CHAPTER 203: WELL-FED HYPOCRISY AND HUNGRY GOODNESS (7)

When did it all start? When had her once-kind father changed so drastically? Was it when he forcefully sent her sister away? Or was it when Isabella returned as an Awakener?

Maybe, he had always hidden his twisted nature behind a mask of tenderness just like she pretended to be the Saintess of Rome to hide that she was the Leech Queen.

Isabella forced her lips to move even though they refused to part.

“Why?” She strained her voice to ask. “Why... did you do it?”

After Isabella had seized real power in the family, much of her father’s authority had been stripped away. However, even before Isabella returned, the non-Awakener Paolo had been nothing more than a figurehead getting crushed by the branch families.

If anything, he had gained even more power thanks to Isabella ruthlessly crushing the branch families. Why did he oppose her?

“Was I that much of a thorn in your side? So much that you brought in one of the Seven Stars just to kill me?”

Paolo remained silent.

“Say something, Father. At the very least, you were always good at talking, weren’t you?”

Isabella looked at him with an exhausted expression.

Paolo deeply dropped his head and silently clenched his fists.

“Why... you ask?” His clenched fists trembled slightly. “You really don’t know?”

“Yes. No matter how much I think about it, I just can’t understand,” Isabella said.

“Because of you... because of you alone! You have no idea how miserable my life became!” Paolo shouted in rage. “My authority as head of the family? It was better before you came! I’d rather live without hope as a puppet of the branch families than this!”

At least back then, his heart had been at peace. He could console himself and tell himself that it was because he wasn’t an Awakener. He hadn’t been chosen by the Celestials simply because of bad luck. Even if his role as the family head was only in name, at least it hadn’t been humiliating.

“But after you came back... everything fell apart,” he said.

Isabella was too capable. Even beyond being an Awakener, she had an innate talent for commanding people.

She hadn’t used her hidden powers as an Awakener of Leech to trample the branch families. Instead, she used the lands and businesses that the Colgrande Family possessed as bait to stir up conflict among the branch families. She had basically thrown a sheep into a pack of wolves.

Blinded by greed, the families pounced on the bait, and Isabella fanned the flames of division until their infighting reached a peak. During that chaos, she quietly approached the most talented Awakeners and formed a team of bodyguards that worked directly under the Colgrande Family.

Then, everything fell into place like clockwork. After watching the branch families exhaust themselves from fighting each other, she quietly absorbed their businesses one by one. When she had grown large enough, she forced them to submit to her power.

Everything she had done could’ve been done by Paolo Colgrande too.

“You! You’ll never understand how miserable I felt.”

Isabella had easily succeeded at what he had given up on indifferently. The humiliation he felt stabbed into his soul.

“Do you remember what you made them do after you brought down the branch families?”

“I told them to apologize to you, Father.”

“That’s right! You made them apologize to me!”

How could he forget that nightmare? The way they forcefully bowed their heads before him! The way they looked at him. Those contemptuous, mocking gazes full of ridicule for a man who had done nothing but ride on the coattails of his talented daughter.

“If... if I had been as capable as you... If I had your talent...”

Only then...

“Cassia... that poor child... I could have saved her...”

Paolo collapsed to the floor, curled in on himself, and cried out.

If only Isabella had been the family head instead of him when pressure came from every direction to exile Cassia in the name of tradition.

“I didn’t want to know... I didn’t want to learn the truth...”

He would’ve preferred to remain ignorant.

If only he had never known that the seemingly unattainable, happy future he imagined could actually be obtained. He wouldn’t have felt so wretched and utterly broken.

“I... despise you.” Paolo sobbed as he glared at Isabella. “I despise you more than anyone else for making me see the truth.”

Isabella looked down at the weeping Paolo with her lips tightly sealed.

It hurt. Her heart felt like it was being stabbed with a sharp blade or being seared by burning iron. It hurt so deeply and terribly.

“Dad.” What she used to call him in her childhood slipped through her lips.

She clutched the blood-soaked hem of her dress and bit her lip.

“I-I...”

She hadn’t meant for this to happen. She never thought her actions would leave him feeling so miserable.

I just wanted to go back to those days.

