ㅤ Thud.

ㅤ The sound was surprisingly small. A dull sensation of piercing flesh traveled up her wrist as the thin blade of the paring knife sank halfway into the nape of his neck. Blood sprayed across the pillow like a fountain. The dark red liquid spread like a flower over the white linen.

He clutched his throat. Blood leaked steadily through his fingers. His eyes turned toward Guest. Eyes filled with disbelief. Not horror or rage, but pure confusion. Eyes that could not process the fact that his own possession had bitten him.

He opened his mouth. Only a wheezing sound came out. His vocal cords were torn. Even so, he tried to say something. He tried to command. As he always had.

His mouth opened and closed. Bubbles formed in a mouth that only leaked air. The blood flowing from his neck was spreading like a river over the blankets, yet the man still reached out. To grab Guest's wrist. To command, to seize, and to put her back in her place, just as he had for fifteen years.

ㅤ Just before his fingers touched her, his body convulsed violently once. His eyes rolled back and then returned. And then he stopped. His hand lost its strength in mid-air and fell limp. Right in the middle of the bloodstain on the bedsheet, lying perfectly flat.

ㅤ He was dead.

ㅤ Silence returned to the room. It was a different kind of silence than before. Only the ticking of the clock echoed. Two in the morning. There were still four hours before the servants would wake up. It meant the timing was perfect. Whether it was planned or just lucky, only Guest would know.

Beneath her trembling hand, his body temperature was rapidly cooling. It was still warm. A body dead for less than a minute remembered the warmth of life, and that fact was transmitted sickeningly vividly through Guest's fingertips.

Compared to what this man had done to Guest, compared to fifteen years of oppression, this was a truly pathetic and hollow end. Every morning she woke up, she wore the designated clothes, sat at the designated table, and met only the people her husband decided would visit. Even her smiles were calculated based on his mood. Because if he was in a bad mood, she would be locked in her room for the day.

But it was strange. Fear was only thinly layered over a sense of euphoria; it could not weigh it down. Her heart was pounding wildly, but it wasn't just from dread. Something hot surged from deep within her gut. If she had to name it, it was pleasure. A pleasure for something she had committed entirely of her own will, something she had never felt in her life.

The hallway was dark. The sconces on the walls held only the minimum light, and the movements of the servants were strictly controlled. He had made it that way. After eleven at night, the maids retreated to the inner annex, and two guards took turns patrolling the entrance and the hallway. The shift change was at midnight. Exactly a fifteen-minute gap was created.

Guest knew that gap. She had lived in this mansion for fifteen years. She was a bird in a cage who could only move within the range her husband allowed, but a bird memorizes everything inside its cage. Where the guards linger, which door the servants use, where the locks open and close.

ㅤ She had to go down the stairs. From the main building to the back door, she had to pass through the servants' passage. The main gate was guarded. She placed her feet on the stairs, muffling her footsteps. The wood creaked. She held her breath.

When she slipped out the back door, the world was different. It was a landscape she had never seen from inside the mansion. Moonlight poured over the gravel path, and the silhouette of the forest in the distance blurred like spilled ink. The sound of grass insects. Leaves swaying in the wind. Guest knew these things existed in the world, but she had never truly felt them. She had always only seen them through a window.

Gravel pierced her bare feet. It hurt. Only now were her senses beginning to return. Coldness traveled from her toes to her calves, and the dawn chill seeping inside her robe pierced her thin pajamas.

Still, she walked. There was no place to go back to now. In the master bedroom lay a bleeding corpse, and when day broke, the mansion would be turned upside down. A pursuit party would be formed. The wife of a southern noble killed her husband and fled? It was an incident that would set the entire empire ablaze.

ㅤ No sound came from the direction of the mansion. It was natural. It was shift change. The time when the guards would be yawning while on patrol. Four hours until morning. She shouldn't think that was plenty of time. To feel relieved is to become careless.

Her soles were bleeding. She hadn't noticed while stepping on the gravel, but as she entered a dirt path mixed with stones and dry branches, her soles cracked in various places. Pain rushed in belatedly, but she couldn't stop. If she stopped, her thoughts would return. If her thoughts returned, regret would follow.

She didn't stop. Because if she stopped, she would think; if she thought, she would regret; if she regretted, she would hesitate. And if she hesitated, everything she had done to get here would be for nothing.

She walked along the narrow path. The hem of her robe grew damp with dew. That sensation kept reminding her. The feeling of piercing flesh. The resistance of catching on bone. The warm blood soaking her clothes.

The night wind scattered her hair. Surely, since she had killed a person, she should feel guilt, but strangely, the strongest thing she felt was a sense of liberation.

ㅤ The first thing this woman ever did of her own will was kill her husband.