Next Time We Meet, I’ll Let You Kill Me - Chapter 9

Hugo now used his fingers to go up and down the spot where she felt the most. The faster the friction grew, the rougher Liselotte’s breathing became.

She’d never received this kind of touching from anyone before, so it was the first time she realized she could get this aroused without penetration. Her knees trembled, and her head kept tilting back.

Then, when he reached a certain point, her waist twisted sharply. The pleasure that had been simmering through her whole body suddenly exploded.

“…!”

At that moment, not a single sound left her lips. It felt like all her senses had vanished as she floated somewhere weightless.

Her eyes were definitely open, yet her vision flickered with light. Where she was, who she was, everything evaporated.

So this is what it means when people say your vision goes white. Lost in the vague feeling of drifting above the clouds, a dreamlike voice whispered softly against her ear.

“…Lottie.”

Hugo was calling Liselotte in a low murmur.

“I have… quite a lot of enemies, you know?”

What was he suddenly talking about? Before she could ask, a large palm gently cupped her cheek.

“So when a woman as pretty as you comes close, I have a habit of suspecting her first.”

Did she swallow nervously? She couldn’t even tell.

“What did you do to me…?”

Instead of answering, Hugo smiled faintly and rubbed just beneath her eye with his thumb. Liselotte instinctively shut her eyes.

He kept stroking the corner of her eye with a clear intention. Once she closed them, she couldn’t open them again no matter how hard she tried.

A strange, overpowering drowsiness washed over her. Liselotte fell helplessly into sleep.

“So forgive me.”

A light kiss brushed her forehead, and her consciousness went completely black. She didn’t even have the chance to feel humiliated at how easily she’d been caught.

***

“….”

Liselotte woke to a room completely swallowed in deep darkness. It was so pitch-black she couldn’t see anything.

Feeling around blindly, she pushed aside the curtain near the head of the bed. Only when moonlight slipped through the window could she barely make out her surroundings.

She sat up and moved to step off the bed, then froze. Confusion flickered in her blue eyes as she looked toward the window. She had never closed the bedroom curtains in the first place.

And what she was wearing wasn’t her tight dress, but a bathrobe. When she lifted it, she found a new set of underwear neatly put on her.

Instinctively, she touched herself below, but felt nothing unusual. It didn’t seem like anything had been done to her while she slept.

“…Hugo?”

Her low, sleep-rough voice echoed softly in the silence.

No answer came back. Maybe because she couldn’t remember when she had fallen asleep and her mind was still foggy, it was hard to feel like this was really happening.

Stepping onto the rug, Liselotte stood up, then suddenly looked down at her feet. Caught under the sole of her slipper was a cufflink that looked expensive at a glance.

Hugo had definitely been here, but he was gone.

The small hand of the table clock was pointing at the number three. With the moon up, it clearly wasn’t three in the afternoon. It meant three in the morning.

To think she had been lying there for thirteen hours. That was one hell of a nap.

“…Ha.”

Did that even make sense? With a face gone cold, she touched her lips. As expected, there wasn’t a trace of ointment left.

He had obviously messed with that blue ointment. He was more dangerous than she’d thought, and she had no real countermeasures. The former was Hugo, the latter was herself.

She hadn’t expected to fall for it this easily.

There was no time to wallow in self-loathing. When had the bastard gone back?

“…!”

Turning on the light and stepping out of the bedroom, Liselotte froze with her mouth hanging open. The house, which had looked like it had gone through a war, was now spotless.

He hadn’t thrown anything away or removed anything, but every object that had been scattered everywhere was placed neatly at a consistent angle. The floor gleamed with a polished shine, and no matter where she ran her hand across the shelves, not a single speck of dust appeared.

This crazy bastard even cleaned?

Did he think she’d be grateful for this? After knocking out the owner of the house and rummaging through everything while she was unconscious?

No way. A sharp, restless pounding erupted in her chest.

Her footsteps, heading somewhere, gradually grew faster. As if reflecting her frantic nerves, she flung open the bathroom door and stepped onto the edge of the tub in one leap.

Liselotte opened a ceiling tile and felt around inside. Her hand caught on a thick hardcover book. When she pulled it out and opened the cover, instead of pages, a black gun barrel revealed itself.