She only wanted to return to her faded memories of when her entire family laughed together.

Isabella clutched her chest and staggered back.

“Ah... ugh.”

How had it come to this? How had everything fallen apart?

Her breathing grew ragged. “Haa, haa!”

The thirst for blood that had vanished after feeding on Kwon Oh-Jin surged up again.

Isabella bit her lip harshly and raised her arm. Thick, dark blood welled up at her fingertips.

“Go ahead.” Paolo looked up at her with a futile expression. “End this miserable life of mine with your own hands.”

He had nothing left for him anymore.

Isabella trembled with her blood-stained hand in the air. Killing Paolo would be as easy as crushing an ant on the road. All she had to do was bring her hand down, and Paolo would die.

“Haa, haa, haa.”

For some reason, her hand wouldn’t move.

Just then, a photo drifted through the wind and landed at her feet.

This is...

She had secretly kept this family photo from her childhood hidden in her drawer. Had it fallen out when the mansion collapsed?

As if god had intervened, Isabella quietly gasped at this cruel coincidence. “Ah.”

I have to kill him.

She crushed the photo beneath her heel and stepped toward Paolo. Breathing heavily, she raised her hand high.

If I don’t kill him now...

She didn’t know how, but Paolo had found out that she was the Leech Queen.

Mr. Oh-Jin will be in danger too.

If word got out that Kwon Oh-Jin had sided with an executor of the Black Star Society, it would obviously cause a massive problem since the world praised the Thunder Wolf as a hero.

She couldn’t let Paolo leave this place alive. The hope she cherished in her heart had now become nothing more than an impossible dream.

Tears welled up in Isabella’s eyes. “Why, why, why, why?”

The shattered fragments of her broken hope rolled down her cheeks as tears.

“My little princess.”

“Stop!” Isabella shouted and glared at Paolo. “Don’t... call me that.”

Sobbing, she concentrated mana into her raised arm. The dark red blood at her fingertips morphed into a massive scythe and hovered above Paolo’s head like a giant guillotine.

Paolo looked up at her and smiled faintly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a worthless father.”

“Please shut up. Saying that won’t save you.”

Paolo had forcibly stimulated the Dragon Vein to make her use the Stigma of Leech. The damage had been minimized thanks to Kwon Oh-Jin and Song Ha-Eun’s help. Even so, at least hundreds of innocent people who simply came to enjoy the beach had died.

The cries of the grieving families vividly resurfaced in her mind.

“Do you... even understand what you’ve done?”

Among the victims were a pregnant woman who had just given birth, a young couple on their honeymoon, and people who had come on a family trip to treat their aging parents.

Isabella had never lived a life completely free of shame either. Even so, she knew full well that she couldn’t defend Paolo just because he was her father.

Paolo closed his eyes slowly as if he had said everything he needed to.

Isabella gasped for air and raised her blood-red scythe.

“Haa, haa, haa!”

Just bring it down.

It would all end if she just lowered her hand thirty centimeters. She would never have to desperately chase those faded days of her past ever again.

It’s not hard.

It was easier than crushing an ant crawling along the road.

I... I... I...

Isabella squeezed her eyes shut. Tears rolled down her cheeks and clung to her chin before dropping to the ground.

Slash!

Paolo’s severed head tumbled to the ground.

Thud.

“Huh?”

Isabella opened her tightly shut eyes and looked at her arm in confusion. The blood scythe was still in her hand and unmoved in the air.

“What just happened...?”

She turned her head and saw Kwon Oh-Jin standing still with a bloody spear in his hand.

He looked at Paolo’s severed head before slowly turning to face her. “I’m the one who killed him.”

Kwon Oh-Jin carefully stepped toward the trembling Isabella and gently wrapped his arms around her.

“M-Mr. Oh-Jin?”

“It wasn’t you. I’m the one who killed him”.

“Why... Why would you?” Isabella asked in a trembling voice.

Kwon Oh-Jin lightly patted her back and quietly said, “You didn’t do anything.”

She hadn’t destroyed her hope, the happiness she had desperately longed for, with her own hands.

“I—”

The one who crushed her hope was...

“—killed him with my own hands.”