I Ran Away And The Reverse Harem Started Chapter 138

“What the…!”

Mina, who had been sitting in the gallery with a child in her arms, was so shocked she nearly sprang to her feet. But Rumiz, sitting at the defendant’s bench, was faster.

On her face—so still before, like a corpse—an intense emotion she had never shown before surged violently.

Rumiz suddenly leapt up and slammed the defendant’s bench.

“What kind of nonsense is that! My daughter knows nothing!”

Her twig-like hands clenched tight. At her scream, which was closer to a shriek, everyone in the courtroom flinched.

Only Wilhelmina turned to her calmly.

“So you’re saying your daughter didn’t take part in the kidnapping? That she truly didn’t know about it? Even though you brought the kidnapped child into your home?”

“At that time, Lady Irene was in the carriage! I went into the house alone, leaving her there. Do you think I’d be insane enough to bring her inside my home, where my son and daughter were sound asleep?”

Rumiz ground her teeth as she spat out the words. Wilhelmina studied her for a moment, then asked dryly,

“Can you prove it?”

“…What?”

Rumiz, who had jumped up, faltered slightly. Wilhelmina’s gaze swept over her coldly.

“Is there anyone besides you and your children who can prove that you didn’t bring Irene Büllosen into the house?”

“That was twenty years ago, it’s…”

“And is there any proof your daughter wasn’t involved in the kidnapping?”

“There’s no proof she was involved either!”

Rumiz shouted in fury. But Wilhelmina countered without flinching—almost as if that was exactly the response she’d wanted.

“Yes. And that’s why we’ll begin investigating now.”

“What…”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? That your clever daughter had been keeping a daily journal since she was four. That means she was writing one when she was ten—the year of the incident—and that she still has the journals she’s written since then, doesn’t she?”

Passing the pale-faced Rumiz, Wilhelmina stepped up before the judge.

“Your Honor, there may be another accomplice in this case besides the two defendants. The defendant’s daughter, Miss Mina.”

Mina’s face in the gallery turned deathly white. She had no idea what was happening.

Why she was suddenly being accused as an accomplice.

Why they were ignoring her guilty mother and dragging her into this instead.

With both women panicking behind her, Wilhelmina continued,

“I request that Miss Mina’s journals, kept since she was ten, be submitted as evidence. They may contain descriptions of the circumstances surrounding Irene Büllosen’s kidnapping.”

The judge looked at Wilhelmina silently.

Only now did he seem to understand why she had built her case step by step—from the fact of Rumiz’s terminal illness, to the outdated idea of collective punishment, to the story of her clever daughter.

‘So this is it? If the terminally ill mother can’t be held to account, then torment the daughter instead? Or perhaps use the daughter to corner the mother…’

Meanwhile, Rumiz could not contain the boiling rage within her.

“This is absurd! Pure absurdity!”

When she tried to rush out of the defendant’s bench, guards forced her back down, pressing her thin shoulders hard. Despite her frail frame, she struggled with astonishing strength.

“Don’t you dare touch my daughter! She’s innocent! It was all me! It was all my fault! My crime, do you hear me?!”

Her wild thrashing looked just like a beast whose young had been snatched away.

Mina and Hermann were what she had fought to protect with her life. They were the only things of value in her life.

She had worked and struggled so they would lack nothing, so no one could sneer at them. She had juggled multiple jobs, stealing sleep where she could, to raise them. That effort had left her with a terminal illness, but she had no regrets.

And now Wilhelmina was trying to drag her daughter down into the same pit as herself, pinning a false charge of being an accomplice to the kidnapping twenty years ago.

The thought made her blood boil in reverse.

But no matter how she raged, Wilhelmina didn’t so much as blink. Or rather, it was exactly the picture the one behind all this had wanted.

“Is that so? If you’re that indignant, shall we call a witness?”

“W-witness…?”

“The victim of the case, Irene Büllosen—Miss Rosieta.”

At Wilhelmina’s almost benevolent tone, Rumiz’s frantic eyes flickered. She whipped her head around to look at Rosieta, who had moved to another seat in the gallery.

Clad in a white linen dress, Rosieta gazed at Rumiz with a blank expression.

For a moment, Rumiz felt hope.

‘Yes… After all the cooperation I’ve given. They were only able to expose Kazan Louis and even my own crimes because of me. So surely she’ll take my side. She must.’

Without me, would this trial even have been possible? Not a chance.

She forced herself to calm her roiling anger and selfishness.

It wouldn’t take much. All Rosieta had to say was one line: that Mina had nothing to do with this case. Then everything would be solved.

Wasn’t it thanks to her own cooperation and testimony that Kazan Louis could be brought to justice at all?

‘Without me, you’d never have even dreamed of this!’

So surely, surely, Rosieta would support her one last time.

Rumiz stared at Rosieta with a desperate face. Rosieta rose gracefully to her feet. Everyone in the courtroom turned toward her.

Standing in the gallery, Rosieta glanced around once, then smiled faintly.

“Well, Prosecutor, do I really need to take the witness stand?”

