Chapter 109
Chapter 109
The place where the empire's eyes and ears converged.
The corridor of the Imperial Palace Intelligence Department building always carried a cool, tense air.
Thud, thud.
Heavy footsteps echoed at regular intervals across the long marble floor.
Chief Agent Harun walked briskly down the corridor, carrying a thick leather-covered file in one hand.
Bright afternoon sunlight poured through the window, shattering across his neat uniform.
'I wonder if he's pulling his weight properly by now.'
Harun unconsciously kept walking, all the while worrying in his head about his younger brother Cassian's situation.
Of course, if things got any more tangled here, it would be extremely dangerous on a family level as well.
The fellow was already juggling two powder kegs: the princess of Rosenberg and the Church's saintess.
If yet another noble young lady got tangled up in that mess, then from that point on it would clearly stop being youthful indiscretion and turn into an unmanageable romantic fiasco.
But.
'Well, it's not like anything would happen.'
Harun gave a self-assured inward snort.
Emotions between a man and a woman are, by nature, strongly governed by time and place.
It wasn't some sultry evening rendezvous meant to set each other's hearts ablaze.
It was a bright midday meeting, with the river's glittering reflections making the sunlight feel doubly intense.
Under the blinding light of midday, human sensibilities were bound to dry up and wither.
If you made even the slightest awkward face or let your eyes waver, it would be laid bare for all to see.
At least every "woman" Harun had ever encountered in society throughout his life had been like that.
In a bright setting where the atmosphere hadn't ripened yet, there wasn't even space for complicated, subtle feelings to get deeply entangled.
'If things stay on the route I laid out, there'd be no opening for the other party to feel attracted to Cassian.'
Feeling satisfied with his own planning,
Knock, knock.
Harun stopped and knocked on the thick wooden door of the intelligence chief's office.
"Come in."
Corinth's heavy, dry voice came from inside.
Creak.
"I have a separate matter to report."
When Harun opened the door and went inside, Corinth, who had been signing off on approval paperwork behind the desk, stopped his pen.
His brow furrowed.
"Cassian?"
His younger brother's name came straight out with the first word.
It wasn't so much the intelligence chief's keen intuition as the fact that the private headaches dealt with in this dreary office lately all centered on one fellow.
Harun silently nodded and carefully placed the leather folder he had brought onto Corinth's desk.
In fact, just moments earlier, back in his own office, Harun had nearly felt a little flustered while carefully slipping this single-sheet document into the luxury leather cover.
Because its contents were nothing more than Cassian's blind-date itinerary and the target's identity.
He was, after all, the chief agent of the empire's finest intelligence agency.
He had handled weighty matters like rebels' covert movements and foreign military trends without a shred of hesitation.
But faced with this situation—reporting his grown younger brother's daytime meeting schedule to his father in the form of a thoroughly official document—he simply couldn't think rationally.
'Is this really right?'
Even if it was a family matter ordered by their father, it wasn't easy to suppress this bizarre complexity, as if the line between public and private had been completely erased.
Rustle.
However, unlike his son's desperate inner conflict,
Corinth unfolded the document cover, keeping a poker face that didn't so much as flicker.
His eyes scanned quickly down the page.
That solemn, cool expression, with not a single facial muscle twitching, as if he were reading a coded message on which the fate of the nation depended.
'As expected.'
Watching that ironclad face of his father, Harun somehow felt, painfully, how far he still had to go in his own discipline.
He still lacked the depth to compose his expression in the face of such absurd situations.
A moment later.
After finishing the document, Corinth set it down on the desk and spoke.
"You personally advised him to do this?"
"Yes. That's correct."
"Why?"
Corinth's sharp question flew at him.
Harun took a breath and answered.
"If I left him to his own devices, I figured he'd inevitably go through some bizarre stunt and, in the end, even the young lady he was meeting today might end up falling for Cassian."
"Hmm."
Corinth gave a low, thoughtful hum while stroking his chin.
At that sight, Harun almost forgot the heavy propriety demanded in a public setting and blurted out, "And the reason that brat keeps bewitching women is because your blood runs through him."
But with the instincts of the intelligence chief, he just barely bit his tongue and held it in.
