Investing in My Yandare Villainess Fiancée:Each Reward Fuels My Growth

Chapter 68: Investment 68: Cracks in the Quiet

Morning at the Reingard estate arrived slow and golden, sunlight pooling across the orchard in a way that made the previous week’s horrors feel, for a fleeting moment, like a half-remembered nightmare.

Elliot woke to the sound of Mira pounding on his bedroom door with the subtlety of a battering ram.

"Elliot! Elliot, wake up, you promised!"

"Promised what?" he mumbled into his pillow.

"The orchard! You said when you came home you’d finally teach me that sword stance you learned! You said it in a letter, I still have it, I can go get it and read it to you—"

"Alright, alright, I’m up." He dragged himself upright, running a hand through disheveled hair, and found, despite the exhaustion still lingering in his bones, that he was smiling. "Give me ten minutes."

Ten minutes turned into twenty, mostly because Seria insisted on braiding a portion of her hair back before joining them—"I refuse to let a ten-year-old best me in swordplay because my hair got in the way," she’d said, with the kind of deadly seriousness usually reserved for actual combat—but eventually the three of them made their way out to the orchard’s edge, morning dew still clinging to the grass.

"Okay," Mira said, planting her feet in an approximation of a stance that was almost, but not quite, correct. "Teach me."

"Your feet are wrong," Elliot said, crouching to adjust her back foot with gentle hands. "Wider stance. You want your weight balanced, not leaning."

"Like this?"

"Better. Now your grip—" He guided her hands along the wooden practice sword’s hilt. "Not so tight. You’ll tire your wrist out in the first minute if you choke it like that."

Mira adjusted, brow furrowed in fierce concentration, and swung an experimental practice cut through the air with a soft whoosh.

"You’re a natural," Seria said, watching from a nearby fence post with genuine warmth in her voice. "Better form than half the second-years back at Adonite, honestly."

Mira beamed, practically glowing under the praise. "Really?"

"Really," Seria confirmed. "Though I imagine that has more to do with excellent teaching than raw talent."

"Hey," Elliot protested, though he was grinning.

"I’m simply being honest, dear."

They spent the better part of the morning like that—Elliot patiently correcting Mira’s form, Seria offering the occasional sharp, useful critique, Mira soaking up every scrap of attention with the desperate enthusiasm of a younger sibling who’d clearly missed her brother far more than her earlier scolding had let on.

It was, Elliot thought, watching his little sister attempt an overly ambitious spinning strike and nearly topple over from the momentum, exactly the kind of morning he hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed.

"Again," Mira demanded, scrambling back to her feet, dignity fully intact despite the grass stain now decorating her trousers.

"Again," Elliot agreed, laughing.

---

The unease crept in slowly, the way it usually did—not with a dramatic announcement, but in small, easily dismissed fragments that only made sense once strung together.

It started with Old Harmon, the estate’s longtime groundskeeper, failing to show up for his usual morning rounds. Nobody thought much of it at first; the man was well past seventy and prone to the occasional stiff back that kept him abed for a day or two.

Then one of the kitchen staff mentioned, almost in passing, that several chickens had gone missing from the coop overnight—not stolen, not eaten by a fox, simply gone, with no blood, no feathers, no sign of struggle at all.

"Probably wandered off," Lyra said at lunch, though her tone lacked its usual certainty.

"Chickens don’t wander off in groups of twelve, Mother," Elliot said carefully.

"No," she admitted. "They don’t."

By early afternoon, Old Harmon still hadn’t appeared, and when a stable hand was sent to check on his cottage at the estate’s edge, he returned pale and shaken, reporting that the old groundskeeper’s door had been left wide open, his modest belongings undisturbed, and the man himself nowhere to be found.

"Perhaps he went into the village," Cassian suggested, though even he didn’t sound convinced.

"Without his cane?" the stable hand said. "Begging your pardon, my lord, but Old Harmon hasn’t taken ten steps without that cane in years. It was still leaning right by the door."

A heavy silence settled over the manor’s study, where the family had gathered to discuss the mounting oddities.

"I saw something," Elliot said finally, breaking the quiet. "Yesterday. When we first arrived. At the tree line."

"You didn’t mention that," Seria said sharply, turning to face him fully.

"I thought it was nothing. Exhaustion. Paranoia." He rubbed the back of his neck, frustrated with himself now in hindsight. "I should have said something."

"What did it look like?" Cassian’s voice had gone flat, controlled, the tone of a man forcing himself not to panic in front of his youngest daughter.

"A shadow. Watching. Gone the second I actually looked at it directly." Elliot’s jaw tightened. "I didn’t think it was worth worrying anyone over."

"Given everything you just told us last night," Cassian said, "I think we’ve moved well past the point of dismissing shadows as nothing, don’t you?"

Elliot didn’t have a good answer for that.

"I want extra patrols posted along the estate’s perimeter starting tonight," Cassian continued, already rising from his chair, decisive energy replacing his earlier calm. "And I want a message sent to the capital garrison requesting additional support, just as a precaution."

"Father, that could take days to arrange—"

"Then we start today." Cassian’s gaze swept the room, settling briefly on Mira, who had gone very quiet, sensing the shift in the adults’ mood even without fully understanding it. "I won’t take chances. Not with this family. Not after everything you’ve already survived to make it home."

Seria moved instinctively closer to Elliot’s side, her hand finding his beneath the study table, fingers lacing tightly together.

"Whatever this is," she said quietly, voice carrying the particular steel that always emerged when something threatened the people she’d claimed as her own, "it made a mistake, coming here."

Elliot squeezed her hand, grateful, even as a cold, familiar dread began settling low in his stomach.

Outside, past the orchard, past the perimeter of the estate’s outer fence, twelve missing chickens lay in a perfect, silent circle around what remained of Old Harmon—arranged with a deliberate, ritualistic care that spoke of patience, purpose, and a message meant to be found.

It would not be found until morning.