Chapter 88
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Sponsored by Virginie. Thank you ❤️ (2/3)
***
After biting down on the rope until she thought her jaw was going to fall off, she managed to untie the knot.
She rose to her feet, barely free, and realized she would need a sharp tool to untie her wrists behind her back.
Louise glanced at the decorative locked chest.
Maybe there's something useful in there. If it contained pottery, she'd break it to use it. ......................
At first glance, the lock looked decorative and easy to open.
And Louise, a Countess from a commoner's family, had the skills to pick real locks. She learned it from Mr. Smith when she lost her keys.
Of course, she never thought she'd need to do it again.
Louise pulled one of the thin nails that held the bronze ornamentation from the surface of the decorative chest with her front teeth.
It took her a while to get it into the keyhole to unlock the lock, but she was eventually able to open it.
Imagine her delight when she found an ornamental paper knife in a chest full of luxuries. It took another long time, but Louise finally freed her wrists.
She wiped away the tears that were streaming down her face with the back of her hand and moistened her tongue.
The wooden carriage was haphazardly constructed, with only the faintest of light leaking through the few remaining gaps.
But even if she squinted, she could not recognize her surroundings. It was dark all around, and she could only assume it was a forest path before sunrise.
The carriage had been traveling for hours after Louise awoke.
She thought of Ferdinand from the day before, being dragged to an unknown place.
The cruel man who could blow a person’a head off like swatting a fly without batting an eye.
And Louise’s fate would be no different.
She must seize the opportunity and flee.
But there were at least two of them, so she had no chance.
With that thought, she put the gag back in her mouth, loosely enough that she could spit it out at any moment. The ropes around her wrists and ankles were rewound as if they had never been untied, but each knot was only loosely tied.
If the men were to open the carriage, she would lie down and pretend to be asleep.
Then she fixed her eyes on the gaping hole in the carriage.
The last thing Louise needed right now was the kindness of others.
A soldier or policeman would be great, but if not, any number of ordinary people would do.
The kidnappers would have weapons, but there would be three of them at most. It's hard to fit three people in the coachman's seat of a carriage like this.
If they were so difficult to deal with, it would be nice if someone would just call the reinforcements.
Judging from the men's words, they wouldn’t reach their destination until morning, so she would wait for the sun to rise.
The carriage continued to sway.
Never had she been so afraid of the future.
As the dark night continued, Louise thought of the man's golden eyes.
The man her parents had abandoned, with the golden eyes of Heidenberg that her mother had loved so dearly.
The man whom her parents had betrayed, whom they had risked their lives to protect, whom they had refused to give their only daughter the slightest clue about the prince.
She loved him even though she knew she would be abandoned.
She loved him anyway, because she had to be loyal to him instead of her parents, the poor man who was abandoned by her parents because her mother was pregnant with her.
But what if it wasn't so, what if it was all a misunderstanding, what if her parents had kept the secret, the pearl, for him through all the hardships of their past lives.
And that was how he was able to get the pearl back from her.
He should have at least known gratitude. He deserved to know she was sorry.
Blind loyalty and lost love had turned to hot resentment that boiled her heart.
Fierce anger dried wet tears.
She would cry no more for that man. Nor would she suffer an unjust death.
She would live to tell the truth about Ferdinand's crimes, and she would free her parents from their injustice. She would hear from that proud man an apology for slandering her parents.
She would never die like this.
Emerald eyes, the color of a summer forest, flashed in the darkness.
***
{She’s not really waking up, is she? She’s sleeping without a care in the world}
It was dawn, and the sun had not yet risen.
One of the men opened the carriage, chuckled, and slammed it shut again.
Louise quickly rolled over, pretending to be asleep, then sat up and drew in a nervous breath.
Even if the carriage was open, it was too secluded a place to escape.
Even if she ran as fast as she could, she could never outrun men with horses, and she desperately needed someone to help her.
The carriage sped off again.
Louise focused her eyes on the narrow gap.
