124

“You’ve already checked those documents three times.”

As the aide said, Riina had been poring over the same documents for two hours now, scanning, scrutinizing, and examining them thoroughly.

And for good reason—it was hard to believe the clear facts before her eyes.

“These documents, are they certain?”

“That’s the fourteenth time you’ve asked that question. And the answer remains the same. Yes, they are certain.”

“But…”

Unable to finish with ‘they all succeeded,’ Riina pressed the words down with the tip of her tongue and gripped the corner of the document.

No matter how many times she looked, it didn’t change.

The projects she had planned, strategized, executed, and refined had not ended in failure but in success.

Before her regression, these were all endeavors that had failed by the narrowest of margins or due to minor errors—truly by random ‘bad luck.’

Of course, there were fewer in number and smaller in scale than before, but they were still projects she had personally handled.

If Jane had stepped in to complete them, Riina could have understood their success, but Jane’s abilities weren’t yet up to that level—she had only added her name to the paperwork.

While Riina had told herself she needed to check, she hadn’t even dared hope that she would ‘succeed’ in family matters.

Since she couldn’t simply hand the family over to Jane and leave, she had only intended to see how badly she had failed and find ways to make up for those failures.

But the results of her work were…

All successful? This easily? This… just like this?

Whether her bad luck had been fickle or Einar’s good fortune had been that powerful, the result remained unchanged.

For the first time in her life, she had been of help rather than a burden to the family she loved so deeply and that had loved her in return.

As the saying goes, misfortunes never come singly—bad things tend to happen in succession, like falling dominoes.

And in Riina Bolshevik’s life, clusters of misfortune were nearly an everyday occurrence.

But good things?

There is a saying: “gilding the lily.”

The Bolshevik ancestors had explained it as “adding good to something already good,” but…

“Why, why do good things keep happening to me?”

Genuinely perplexed, Riina murmured while staring outside at the dazzling sunshine with a blank expression.

The aide, unable to catch her soft voice, tilted his head and was about to speak when Riina shook her head gently and said:

“I’ll be going. Thank you for your hard work in the preparations.”

“Not at all. I merely placed a spoon on what you had already accomplished, my lady.”

The voice and expression were too sincere to be mere flattery, so Riina could only open and close her mouth a few times before finally leaving the Duke’s office without saying anything.

Returning to her own office, Riina circled around the sofa without sitting down, her cheeks slightly flushed.

It was a different feeling from when she had rescued Becky from debt hell, prevented Lione’s tragic death, or erased Sierre’s funeral.

Amidst the coexistence of joy and anxiety, Riina could barely—truly barely—admit:

That she was no longer a being who brought only misfortune to her family, even if she didn’t leave.

No one had ever pointed fingers at her or blamed her, but it was a framework she had confined herself in after losing her mother.

And that rigid, merciless frame that had bound her until her death had shattered in a strangely simple and ridiculously easy way.

Without Riina even knowing.

Unconsciously looking toward the imperial palace—more precisely, in the direction of Einar’s palace—the shadow behind Riina rippled.

The next moment, as her shadow and the surrounding shadows rippled together, Riina reflexively opened her mouth at the sight.

“Lione?”

At her call, a human figure suddenly emerged from the pitch-black shadow.

Lione, who had deliberately made his presence known before appearing so as not to startle her, bowed his head.

“I have come to see you, my lady.”

Seeing that he appeared quite exhausted, Riina first examined him from head to toe, checking for any injuries.

Only after thoroughly inspecting him and confirming there were no visible wounds did Riina part her lips.

“Have you finished your investigation?”

“Yes.”

Lione had gone to investigate Jane’s surroundings and past, suspecting she might be a spy.

His return meant that the results of that investigation were in.

“The shadow was not a spy, but…”

Lione, who had delivered the essence of his findings in that brief statement, paused with an indescribable expression, and Riina waited patiently without urging him, seeing that he had more to say.

