“It must be hard for you to have to work so late at night,” Elizabeth said, smiling elegantly at the two knights standing guard in front of her father’s office.
It was an hour before Paige and Dion were set to break into the Reyn mansion.
“Well, that’s part of the job,” one replied, looking away awkwardly. The other was blatantly ogling Elizabeth, his cheeks flushed red.
Elizabeth was wearing a thin, silk nightdress that accentuated the lines of her body. The rash that had appeared from the Elizabeth Pink poisoning had been easily disguised with a dab of white powder. No man—Leonardo aside—could resist Elizabeth’s beauty when she showed off her soft skin and ample cleavage.
“Say, I have some rare tea from abroad in my room. Would you two like to share it with me?” Elizabeth whispered seductively to one of them, pressing her body up against him. He audibly gulped.
“W-We’re on duty,” the knight stammered.
“My father’s on a business trip and won’t be home tonight. There’s no one here who would blame you for taking the night off,” Elizabeth said.
“Well then, we’re at your service.”
Elizabeth walked with her back to the knights as they followed her, just as she had planned. Her lips curved up into a smile. Now all that remained was for Paige and Dion to come and break into the office as planned.
After taking the two knights into her private rooms, Elizabeth was to give them a sleeping potion mixed with the tea, which Westalia had prepared in advance.
“Please have a seat while I prepare the tea,” Elizabeth said.
“We don’t want to be any trouble...”
“Oh, there’s no need to worry about that,” Elizabeth replied, pouring the tea for them after they sat down. Almost immediately after drinking the tea, the pair lost consciousness and stopped talking.
Wow, it worked like a charm. Just what kind of person is Lady Westalia really?! Elizabeth wondered. Westalia had said she’d concocted the sleeping potion herself. It was a well-known fact that she’d been thoroughly educated to be a queen in Lhumzia; the Lhumzian royal family must’ve made her learn incredibly advanced pharmacology as well.
Elizabeth had also studied various things in preparation to become empress, but clearly not as extensively as Westalia had. Her education and depth of knowledge must have been due not only to her hard work but also to her naturally inquisitive mind.
The two knights were sleeping so soundly that Elizabeth poked one of them in the cheek with the wet teaspoon to make sure they weren’t actually dead. She could hear him breathing faintly in his sleep, but he didn’t move or change expression at all, still as a corpse.
In any case, I’ll leave the rest up to you, Paige and Dion, Elizabeth thought. She had been at Tiberio’s beck and call for a long time, but she would no longer follow his orders and remain complacent. If her father was profiting from a poisoned dye that he knew would harm people, she wouldn’t let him get away with it. She’d suffered enough because of him. That was why she’d decided to cooperate with Westalia to expose the dark side of Elizabeth Pink. The world would be better off without the house of Reyn. Elizabeth had no idea what her life would be like after that, but she knew there could be no worse situation for her than the one she was in now under her father’s control.
If they can locate the Elizabeth Pink dye factory, it would be a clue to saving a lot of people. Father, you’re hiding the address because you’re guilty of something, aren’t you? Elizabeth thought. The first thing Westalia had asked her to do was find out the address of the factory. The people who processed the petals of agisakuragi during the dyeing process were the most likely to get poisoned. Westalia needed to investigate the reality of the situation. Tiberio might have already been aware of the poisoning symptoms among the workers but was hiding the entire factory to keep that truth from the public. The other factories the family owned were also being kept secret, probably for camouflage.
In the end, however, Elizabeth had been unable to locate the address. She’d tried to meet with the important people involved in the management of the Rias Corporation, but they were all Tiberio’s dogs and wouldn’t take notice of his daughter.
As far as the empress selection, Elizabeth’s will was irrelevant, and with the budget she had been provided with, she had taken an early lead solely through Tiberio’s doing. Elizabeth no longer even knew whose benefit the empress selection was even for. But she was sure that her father was unaware that she was working behind the scenes to expose his vile tricks.
If one has done wrong, they should be punished and atone for it. That applies to you and me both, father. The crime of promoting a toxic dye was not something she could get away with just because she hadn’t known anything about it; she would carry that weight with her for the rest of her life. Elizabeth was an ordinary girl with nothing special to commend her, yet she had been revered as the best candidate for empress in the whole country. All of this was merely a facade created by her father, who had been deceiving the people for a long time.
Even prior to the empress selection process, Elizabeth had done many underhanded things in order to live up to her father’s expectations and avoid his wrath. For example, she’d had someone else do the embroidery to be presented to the current empress, and she’d had someone else write the speech for the founding ceremony and then presented it as her own words. In all aspects, she and her father had worked together to keep up appearances through a series of dishonest acts.
Never has there truly existed an upstanding version of Elizabeth Reyn, she thought. Elizabeth stared blankly at the pair of sleeping knights as she thought about her father and how she’d now betrayed him. However, her daze was broken when a maid knocked on the door. She put a large blanket over the men and got up from the sofa so that the maid wouldn’t know that she’d brought two men into her room.