The farce concluded with the official's frigid pronouncement.

The crowd stood frozen in a tableau of shock, deathly silent. All eyes fixed on Isabella, her body swaying precariously.


"No... that's not right..." Isabella's lips quivered, her voice a mosquito's whine. "My mother is the head maid... but I... I am the princess..."

Her logic collapsed like a house of cards—the desperate flailing of a drowning mind.

The sheriff made one expressionless gesture, and guards immediately moved to hoist Martha's crumpled form from the ground.


Watching her mother's arrest, Isabella's final psychological defenses shattered. A strangled scream tore from her throat before her eyes rolled back and she collapsed like a marionette with severed strings.

The guards showed no compassion, efficiently removing both the unconscious girl and her ashen-faced mother.


My gaze drifted across the restless crowd until it found Sebastian.

His face had blanched whiter than artist's paper. Those blue eyes that once quickened my pulse now reflected the inch-by-inch collapse of his world. He watched Isabella's removal, then turned to me in naked disbelief, lips trembling soundlessly.

He was merely an accomplice. Yet when cold iron closed around his wrists, reality finally pierced his delusions. What he'd embraced was never a path to glory, but a serious criminal conspiracy.

Days later, the academy's winds shifted completely. Isabella's former admirers scrambled to distance themselves, rewriting history as if they'd never known her.

Barton arrived with fresh intelligence from the capital.

During her royal masquerade, Isabella had systematically pilfered jewelry and valuables from Egret Manor, distributing them to followers or selling them for profit. As the palace completed its inventory, she faced not only imprisonment but ruinous financial penalties.

This revelation didn't surprise me. Greed is the primordial sin that lures people toward their own destruction.

I believed the matter concluded—until a prison letter shattered my peace.

The envelope bore no name, only the prison's stamp. Inside, I recognized the handwriting immediately. Sebastian.

The letter began as a tearful confession. He deflected all blame onto Isabella, claiming passion and ambition had clouded his judgment, then begged me to secure his release for the sake of our former attachment.

I read his affected sentences with icy detachment, utterly unmoved.

The letter's second half, however, took a sinister turn, revealing venomous fangs.

"Arya, don't think you're untouchable," he wrote. "I've seen you hiding a royal emblem. You must have stolen it from some nobleman! Unless you secure my release, I'll report you to the authorities for the same crime—'impersonating an official'!"

Reading those lines, I nearly laughed aloud.

Not in mockery, but in genuine amazement at the depths of human stupidity.

He believed he held leverage, never suspecting the emblem was rightfully mine. He thought he could force mutual destruction, unaware he was digging his own grave even deeper.

I folded the letter without hesitation.

When I presented it to the sheriff, his expression transformed from surprise to shock, finally settling into wordless contempt for such monumental stupidity.

Sebastian had personally added another charge to his growing list: "threatening a royal personage."

His own foolishness became the final nail in his coffin.