After a while, as if choosing his words carefully, Lione rolled a few words around in his mouth before speaking cautiously.

“The shadow believes herself to be the true bloodline of Bolshevik.”

Lione’s explanation continued once he began speaking.

A servant who had disappeared from the Bolshevik household in the past, along with her sister, and a daughter the same age as Riina.

Tracking their past wasn’t particularly difficult.

They hadn’t moved particularly secretively to begin with, and there had even been a time when they had boasted about working at the Bolshevik estate.

‘They were rather strange people. Especially the woman with the daughter…’

The story that began this way flowed in a direction Lione had never anticipated.

‘So this woman would whisper to her daughter, saying that she was the real one.’

Of course, after hearing this, he had sought out Jane’s aunt like a storm to hear the whole story.

“She was a servant who attended the Duchess, and apparently she enjoyed spinning various tales as if dreaming even back then. But she never imagined the woman would actually believe and spread such things.”

From Lione’s perspective, there had been people with severe delusions among those who had professed their love for him, so her behavior itself wasn’t particularly surprising, but even to him, her delusion was too extreme.

“The shadow’s current hair color is dyed; her real hair color is said to be a faint red.”

After Lione closed his mouth, silence fell for a long time—truly, a very long time.

During that time, Riina opened her mouth several times, but no words came out between her parted lips, only meaningless breaths that scattered.

She had listened to the entire story, but it was full of things she simply couldn’t comprehend.

Fake? Real? The Bolshevik heir switched? The Bolshevik family, known for its rarity of hands and ruthless bloodline management, to the point where those claiming to be distant relatives didn’t share a single drop of blood?

It was truly an unexpected story, and Riina wore an expression as strange as Lione’s.

Then suddenly, a realization struck her.

“So that’s why she was so devoted?”

If Jane truly believed herself to be the real ‘Bolshevik,’ then Riina could understand her tremendous devotion to the family before the regression.

How could one not cherish and love what they believed was rightfully theirs?

She probably thought it had been stolen from her.

Oddly enough, Riina could now clearly see that Jane’s behavior—blindly following the family rather than serving as a shadow—had a clear purpose.

Indeed, what begins with suspicion ends with certainty.

Of course, when suspecting, she had merely thought Jane might be an outsider coveting the Bolshevik name, but to think she actually believed herself to be the ‘real’ Bolshevik…

“It would have been more realistic if she had been revealed as a spy.”

“Indeed. Even if she had been a foreign spy, it wouldn’t have been this absurd.”

Lione, who possessed the common sense typical of a continental person regarding the Bolshevik bloodline that had shared history with the continent, also shook his head repeatedly.

And Riina suddenly pressed her chest, feeling an anxiety rising within her.

Hadn’t too many good things happened to her lately?

Perhaps this was deliberately granted by her ‘bad luck’ in preparation to tear her apart mercilessly.

Even while knowing this was also a delusion, she couldn’t simply dismiss words like ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ or ‘what if.’

If the misfortune that had dominated her entire life had been so easily overcome, she would never have chosen to drink poison that dissolved her internal organs.

So maybe that strange delusion that began with Jane’s mother might possibly be true…

Just the possibility made Riina momentarily feel faint, but she didn’t stagger.

She strengthened her legs, stood straight, and flashed the frozen blue eyes unique to the Bolsheviks.

“I need to see my father.”

“I will inquire about what the shadow might fabricate to become the ‘real one.'”

“Yes. It will be related to mechanical devices. Ask Becky about her tea time with her.”

As Lione dissolved into Riina’s shadow with those words, he smiled like a sigh as he saw her blue eyes burning like azure flames in the backlight.

There’s no way she could be the ‘fake.’

Although Riina moved quickly after making that determination, she couldn’t meet the Duke of Bolshevik within the mansion.

“Again?”

“Yes. The Duke has gone to the Imperial Palace at His Majesty’s summons.”