Try Begging - Chapter 97
He opened the pen case and took out a fountain pen. The moment he pulled the lid off, a familiar voice asked him.
“So, you’re just going to sit on the sidelines?”
As the sullen blue-green eyes began to flicker in front of him, Leon gritted his teeth.
‘Do you think I am God?’
Tak.
As the fountain pen lid was closed, he left again. In the confession that was left behind, the signature line for the head of the domestic intelligence division was still blank.
Grace, who was leaning against the desk drawer, glanced up at the man sitting in the chair.
Leon Winston.
He had finally returned to his usual cruel, cold-hearted, and mean-spirited Leon Winston. How anxious she was over the past week. She didn’t know why she was anxious because that guy was acting differently from usual.
Worry?
It was crazy. No, she just felt physically and mentally uncomfortable.
Winston had been living in the torture chamber all last week. He even slept in the torture chamber. That single bed was too cramped to sleep alone already, so did it even make sense for two people to sleep together? She hated being forced to sleep with her body folded up on top of him.
So, after the man fell asleep, she sneaked out and looked for a place to sleep, and the place that caught her eye was the bathtub.
As she entered the hard, cold bathtub, she wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down.
She felt miserable.
It was when she finally fell asleep after lamenting her situation.
Splash.
Cold water poured down her face. After the water stopped flowing, she opened her eyes and saw Winston standing there holding the faucet.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were here.”
It was a very blatant lie.
Anyway, the past week has been tiring, thanks to him. It made her wonder if ‘A Week with Leon Winston’ was a newly developed torture technique.
When she asked him if he was working, he said that he took a leave. In the year she had worked as a maid here, she had never seen the man take any personal leave, except for summer vacations or important family events, so she wondered if she had heard it wrong.
There were only two things Winston did when he locked himself in the torture chamber.
Alcohol and s*x.
She was suspicious, so she asked what was going on, but when she did, she ended up lying underneath him and panting for three hours. Then, her intuition told her… it was because of the Sinclair case.
‘Does that man have a conscience?’
Grace suddenly remembered the question she asked while drunk.
“Grace Riddle, have you ever imagined a life that wasn’t you?”
It was a moment when she was thinking of the uncharacteristic Leon Winston words that a large hand suddenly came down from the desk. In the palm of his hand was a dark red cherry on top of pure white cream.
What kind of treatment was this?
Grace narrowed her eyes and glared at the cherry.
If he was going to treat her like a dog, it’s better to give her in a dog’s bowl. On days when this man took her for a ‘walk’ in the office, he fed each meal by hand.
When the man held out his hand again, she reluctantly lowered her head. Grace put the cherry in her mouth, but his hand did not move away. Instead, the man stretched out his hand and smeared the cream on his palm onto her lips.
This meant licking the palm clean as well.
Crunch.
As she clenched my teeth, the cherry stuck between her teeth burst open, spilling out sour juice.
Grace opened her eyes and glared at him, licking his palm with her tongue. The tongue drenched in cherry juice left a dark red trail. It looked like a blood stain. It felt as satisfying as biting the man and leaving him covered in blood.
It was all just an illusion, though.
Ptoo.
Leon furrowed his brows.
The woman spit the cherry seed into his hand. He thought she was listening to him obediently though she tried to stand on top of his head again.
“It’s sour. I like sweet cherries.”
Yes, it has always been like this. He wished she was as easy as his father.
“Eat whatever I give you.”
The cherry seed was thrown onto the plate and made a dull sound.
“What a picky dog.”
Even if he said it so bluntly, the cherries on the table tomorrow would definitely be sweet. Grace already knew. In the meanwhile, Leon pretended to be sad as he kept his mouth down while pressing his palm against the cheek of the woman who was acting flirty.
“Uh… dirty…”
The woman with a cherry blush on her face rubbed her cheek with her sleeve. He laughed as his sad mouth turned into an annoyed mouth.
Now that lunchtime had passed, the time to flirt with women was over.
He pushed the empty plate aside and picked up a thick stack of documents. He had gathered all the documents pertaining to the Jeffrey Sinclair case. This also included evidence that this case was fabricated.
Leon posted this morning’s newspaper article above it.
Like it was an operation to destroy the reputation of the Sinclair family, a photo of Jeffrey Sinclair wearing a prison uniform and handcuffs was plastered on the front page of the newspaper. There was no appearance of a refined gentleman left. Anyone could see that he looked like a rough and haggard criminal.