“What do you mean, Miss Büllosen?”

Wilhelmina, facing Rosieta, also smiled faintly. At the twin smiles, Rumiz’s face grew uneasy.

“I don’t remember.”

“…!”

“I was only three years old then, after all.”

Rumiz’s face turned chalk white. Rosieta glanced at her, then said flatly,

“Since I don’t remember, I can’t say whether Miss Mina was an accomplice or not. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. Isn’t that something worth investigating further?”

“Wh… that’s ridiculous.”

Rumiz shook her head in disbelief. Her heart pounded violently, and a wave of dizziness swept over her.

She turned her eyes, almost against her will, toward the front row of the gallery.

There sat Hermann, glaring at her with utter loathing, and Mina, her face red with fury.

“H-Hermann… Mina…”

Rumiz reached out her bony fingers toward them.

But the two stomped their feet and stormed out of the courtroom, leaving her behind at the defendant’s bench.

Without looking back even once.

 

 

 

****

 

 

 

 

“Hey, you!”

It was during recess, just before Kazan Louis’s sentence was to be carried out. Unlike the Rumiz family, who still required further investigation, Kazan would, unless an exception was made, be sentenced to life imprisonment.

And then—heavy footsteps echoed down the hallway. It was none other than Rumiz.

Her face was flushed red with rage as she glared at me. But I wasn’t the least bit afraid. If anything, I found her pitiful.

“What is it?”

“How could you do this to me? I testified about everything for the Büllosen trial. I even gave the testimony that sent Kazan Louis away, and I confessed all my own sins too. And yet you— you dare drag my child in as an accomplice?!”

Wilhelmina, Yvette, and Daniel were standing beside me. When Rumiz confronted me, Wilhelmina tried to intervene, but I signaled her to stand down and smiled coolly at Rumiz.

“How could you expect me to remember what happened when I was three? I couldn’t even remember that you abandoned me in front of the orphanage.”

“You…!”

Rumiz ground her teeth in bitter fury, glaring at me like a woman making her last desperate stand.

“You vile brat!!”

Bloodshot eyes blazing, Rumiz lunged at me. But before she could reach me, Daniel grabbed her arm and stopped her.

“Lower your hand. Before I call the guards to drag you off.”

Even at Daniel’s quiet warning, Rumiz’s eyes stayed fixed only on me. Breathing heavily, she spat out,

“Why are you doing this to me…? Isn’t it enough if only I pay for my crimes?”

“Pay for your crimes?”

I scoffed at her words. Truly, it was laughable.

I stepped closer. For a moment, her ashen eyes wavered, though they soon hardened again. No doubt her mind was consumed with thoughts of protecting her two children.

“You’ve never once truly tried to pay for your crimes. You only thought about running away in death. If you were serious, you should have turned yourself in long ago—not after you’d been diagnosed as terminal.”

Of course, I knew Mina wasn’t really an accomplice. Perhaps she had sensed something about her mother, but that wasn’t important.

What mattered was that Rumiz spend the rest of her life in utter torment.

At my words, Rumiz clenched her teeth so hard they ground audibly, her glare full of venom.

Her fury almost made me laugh. She had been so stoic in the face of her own death, yet when her children were threatened, she burned with rage.

I, too, had once been a beloved child to my parents. A jewel beyond price.

Tilting my head toward her, I whispered into her ear.

“…Enjoy the rest of your short life with the thought that you’ve ruined the future of the children you claim to love so dearly.”

“…”

“Even if you die soon, our family won’t stop. We’ll hound your children, drag them into court again and again, and never let them live in peace. Even after you’re gone.”

“You, you…”

“You won’t even be able to die in peace, not with the fear that your children might be condemned as accomplices. And when they suffer under the weight of it, they’ll hate you for it too…”

“…”

“This trial will drag on for months, for years.”

At last, Rumiz’s face went corpse-pale. Seeing it gave me a faint satisfaction.

‘To a parent, a child is a jewel beyond compare…’

Uncle Hans’s words had given me the very key to this case.

Rumiz collapsed onto the floor of the hallway, as if all strength had left her body. Her face, hollow as if her soul had fled, told me my revenge was already half complete.

“Let’s go.”

Yvette, who had been watching us from behind, came up beside me. My mother too approached, laying a comforting hand on my shoulder.

We did not spare Rumiz—slumped like a puppet with its strings cut—so much as a glance.

As we left the hall, Hermann and Mina stormed in, their faces blazing with fury, turning their wrath on Rumiz.

“Because of you, my life is ruined! My reputation’s in tatters! I finally found a job, and now this—what the hell am I supposed to do?!”

“H-Hermann…”

“Why do I have to be investigated because of you? I didn’t know anything! What could I have done at ten years old? This is all your fault! It’s hard enough raising my daughter alone—did you really have to turn me into a criminal too?!”

“Mina…”

Rumiz’s ashen eyes wandered emptily as she listened to her children’s bitter accusations. Like a woman whose spirit had fled.

Now, truly, she had nothing left.