Chapter 13

“…”

Isaac was struck speechless. His breathing stopped too, and he stared with his mouth half open before glancing at the prince.

The greatest beauty in the kingdom.

Perhaps that was true. No, to be honest, it would be difficult to find a face more perfect than this. Not thinking of this person when one said “the greatest beauty” was, in itself, ridiculous and unreasonable.

But.

Even so.

“You ungrateful, spiteful, wicked cat bastards—you wouldn’t even be satisfying steamed alive!”

Isaac, face gone white, shouted the words in one breath and tried to leap up and retreat, but it was too late.

CRACK

The hand he had just tried to shake off gripped Isaac’s forearm even harder and crushed down. A bone-deep sound rang out, and dizzying pain crashed over him. Isaac could not even complete the step he had been trying to take. He stopped where he was.

It did not seem… broken. But it certainly was not fine.

Cold sweat seeped out and dampened the back of Isaac’s neck. The man holding his arm slowly lifted his head and raised his upper body, as if rising from the earth itself.

Their eyes met. Half-lidded, unfocused blue eyes, mad and wavering.

“It can’t be a dream… This pain never lets me sleep, not even for a moment…”

The prince looked at Isaac and whispered as if speaking to himself.

Unexpectedly, his voice was low, as if rising from the floor of hell, but calm. Far more sane than those unstable eyes. That told Isaac that even in the midst of terrible pain, the prince still retained some fragment of reason. It did not make him any less horrifying.

Isaac flinched and curled in on himself without meaning to, and the prince held him even more tightly. Those blurred, unfocused eyes scanned Isaac from head to toe.

“But no ordinary beast could charge into my palace and bring me here. Nor could any ordinary human command such a beast. …In that case, you must be…”

CRACK. CRACKLE.

Isaac’s arm bone screamed. White with pain, he could not even blink as he stared at the prince. Kaiyan rose over him with a serpent’s slowness and leaned close, their noses nearly touching. At that distance, the prince smiled crookedly.

“A witch.”

SNAP.

The unfamiliar, vivid sensation of bone breaking.

A tremendous pain struck at the same time, and Isaac did not even realize he had screamed. Before he could register that fact, the prince pounced over him like a hawk and pinned him to the floor.

As Isaac shook beneath him from the pain of his broken arm, the prince grabbed his hair and lifted his head. With his broken arm crushed beneath the prince’s knee, Isaac gasped in agony and looked up at him through clouded eyes.

Let this be a dream. Please, just let me wake up.

But unfortunately, the pain was too vivid, and Isaac had to recognize that he had been thrown into a reality even more unreal than any dream.

“This… this can’t be happening…”

Isaac barely forced the words out with a stiff tongue, only to fall silent when the prince’s large hand closed around his throat. His airway shut.

“A witch summoned me…? When you ought to have dug a hole in the earth and hidden so deeply that not a single strand of hair showed…?”

The prince laughed as if it were absurd. The hand around Isaac’s throat tightened. Isaac felt death approaching from the distance, whether through suffocation or a snapped neck.

“I’ll strip every piece of flesh from your body and rip out your tendons. I’ll shatter your bones one by one and butcher you. Even then, it won’t be one hundredth of the pain I suffer every new moon.”

The prince whispered through gritted teeth, as if that alone enraged him. Even now, blood-tinged red sweat gathered on his forehead and at his nape, dripping down in heavy drops. He was still experiencing that hideous pain in full.

Isaac’s vision had begun to fade from lack of air, but hot pain digging into the side of his neck dragged him back to reality.

The prince was biting into his nape. As if he truly meant to tear out his flesh piece by piece. The smell of blood rushed up.

I’m going to die.

Fear of death surged over him with terrible clarity.

Each time the prince chewed at his neck, burning pain seeped through him along with the smell of blood. Isaac’s consciousness began to blur, and his body went limp like a deer whose throat had been caught in a beast’s jaws.

Then, as his head tipped back, Isaac saw the three enormous black beasts sitting in the middle of the room, looking down at him.

Right. Why on earth did I forget them?

Now that he thought about it, Isaac had not yet made his third wish. He still had a chance. Hope suddenly welled up in him, and while meeting the beast’s eyes, Isaac barely squeezed out a whisper.

“Help… please, help me…”

「You’re not holding the flint, though.」

The beast’s answer was perfectly carefree.

Isaac stared blankly at it. Only a moment later did he remember that he had dropped the flint on the table when he rushed over to the fallen beauty. Isaac barely moved his eyes. The flint lay on the far end of the table. Only a few steps away, but with the prince’s hand locked around his throat, it was farther than hundreds or thousands of miles.

Isaac whispered again, pleading, “You said… you’d lent it to me… I struck it, too… So please… just help me…”

「Still, you’re not holding it right now.」

The beast replied as brightly as ever and began grooming one front paw as if it had nothing to do with this. Isaac stared at it desperately, but the behavior of those three large-eyed beasts, all equally indifferent, was so astonishing that even his breath caught. Then, ferocious anger followed, and his teeth ground together.

Someone is dying right in front of them, and those bastards brought the disaster here in the first place, but now they’re acting like they don’t know a thing. If I’m going to die, I should at least kill those damned creatures first. God damn it.

Repeating only that thought with bitter regret, Isaac stared at the flint lying obediently on the table through blurred eyes. He had no choice but to surrender and wait for death to come.

Mom… Mom, I won’t be able to keep my promise. But it isn’t my fault, so please don’t scold me. Until now, I did live bravely and happily in my own way…

Isaac let the strength drain from his body. He felt, with terrible clarity, the immense pain of his broken arm and the burning agony of his neck still being chewed open. If he was going to die anyway, he wanted death to hurry and spare him even a little of this agony.

Death, come quickly. Please just come.

But after he had prayed for death while tasting every bit of that pain, Isaac eventually opened his eyes again because no matter how long he endured, his consciousness would not fade.

Why am I not dying when it hurts this much…?

Isaac’s lips moved soundlessly. Then he abruptly realized that the prince was no longer chewing at his neck. Yet the prince had not lifted his mouth from him.

He was… sucking his blood.

GULP. GULP.

When Isaac realized the sound he heard right beside him was the prince sweetly drinking his blood, his eyes flew wide in shock. And then, even without opening them wide, he met the eyes of the beasts, whose eyes were far larger than his.

「Doesn’t it look like his blood is being sucked right now?」

「It does. He’s being drained quite thoroughly.」

「Well, he is half-witch… His blood would have some effect in its own way.」

「Now he’s definitely going to become a glorified painkiller.」

Shut your mouths, you cat bastards!!

He wanted to shout, but even that remained trapped inside his mouth. In his fading mind, the words they had spoken earlier suddenly returned. If a royal drank the fresh blood of a witch, they could be freed from the witches’ curse for one night.

Which meant…

Isaac moved his hazy eyes and glanced at the prince. He could not see the prince’s face buried in his neck, but he could see that no more blood-tinged cold sweat seeped from his nape. He could feel, too, the body that no longer convulsed in pain. The shoulders had relaxed as if much more comfortable now.

Please, just let this be a dream… Damn it, somehow, I don’t think it is.

The sensation of blood being drawn from his neck remained vividly real. Isaac felt as if he might faint, and he desperately hoped he would. The only fortunate thing was that if the prince sucked just a little more blood, he might pass out from blood loss.

Unfortunately—

“A painkiller…”

The prince suddenly stopped drinking. He had been murmuring with his lips still pressed to Isaac’s neck, then lifted his head. Unlike the clouded eyes from moments ago, blurred by pain, clear and vivid blue eyes looked down at Isaac now.

“The blood actually has an effect…?”