"However—now there is no need for that."
Olivia's hollow voice echoed through Jade's mind unbidden.
Each time he recalled those words—those words that had struck him like a blow to the chest—he found himself asking the same question over and over.
Why? Why won't Olivia come back?
And at the end of every spiral of thought, the target of his resentment was always the same.
The Empress.
"Your sister must have had a difficult time because of the Empress, isn't that right?"
Probably so.
Jade had always suspected as much. The Empress—an aristocrat to her very core—would never have left Olivia in peace. Not a girl who had come from the imperial faction. Not a child branded as illegitimate.
But he had never allowed himself to truly consider Olivia's suffering.
Because doing so would have meant acknowledging his own.
He had been too consumed by his own anger to see anything else. He had despised Olivia—this girl who hovered around him constantly, as though wanting something from him. Every time she called him "brother" with that innocent smile, as if she didn't know—as if she had never understood—that she had stolen his mother from him...
It made his blood boil.
So Jade had tormented her. He had wanted nothing more than for her to go away.
He had placed a dead rat beneath her bed. He had chased her out of the house on rainy nights. He had torn apart her favorite books, page by page.
"Brother!"
And still—Olivia had always been the same.
That foolish girl had continued to follow him, continued to smile. Even when he pushed her away. Even when he made his hatred crystal clear.
When she had become the Crown Prince's fiancée, a part of Jade had thought: Good. Let her go.
He had known the Empress would never accept her. But still, that naive child had believed—had truly believed—that she was Princess Madeleine.
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