It was a revolver she’d hollowed out the book to hide. It wasn’t strange for a woman living alone to keep a gun for self-defense, but a weapon with far too many signs of use was suspicious, so she’d hidden it.

She opened the cylinder and confirmed all six rounds were loaded, then returned everything to its place, replaced the tile, and walked back to the living room.

The disguised gun she had placed in the top drawer of the display cabinet had its angle shifted just slightly.

That meant someone had touched it.

Of course, someone poking around the house might pick up the gun out of curiosity. But that didn’t stop the prickling unease in her throat, like a thorn lodged there.

‘When a woman as pretty as you comes close, I have a habit of suspecting her first.’

Wasn’t that basically admitting he had gone through her things?

Liselotte quietly approached the bookshelf that took up one wall of the hall.

The shelves were packed tightly with thick books, all long novels of over ten volumes each, all with identical covers. She pulled out a familiar mystery novel from its usual spot and opened it slowly.

Just like the other, the inside was hollow. Lined up neatly inside were the knives she used.

Thirteen hours. More than enough time to pull out every book here and check them one by one.

Because she had carved out the insides to exactly fit the shapes of the knives, there was no way to tell if anything had been touched. Liselotte bit her lip hard.

Even without any concrete evidence, the unease refused to settle. Was it because the bastard’s last name was “Schwartz”?

Because he was the younger brother of none other than that “Aaron Schwartz.”

While she’d been tailing Hugo, he hadn’t had any contact with Aaron in any way. If he’d called him from home, Doug would’ve let her know.

After all, several of their company’s employees were working undercover as operators at the capital telephone exchange.

Even so, the period she’d tailed him had been far too short to be certain he had no dealings with Aaron. In the end, it meant there wasn’t a single thing she could say for sure.

Maybe she was just being oversensitive. Because the man was tied to Aaron, she might simply be overinterpreting a garden‑variety perverted psychopath.

And still….

Her heart began pounding violently again the moment she thought of him.

Aaron Schwartz.

It was because of the uncontrollable rage she felt toward Hugo’s brother.

***

The Bishar Private Orphanage, despite its grand and impressive exterior, was a place overflowing with a horrendous stench.

It was only natural. Hundreds of children with no relatives to claim them, in other words, impoverished lower-class kids with nothing at all, lived crammed together in that building.

Even so, fifteen-year-old Liselotte welcomed it.

At least she no longer had to be passed around between relatives like a ticking bomb just because of a child who wasn’t even their blood. Compared to that, a little stench was nothing.

She had been adopted in the first place, so in the end, she had only returned to where she originally belonged. She decided to tame the grief of losing the parents who had loved her and the hollow sense of loss that followed.

She no longer had to walk on eggshells, nor overhear shameless conversations about her deceased parents’ estate being treated like some long‑awaited savings they were entitled to. Just that alone was enough to satisfy Liselotte.

And that wasn’t all. Thanks to her natural beauty and refined way of speaking, she’d even been lucky enough to take a commemorative photo with the founder of the orphanage.

Liselotte had been so full of excitement that she’d barely slept the night before.

The man who had spent an enormous sum of his own money to build the orphanage was none other than Aaron Schwartz.

He was the sensational figure regarded as the strongest candidate for the next senator, following in the footsteps of his father, a real‑estate tycoon and magnate.

His striking background matched his handsome looks so well that even those with no interest in politics adored him. Liselotte, at the age when curiosity about the opposite sex was at its height, wasn’t much different from them.

In front of Aaron Schwartz, who arrived surrounded by a swarm of reporters, Liselotte shyly flushed. The man she had only ever seen in black‑and‑white photos on newspapers and the news looked far more impressive in person.

And that deep, low, gentle voice. Seeing the girls watching from afar squeal and collapse into giggles, she felt a deep, sincere sense of agreement.

“If I’d known such a beautiful young lady would be here to greet me, I would’ve dressed up a little more.”

Aaron, putting on a show for the reporters, scattered his trademark charming smile. Her hands, offering the bouquet prepared by the orphanage staff, trembled uncontrollably.

“Thank you. What’s your name?”

“Li‑Liselotte.”

“Liselotte. A name as pretty as your appearance.”