The pale light peeking through the crack grew clearer and clearer. Morning was finally coming.
Only in the morning light could she recognize the surroundings. Dismally, it was a bushy trail.
Still, she kept waiting.
No matter how narrow, a path must lead somewhere.
Where could a path worse than Ferdinand's death lead, she wondered, was most likely a foreign country. Hiding the truth from Caius would be one of his goals.
And there were only two neighboring countries to the Hyreth Empire. The Duchy of Galicia and the Kingdom of Domus.
However, it was not a long way from Trier to the Galicia border. If he had intended to send her to Galicia, the carriage would have already reached its destination.
But the carriage, which probably left during the day, were still traveling steadily the next morning.
Moreover, the men driving the carriage spoke Domus, so the destination was most likely the kingdom of Domus or the Cedei Empire beyond.
Miriam's words flashed through her mind.
"No. Please don't sell me to a merchant on his way to Cedei."
When she heard those words, she thought she was being blackmailed.
Selling her to the Sedei would be nothing to Ferdinand. He was the kind of man who would shoot his hireling in the head without batting an eye.
Aside from the chill down her spine, her eyes were getting bleary, which was to be expected after a night without food.
Wake up, Louise. You mustn't fall asleep.
She didn’t know how many times she muttered that as she stared out in a cold sweat.
***
"Siegfried Dietz! Siegfried Dietz!"
"Long live the empire's first commoner senator!"
"Waaaaaaaah!"
Louise's eyes widened at the distant shouts. The sudden, unrealistic uproar had all seemed like a dream.
The two men at the front were just as bewildered as she was.
{What? Did the protesters come down here? I thought they had dispersed? }
{Just pass them by quietly, they don't have guns, but they're like a pack of dogs and fierce, and it's even more suspicious if we suddenly turn the carriage around.}
Louise's heart clenched in her chest.
Workers' protesters. Perhaps they were more reliable than the police.
A group of men united by justice, fighting the injustices of the world with their bare fists.
Men of noble convictions who would never turn a blind eye to an unscrupulous human trafficking ring like this.
She squinted through the gap in the carriage, trying to get a sense of the size of the protesters, but she couldn't see anything. The protesters seemed to be approaching from the opposite direction.
The occasional hoofbeats of horses made her heart race. If there were horses on the other side, they might be able to track the men in the front if they tried to flee.
Of course, they'd have to have the goodwill to help......................
"Hmph."
Louise cleared her throat softly.
Soon she would have to let out a loud scream for the first time in her life.
Loud enough to be heard by anyone among the demonstrators over the sound of hooves and shouts, forgetting the aristocratic etiquette she'd been taught by her mother all her life.
"Siegfried Dietz! Siegfried Dietz!"
"Long live the empire's first commoner senator!"
"Waaaaah!"
Her heart pounded harder as the shouts got closer.
If they were passing through the neighborhood of Zagreb right now, there was not the slightest chance that she would see more people than this. This was the first and last chance God had given her.
"Hello, brothers!"
Thankfully, the protesters' voices were loud and clear.
They stopped close to Louise’s carriage, and the men in the coachman's seat seemed to greet them first. Their voices were cheerful, perhaps because of the achievements they had read about in the newspapers.
"Hello!"
One of the coachmen returned the greeting in imperial language.
Louise timed her shot so as not to miss her chance. She only needed one scream to reach the protesters.
Heaven help her, the protesters continued to speak.
"You've seen the papers, right? The new Emperor has promised our captain an audience! Now, if we do well, we'll have a commoner in the imperial faction..."
The chanting drowned out the conversation for a moment.
Now.
Louise jumped to her feet, shaking the carriage with her whole body, and cried out.
"Kaaaak! Help! These men have kidnapped me and are trying to take me to a foreign country!"
***
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Write a comment
LC (Sunday, 15 December 2024 17:43)
I wonder if she will get help from the protestors or if the kidnappers will be able to convince people she is lying