Chapter 175 - 174: Verbena’s Lies

The house on chapel row was smaller than Eleanore expected for a woman who’d once carried the title of noble. Narrow, sun-faded, the kind of place someone retreated to when they were trying very hard not to be found. Which, evidently, was exactly what Verbena Mallory had been doing.

The door opened at Victor’s knock, a thin, sharp-featured woman peering out through the gap, and the moment her eyes landed on Eleanore standing just behind him, every trace of color drained from her face.

"No," she breathed, already stepping back, already reaching to slam the door shut. "No, no, this isn’t—"

She didn’t get the chance to finish. Victor’s foot was already braced against the frame, and a heartbeat later Verbena had abandoned the door entirely, bolting through the narrow house toward what Eleanore assumed was a back exit. It took Victor all of four seconds to catch her, one hand closing around her arm and hauling her firmly back through the front room without so much as raising his voice.

"Let me go! I didn’t do anything!"

"Funny," Victor said, depositing her into a chair with more patience than force, "that’s usually what people say right before it turns out they did quite a lot."

Eleanore stepped inside slowly, closing the door behind her, and simply looked at the woman for a long moment,really looked, taking in the frightened, cornered expression, the trembling hands, the complete absence of whatever composure a former noblewoman might once have carried.

"Verbena Mallory," Eleanore said finally, quiet and even. "It took some effort to find you."

"I don’t know what you think you know," Verbena said, voice shaking despite the defiance she was clearly trying to force into it, "but whatever it is—"

"You sent a journalist a tip," Eleanore cut in, "naming me as the woman who tried to kill Stelle and planned my own kidnapping. You provided no proof, no source, nothing but a half baked lie, even though you knew it was not true." She took a step closer. "And now here I am, tracing it back to you."

Verbena’s jaw trembled, the last of her defiance crumbling visibly under the weight of Eleanore’s steady gaze. "I said what I saw," she said, voice cracking. "I just wanted—"

"I don’t particularly care what you wanted," Eleanore said, and there was no heat in it, only a flat, exhausted finality that was somehow more unsettling than anger would have been. "I care that you attached my name to a woman’s death without a shred of proof, let it sit in print for the world to read, and vanished the moment it became inconvenient for you to answer for it."

Verbena said nothing, tears now slipping freely down her face, though whether from guilt or fear, Eleanore couldn’t tell and didn’t particularly care to find out.

"Here is what’s going to happen," Eleanore continued. "You are going to live very quietly, in this house or somewhere else entirely, it makes no difference to me. You will forget you were ever a noble. You will forget the name Verbena Mallory ever carried any weight in society, and you will certainly forget you ever had anything to do with Lady Stella’s poisoning, or my name, or any of it." Her voice dropped lower, colder. "Because if I ever hear that name again, if it so much as reaches my ears that you’ve spoken a single word about any of this to anyone. I will not send Victor next time."

"I—"

"I will come myself," Eleanore said, cutting through whatever protest had been forming. "And your head will be the one paying for it. Not a ruined reputation. Not a quiet disappearance. Your actual head, Verbena. Are we understood?"

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by Verbena’s shallow, panicked breathing as she stared up at Eleanore with the wide, hollow eyes of someone who understood, completely and finally, that this was not a threat that would soften with time.

"Understood," she whispered.

"Good." Eleanore straightened, already turning toward the door, the matter closed as far as she was concerned. "Live well, Verbena. Quietly, and far away from anything resembling my name ever again."

She stepped back out into the afternoon light without waiting for a response, Victor falling into step beside her a moment later, glancing sideways at her with something that looked, faintly, like approval.

"Remind me," he said, "never to get on your bad side."

"You’re already on my good side, Victor. Try to stay there."

"Wouldn’t dream of leaving it," he said, and together they made their way back toward the carriage, one loose thread of the mystery finally tied off — though the larger question of who had truly killed Barbra Fein, and why someone had gone to such lengths to bury it, remained stubbornly, unsettlingly unanswered.

---

The newspaper arrived with breakfast, folded neatly beside her plate the way it always was, and Eleanore nearly didn’t bother opening it, until she caught the headline printed boldly across the front page.

CORRECTION: DUCHESS SINCLAIR CLEARED OF INVOLVEMENT IN LADY STELLA, THE DUCHESS OF SINCLAIR’S POISONING — TRUE CULPRIT REMAINS CLOSE TO THE DUKEDOM OF LANCASTER

She read it twice, something cautious and disbelieving unfurling in her chest. The article was surprisingly thorough for something written by a man who, days earlier, had barely managed to string together a coherent sentence under pressure, a full retraction of the previous claims, a formal apology buried near the bottom, and, more importantly, a single line that made her blood run cold on a second read.

Sources close to the investigation suggest the true perpetrator is someone intimately connected to the Sinclair family itself, a detail that raises troubling questions about loyalty within the household.

Someone close to the family.

Eleanore set the paper down slowly, mind already turning through the short list of people who fit that description, and finding, with growing unease, that it wasn’t a very long list at all.

|| Chapter 1: The Woman Named Barbra

Barbra was known to be a very gentle and kind woman of the kingdom. She was always quiet and had no enemy. Until she fell for the wrong person and tried to win him over only to be trampled on completely by the queen of the social circle, Eleanore Sinclair (You)

Quest 1: Death Case Of Lady Barbra Fein

Task 1: Who killed Lady Barbra?

Do you accept the task?

Yes/No

Note: Reward: +100,000 reputationPenalty: -200,000 coins

Total Reputation: -100,000Total Coins: +90,100||