"Tell me — your job has been failing for quite a while now. Do you suppose someone else might come to finish it for you?"
"Eh?"
Elena froze for a moment. She had thought about it when Vier turned up, but since it had been Vier she had put it out of her mind again.
Now that she considered it, it was possible — but... she had caught on. Lilith was not really asking about that at all. She just wanted to mock her!
"Wrong. Who failed!"
Elena shot Lilith a fierce glare.
Looking at Elena like that, Lilith could not hold back a laugh either.
"Pfft... Fine, fine. You didn't fail."
"What are you laughing at! What's funny about it?"
Elena glared again, though the effect on Lilith was plainly not much.
"All right, I'll stop laughing. But I really am asking seriously~ It would be a shame if someone else came and disturbed the two of us in our own little world~"
"What on earth is 'our own little world' supposed to mean!"
Elena had been wrong. She had thought the peace of the last few days would continue.
The respectable air Lilith had put on while talking with Severina, and those days in town living all but alone, had misled her into thinking Lilith had changed a little.
And then the moment it was just the two of them again her true nature came out. This woman had surely been pent up far too long!
"There now, never mind all that. Your answer~?"
"How would I know!"
Elena genuinely did not know. If anything, the Organization had never defined what counted as failing a job.
Besides, Vier had gone back to report, so it should not be treated as a failure, should it? She could not be certain.
Whatever the case, though, Lilith was her target, and that had not changed. She could not let anyone else steal the credit.
"Even if someone does come, I'll just send them back. And anyone who won't go back, I'll beat back!"
Elena said it in complete earnest — only for Lilith to hear something else in it entirely.
"Oh my~ Is my little maid defending her Master~? Or is she confessing to her~?"
"What is any of that supposed to mean! What does this have to do with confessing??"
Elena finally could not stop herself from shouting.
She could not begin to comprehend what went on inside this woman's head; every single sentence seemed aimed squarely at teasing her.
And she still had no way to stop it.
Perhaps because of that shout, though, Lilith reined herself in; she knew that teasing her any further might genuinely push Elena over the edge.
"All right, I'll stop teasing you. But I am happy~ For one moment at least, you thought about protecting your Master~"
"Wh-who wanted to protect you!"
Lilith's words made Elena go soft at once, and she turned her face away toward the carriage window.
Lilith was right; she really had said that line with the thought of protecting her. But that had only been for her own sake.
After that neither of them kept the conversation going, and the compartment fell silent again.
At some point the sky gradually turned yellow, and the carriage rolled back up to the estate's front gates, where the two of them got down.
They opened the gates and walked toward the villa together, except that Elena kept feeling something was strange.
She had only been away a few days, and yet coming back to this place gave her the sense of having come home.
It genuinely baffled her.
"Elena~ What would you like for dinner?"
"Anything."
The answer was perfunctory, but Elena was not annoyed; she simply did think everything Lilith cooked was good.
"Very well~ Then leave it to your Master~!"
Lilith looked full of energy, and opened the villa's front door as she said it.
"Oh, and~ now that we're home, my little maid should remember to change back into her maid outfit~ You know which one I mean~"
Lilith's words reached Elena's ears, and that humiliating maid outfit duly appeared in her mind.
"I know! Pervert..."
She had no choice, and she was used to it by now anyway. If she had to wear it, she would wear it.
Lilith went inside, and Elena, following right behind, had barely taken a step when she felt a gaze on her.
Lilith had guessed right after all: there really was another killer come calling.
Except he carried no killing intent, and his concealment was extremely clumsy. Elena decided not to startle her quarry for now, and went into the villa and shut the door.
In the hall, Lilith tossed her own bag of clothes carelessly onto the sofa, as though terrified Elena might fail to see it.
And Elena duly pretended not to see it at all, carrying her own clothes upstairs.
Back in the bedroom, Elena used the moment of drawing the curtains to pinpoint the killer's position outside.
He was in a tree at the edge of the woods beyond the estate, glaringly obvious, looking like the rawest of raw beginners.
He had probably been shipped out here before even passing stealth training, and did not so much as realize he had been spotted.
Elena sighed. Was the Organization out of people? It wasn't about to go under, was it?
Once the curtains were closed, she paid it no further attention.
She knew he would not be stupid enough to act at a time like this — and if he really were that stupid, Lilith would finish him off before she had to lift a finger.
The more important matter now was to change clothes and then go and eat.
They had not stopped once on the whole journey, and she had not eaten since she cooked; her already-shrunken stomach was very nearly starving.
***
Downstairs in the kitchen, a changed Elena sat at the dining table. There was already a good deal of food on it, but Lilith was still busy in the kitchen.
In the boredom of waiting, her eye happened to fall again on that bag of clothes lying on the sofa, hidden not at all.
Curiosity kept driving at her, urging her to go and open it for a look.
Whatever else, what was inside was clothing she would sooner or later have to wear. Since she had to wear it anyway, there was no harm in looking.
At that thought, Elena talked herself into it.
She left the table for the living-room sofa, reached out, and carefully opened the bag.
Inside were three more boxes, the clothes packed neatly within them.
She took out the topmost box and opened it — and regretted it the instant she did.
The very first thing she saw on opening it was a piece of underwear, cut away through the middle, in black and pink, embroidered with a cat's head.
Besides that there was a pair of cat-ear hairclips, and two strings attached to a scrap of fabric, a thing that did not even qualify as underwear.
Those were bearable, though. The most horrifying part was the cat tail lying beside them — and that thing at the base of the tail...
Elena's cheeks flushed instantly and she snapped the box shut and stuffed it back into the bag.
Evil. This was pure evil!
Pervert. Lilith really was the pervert of all perverts!
She went on cursing Lilith inwardly, but no amount of cursing relieved the feeling; she genuinely wanted to burn every one of these clothes on the spot!
As luck would have it, Lilith's dinner was ready at that very moment.
"Elena~ Come and eat~"
"I know...!"
She fled the sofa for the dining room at once, hoping to use food to forget the horrifying thing she had just seen.
But how could a red-faced Elena possibly escape Lilith's eye? She was not about to pass up an opening this good for teasing.
"Elena~ Were the clothes pretty~? Shall we try them tonight~? I'm very much looking forward to seeing Elena turn into a kitty~"
Lilith propped her cheek on her right hand and looked at Elena with a thoroughly amused expression.