanting to be a cop?”
Ethan pauses and glares at me as if he’s been hit.
Then he slowly covers his face with his large hands. His shoulders were shaking. He was laughing again.
What the hell, why are you laughing, you look awfully handsome.
After a few moments of silence, Ethan turned back to me, his face once again expressionless, as if he never laughed.
“Then I’ll change the question. Why were you at 61 Nottingham Street at that hour, and how did you kill the monster there? Are you the one who sent my sister the letter……. is you?”
“Ugh. I’m so offended.”
Ethan didn’t mind. There was even an easy, lazy smile on his face.
“No need to be offended, you saw me at the station, you know how I deal with criminals, it’s what I do.”
He tilted his head slightly and looked down at me arrogantly. There was a faint hint of madness in his intense gaze. If you could imprison a man with a look, I’d be dead already, chained to him.
He was. I knew it. He usually used a harsher tone, but this was probably pretty tame by his standards. At least there was no swearing involved, which was a good thing for some reason.
“You might want to stop dodging and start talking straight. If you had an axe, you knew there was a monster in there.”
I rolled my eyes quickly.
Come to think of it, there was someone who sent Aurora a letter.
Quickly looking for an excuse, I replied as nonchalantly as I could.
“I got a letter, too, saying that a monster was going to appear at 61 Nottingham Street and that people were going to die.”
I realised that was actually a pretty good excuse. In the future, I think I’m going to be a little more coy about the future I know from the source material.
“But who would really send a letter like that to Aurora?
As I pondered this, I heard Ethan’s disbelieving voice.
“You have to tell me who it was, and I’m curious as to why you didn’t call the police when you received such a suspicious letter.”
The sharp tone and half-assed words struck a nerve. I looked Ethan straight in the eye and retorted in the same tone.
“Would you have believed me if I told you that? You know the monster case? Nobody believed you, not even that monster ruckus that was constantly in the papers!”