If this went wrong, he could end up like that as well.
As he stared into the tired eyes in the black-and-white photo, he suddenly remembered the eyes that were looking at him earnestly as he tried to stop the lieutenant colonel from taking his son out.
Leon let out a short sigh.
He ended up taking a week of sick leave without signing it. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Collins, the acting head of the domestic intelligence division, signed a false confession.
Leon Winston’s signature was not included in the confession. It was a reckless act that went against the demands of the Grand Duke and the King.
In fact, it was both the best and worst choice that Leon Winston, who judged everything except the woman under his desk based on profit or loss, could have made. While it was the best for his future self in that he would avoid anger, the worst of all was that his present self would be oppressed. The pressure would continue until the monarchy fell.
He laughed self-deprecatingly.
A royalist who wanted the monarchy to fall… what happened to him?
“I don’t understand the captain’s behavior these days.”
Leon suddenly remembered what the lieutenant colonel said on the day he went to work for the first time in a week.
“Like a different person.”
Right. How did things change?
At the thought, he cast his gaze under the desk. The woman, leaning against the wall of the drawers and half-heartedly flipping through the confidential documents he had given her to read, glanced at him with puzzled eyes.
No matter how much he thought about it, this woman was the only reason. Still, he couldn’t kill her and return to his old self.
He didn’t want to go back if killing was the only way.
He still didn’t think he had a conscience. In this regard, he was simply a selfish human being, standing vaguely somewhere between a hero and a villain.
As a man who only cared about his own profits and losses, Leon was busy making calculations in his head, even as he held a dangerous secret that could destroy the kingdom.
While he considered the numerous crossroads and their destinations, his eyes kept turning to the woman. Among the countless paths, the narrow path that was the most irrational, difficult, and uncharacteristic of ‘Leon Winston’ kept flashing before his eyes.
This woman was the only one standing at the end of the difficult road through revenge and all obligations.
That alone was tempting enough.
Was she fortunate or unfortunate? He had no clue before he broke this woman’s brainwashing. Eventually, he placed the documents he had neatly stacked into a large brown envelope. He decided to put it on hold for now and put it in the last drawer of his desk and locked it.
All of a sudden, someone knocked on the door outside. The woman reflexively hid herself deep inside the desk.
“Come in.”
He thought it was the maid who came to clean up the lunch, but it wasn’t.
“Leon.”
What was Mrs. Elizabeth Winston, who hates the annex surrounded by ugly barbed wire, doing here?
“I’m on duty.”
As he took out one of the folders piled up on the desk and opened it, his mother sat down on the chair across from him and laid out her nagging.
“If you’re in the mansion, can’t we at least have a meal together? What are you always so busy with? You pretend to do everything on your own.”
“I do almost everything in the family by myself.”
Hugging the cushion, Grace curled up and held her breath.
‘Mrs. Winston, it’s been a while.’
After failing repeatedly, it no longer seemed like an opportunity to escape, no matter who came to the office. She didn’t have the courage to do so unless the door to the annex opened wide before her eyes, and someone pushed her to run away.
She even almost died the day the inspector came.
“You think I can’t kill you? That’s right, I can’t kill you with a sound mind… though what would happen the moment you are taken away? A person with blinded eyes doesn’t know what they can do. So, be careful.”
It wasn’t just that, the harsh treatment she suffered all night also played a role. It had been quite a while since her limbs were tied to the wall, and for several days, the ropes and chain marks did not go away from her body.
At that moment, the peace maintained under a tacit deal with that man was broken.
Grace had already adapted to this fake peace.
He didn’t even interrogate anymore. The man was satisfied as long as he was allowed to use her body as he wanted and sacrificed her freedom of movement. On days when he was in a really good mood, he even listened to her requests one by one.
However, what if she got caught here and was sent to the headquarters or detention center?
Until she achieved this contradictory peace, she would be subjected to the same things she suffered from Winston from other men.
Perhaps, even after enduring it, peace like now may never come. Before she knew it, she had given up hope that someone would save her when she was being transported. All she had learned in the meantime was resignation.
“Leon, what I’m saying is, show some sincerity in preparing for your engagement ceremony.”
…Engagement?
Did he finally decide to get engaged?
Grace was interrupted from her thoughts when a sound she had never heard came out of Mrs. Winston’s mouth.
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