"So I moved first on purpose."
Harun began explaining how thoroughly thought out his plan was as a restraint.
"I led Cassian to Grand Asteria on the southern riverside. There, I made sure the fourth-floor VVIP section—the trendiest spot, where strict courtesy and formality are constantly demanded—was fully reserved in advance."
Harun knew better than anyone the characteristics of that suffocating space.
"In ordinary circumstances, it might have made him seem attractive to young ladies, but in a place as atmospheric as Grand Asteria, Cassian's absurd behavior would likely come off less as something that inspired curiosity and more as a flaw to be picked at."
"……."
"It's a place where even worrying about the angle of a fork and knife gets exhausting. It's the worst possible setting for male-female attraction to take root, so it should make for a pretty good restraint."
Corinth, who had been listening silently to Harun's report, slowly nodded.
"Good work."
It was clearly praise.
"However……."
Corinth swallowed the words he had been about to say.
The air in the office grew subtly heavier in an instant.
Harun saw Corinth's lips twitch faintly, then stop.
If this had been the manor's drawing room, where father and son met casually, he would have asked with ease whether there was anything worrying him.
However, this was the Imperial Palace Intelligence Department chief's office.
A place where the rules of command and obedience, and absolute secrecy, took precedence over life itself.
For a subordinate to rashly harbor doubts and pry into something the superior had chosen not to say was strictly forbidden.
Harun suppressed the question on the tip of his tongue and closed his mouth tightly.
"Good. You may go now."
"Yes. Understood."
Harun gave a neat salute, then opened the door and left the office.
Creak. Thunk.
*
Creak. Thunk.
The heavy wooden door closed, and complete isolation returned once more.
Swoosh.
Corinth leaned deeply back into the chair, silently staring at the one-page leather-covered document Harun had left behind.
His eyes had gone dark.
"……This is unsettling."
The dry murmur slipped out from between his tightly closed lips.
Harun's logic was rational and perfect.
The oppressive VVIP section where courtesy and etiquette ruled.
His analysis—that such an environment would be effective at crushing the young stirrings of a man and a woman—was the sort of obvious answer anyone familiar with society's usual patterns would agree with.
But.
'To think I still couldn't fully grasp just how grotesquely abnormal my younger brother is.'
Corinth pressed his fingers firmly against his throbbing temples.
Cassian had never wanted to live by set rules in the first place.
No matter how thoroughly Harun had set the stage, there was no way that guy would obediently sit in that controlled chair and play along with boring etiquette games.
It was as if he had been born to cry out for farming and nothing else.
'He definitely broke free of control again while spouting all manner of sophistry.'
And the absurd behavior that shattered that oppressive environment
was very likely to have transformed, in the young lady's eyes, into an unexpectedly fresh and liberating charm.
Corinth stared intently at the ashtray on his desk.
It was a completely different piece from the crystal ashtray in the manor, but it felt about the same in the hand.
He picked up the ashtray in one hand and squeezed his eyes shut.
The separate 'post-blind-date report' that would be submitted to his office tomorrow morning.
He had a foreboding feeling that the parchment would surely be filled with unsettling, headache-inducing content that would make his blood pressure shoot through the roof.
A chill ran down his spine.
* * *
Ding.
When the doorbell jingled, we left the dessert café side by side.
The spring afternoon sun was still warm, and the river breeze pleasantly cool.
"I'll call for a carriage."
I casually waved at the Rohanna family's coachman waiting by the roadside.
A splendid carriage soon stopped before us.
To do my part—no, to fulfill my final duty as her escort, I personally opened the carriage door for her.
Creak.
"Please get in safely, Lady Rohanna."
As I stepped back and bowed my head, Sophia, who had one foot poised on the carriage step, paused.
Then she slowly turned her head and looked at me.
"……."
Her face, backlit by the sunlight, carried a strangely different atmosphere from when we first met at the restaurant.
At our first meeting, she had been so pale she looked ready to break, a frail lady somehow wearing the shell of a noble.
But now.
"Young Master Farne."
"Yes."
"I really enjoyed today."
She whispered, drawing a very pretty, soft curve at the corners of her lips.