"…And that was just one of many cases."
Alice spoke those words quietly, her gaze lost somewhere on the floor.
"But there were many more," she went on, her voice cracking. "Entire villages razed, families exterminated... For years, that was my job, and I carried it out without hesitating even once, convinced I was doing the right thing."
She closed her eyes for a moment.
"That was the kind of person I was."
Once the story was finished, Alice finally raised her eyes to Mark and Aria.
And what she saw made her tense up immediately.
Both of them were watching her in silence, eyes wide, their expressions impossible for her to fully read. The story had clearly hit them harder than she'd expected.
The silence stretched on for a few seconds that felt endless to Alice.
"…Please, don't just sit there quiet, say something, anything," she said with a nervousness she rarely let show. "This silence is worse than anything you could accuse me of."
