“Look, it’s that girl again…”
“Hey, keep your voice down. Even if she’s only adopted, technically speaking, she’s still our young lady.”
“Hmph! What right does a weak little deer have to be our mistress when she can’t even grow her antlers? In this fortress, aside from the Duke and Duchess, only Lady Rebecca and Young Duke Johannes are truly our masters!”
“Typical herbivore. Just looking at that skinny, obedient little thing makes me want to tear her apart. Ha ha ha!”
“What a shameless slut. Look at that fake expression. Who knows who she’s planning to seduce with that face next?”
The guards’ vulgar words and lustful, lecherous stares, along with the maids’ bitter hostility and covert bullying, were like countless sharp thorns growing thick beneath every step Franziska took. No matter which corner of the estate she walked into, she could never escape them.
When she was little, after Duchess Catrina brought her from the orphanage to the fortress, Franziska naively thought this place might truly become her second home. She was given a spacious, sunlit room, dressed in expensive gowns, and served delicious hot meals. The servants assigned to care for her back then always wore gentle, attentive smiles.
The Franziska of her childhood was far too innocent to realize that those warm smiles had never come from sincerity or compassion.
She gave away all her trust and obedience without reservation, then lost herself in that illusion of happiness for years.
Until one sweltering summer night, shortly after she turned eight.
That was also when the first pair of immature antlers in Franziska’s life began to sprout from her forehead.
The pain tearing through her flesh and bones plunged her into a wild, raging fever, leaving her consciousness hazy and unable to wake fully. Amid the cold sweat and delirium, Franziska heard a few unfamiliar whispers mingled with broken fragments of conversation right beside her bed.
“Did the Young Duke really order us to cut off a piece of this immature antler?”
Lia asked shakily, unable to hide the fear in her voice.
“Just do it!”
Jen, Johannes’s personal guard, irritably snatched up a small dagger that gleamed with a cold, steely light.
“He wants to test whether this grass deer’s antlers can really regenerate on their own as the priest said, and whether adding the antler’s medicinal properties to the potion will ease the Lady’s pain. The Duchess only forbade us from killing her. The Young Duke gave the order himself, so who in this fortress would dare disobey?”
The icy blade sliced across the newly sprouted antler.
Pain that tore through her soul erupted, and Franziska’s eyes flew wide. She tried to cry for help, but Biden’s rough, callused hand instantly clamped over her mouth and nose, smothering every sound in her throat.
Franziska couldn’t fail to recognize the owners of those voices.
Even with the pain making her head spin in a muddled daze, she immediately recognized the voices of those who had stayed close to her, caring for and comforting her since the day she first entered Crozier.
Aki, Lia, Jen, and Biden.
They wanted to take her antlers?
But why?
If they cut off her antlers now… it would hurt terribly…
In her delirium, Franziska strained to summon what little strength remained and lift her heavy eyelids. She opened her eyes a sliver, gazing at the blurred figures bending over her bed, then whispered through the fingers covering her mouth:
“Lia… it hurts so much… save me… Lia…”
Startled by the sudden call of her name, the maid Lia jerked violently. The small dagger in her hand nearly fell onto the stone floor. The others also froze in alarm for a moment.
Perhaps embarrassed by her companion’s timidity, Jen, the one assigned to protect Franziska, angrily yanked the dagger from Lia’s hand.
“I’ll do it.”
He coldly proceeded to do it himself.
Franziska watched him approach through a hazy veil of tears. He was a teenage boy with sleek black hair and eyes like bright amber stones glowing in the night—the same boy who had once protected her from the cruel pranks of other children bearing the leopard bloodline in the territory.
Yet now he was the one holding the knife, calmly slicing across the antler that had only just emerged from her forehead.
“Ah… mmph…!”
The violent pain surged like a breaking wave, as though her entire body were being torn into countless fragments. It seeped through every cell and pierced straight into her heart, making Franziska roll her eyes back as her whole body convulsed.
But before her scream of agony could escape, Biden’s rough hand clamped down even harder over her mouth and nose.
Aki and Lia each held down one side of Franziska’s body, grinding her into the mattress to stop her futile struggles. Jen quickly cut another short piece from the remaining antler. His movements were neat, decisive, and practiced, utterly ignoring the body trembling violently from the pain beneath his hands.
Biden glanced at the young face gradually paling from suffocation and agony. He maintained his impassive expression, merely furrowing his brow when he felt alternating heat and chill, along with copious sweat and tears, soak into his palm.
The sensation annoyed him.
Franziska stared fixedly back at him.
Her pale blue eyes, once as clear and gentle as an autumn lake, had now grown cloudy and vacant, stripped of every emotion.
From the day Duchess Catrina brought her back and she stood before the magnificent, imposing Crozier fortress, Franziska had never dared hope she would truly become a member of this family. She chose instead to live withdrawn, obedient, and silent, like a wooden puppet.
Because she knew all too well that Lady Rebecca, the only daughter of the Crozier family to carry the snow leopard bloodline, disliked her.
What happened that night left only two small, bleeding wounds on Franziska’s forehead. But in her heart, an unspoken debt had officially been opened.
From that moment on, Franziska began to understand that everything the Crozier family gave her had been ruthlessly assigned a price. The spacious room, the beautiful gowns, the expensive tonics, and even the status of a noble adopted daughter—none of them truly belonged to her.
In exchange for that pity, she had to obediently remain in the estate, keep her body healthy at all times, and give the Crozier family what they needed most: fresh blood, immature antlers, and the deer species’ innate healing ability.
That night, Franziska still didn’t know why Johannes, the Young Duke and Crozier’s mighty heir of the Leopard Fang, had allowed those people to do such a thing. She also didn’t know whether Lady Rebecca knew about it. She only knew that from the following day onward, the way everyone around her looked at her had completely changed.
They were no longer the eyes of people caring for an orphaned child.
They were the appraising eyes of people examining a living medicinal ingredient to determine how long it could be exploited.
Franziska told no one about that brutal night. She had no proof, and she didn’t know whom she could turn to for help among this pack of savage beasts. More importantly, deep down, she was still afraid of losing the only place where she could take shelter.
She continued to be obedient, continued to lower her head and smile, and continued deceiving herself that as long as she didn’t cause trouble, everything would eventually return to the peace it had once known.
But she was wrong.
Many years later, after enduring countless agonies, Franziska finally understood that night had not been an isolated incident, much less a momentary act by a few overzealous servants. It was the first time she realized the debt the Crozier family had silently written onto her—a debt measured in the drops of fresh blood leaking from her two broken immature antlers.
But at that time, Franziska was still only a pitiful eight-year-old girl, desperately clinging to the little false warmth that remained in the home she still humbly called her family.