Try Begging - Chapter 146.1
It was nearing midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Despite the celebration, the town square was silent like a ghost town where Leon parked his car and headed straight to a shabby three-story building on one corner.
The soldiers standing guard on the first floor saluted as he passed, but he only responded with a dismissive nod before ascending to the third floor. Approaching the only door marked ‘No Entry,’ he extracted a key from his coat pocket and unlocked it.
With a creaking groan, the door swung open to reveal the familiar scene of a cramped boarding room.
The room contained only a single bed with a mattress, a wardrobe, a desk, and various miscellaneous items. He entered and shut the door behind him. The room was so small that turning on the desk lamp was enough to light up the whole space.
Standing between the desk and the bed, he felt the room tighten around him. The musty smell of dampness hung in the air, evidence of long periods without ventilation.
“Ha… D*mn it.”
The irony didn’t escape him; a torture chamber would be more comfortable and spacious than this woman’s room.
He had made some guesses about her from the sassy behaviors she exhibited—disliking cold showers, using the master’s bathroom without permission, and being fussy about food—suggesting she had lived at least a middle-class life.
Moreover, she was a member of the royal family that had led the revolution.
It was hard to believe that she had been treated this way even though she was an illegitimate child. Before being discarded, she was even the fiancé of the leader. At the very least, she should have been treated like a princess.
“Ha, what kind of palace is this?”
The idea that she had lived in this moldy boarding house in a remote village was beyond his imagination. It made no sense.
When he first saw this room and read her diaries, he felt a strong dissonance. The life he visualized for her from her belongings and writings seemed far removed from that of a ‘revolutionary princess’ or the ‘future queen of the Blanchard dynasty.’
“The treatment of the fallen royal family is terribly harsh. That foolish girl… to endure all this.”
In this cramped room, he was repeatedly haunted by memories of the cunning woman who had toyed with him several times.
He sighed as he looked around the narrow space again.
The floor, dusty and only marked by his own footprints, was a stark reminder that the woman hadn’t come back for her belongings, despite the town hall, where she was last seen, not being far away. It seemed she had completely abandoned her past without a trace of regret.
He could understand her feelings. Those she trusted had hidden the truth about her biological parents. It must have been shocking, enough to make her feel as though her entire past was a lie.
Yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that her actions that day were more extreme than expected.
Perhaps she had heard more from her brother than he had anticipated.
Leon wanted to bring Jonathan Riddle Junior to the interrogation table right away, but it wasn’t time yet—he was still setting traps and waiting.
Though he knew it was probably pointless, Leon searched the room once more.
He pulled an album from the desk drawer and flipped through it. There were only a few photos, including one taken in front of Abbington Beach station, where she was smiling brightly. The rest were of her in ways he didn’t recognize, which made him feel a rising anger every time he faced Blanchard.
He snapped the album shut and put it back in its place before rifling through other drawers. From the top drawer, he pulled out a candy tin containing five passport-sized photos, which he stared at before sliding them into his wallet.
His hand through the room became more frantic. He was desperate to find something, yet he didn’t know what it was.
Or perhaps he knew, but it just wasn’t here.
He didn’t know what more he could do to find her. He felt he had done everything possible, and the thought that there was nothing left to do was unbearable. So he continued his futile search until he opened an old travel trunk under the bed, and for a moment, time seemed to stop.
…No, maybe it went reverse.
Carefully, as if excavating a relic, Leon picked up a straw hat surrounded by miscellaneous objects.
Why was this still here?
Why had she kept the straw hat he had bought her?
“I really… liked you too.”
Could that be the reason? No, that didn’t make sense.
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