"If you touch my sisters, I will cut off your dick and force your balls down your throat."
Ulrich's blood-red eyes stared at the girl who had slipped into his room in the dead of night and was now straddling him, a knife pointed at his throat.
Ulrich, however, stared back at her, unbothered.
She was thirteen years old, yet there was a coldness in her twin pools of blackness that should hardly belonging to a girl of her age.
With her long dark hair falling down both sides and her pale skin, she looked as frightening as she was unreal.
'This is what happens when you adopt the villainesses.'
That was Ulrich's thought as he stared back at her calmly holding back a groan.
He couldn't exactly be considered normal either, after all, despite the situation, he looked wholly at ease.
Well, that was who Ulrich was. And Silas, who had slipped into both his body and his mind, had long since come to terms with it. Well, they did made quite a pair in some ways…
But he was Ulrich now.
And he had no intention of following the same path that cruel man had taken in the novel he had once read.
That was why, with his knowledge of the story and the fact that he had reincarnated years before the original plot began, he chose as his first great move the adoption of three girls.
Three dangerous girls from the novel, also known as the Villainesses, the Scarlet Sisters.
After their mother and their village of witches had been massacred on the King's orders, their lives had taken a turn for the worse under the original Ulrich, who had led the attack at the King's command.
But this Ulrich had not done exactly as his predecessor had in that novel.
What the original Ulrich had done, standing amid the destruction, would shape all three sisters onto a path of vengeance against the Kingdom, driven above all by the death of their mother at his hands.
The last thing Ulrich wanted was to reenact what had unfolded in that novel. He couldn't outright refuse or halt the massacre, but he could prevent these Villainesses from being broken and set upon that path of ruin.
So he chose to save them.
Them, and their mother as well.
He managed to hide the four of them inside a cart, but one of the knights found them. Their mother slipped out, trying to stop him, and was killed in the process.
Before the knight could reach the cart and the girls, however, Ulrich had already cut him down.
And then, to everyone's shock, he chose to take the girls into his household.
He was a Count and a powerful one at that so it was well within his means, though the decision drew a great deal of bewilderment, wariness, and hostility directed at him.
Witches were hated in Skargardia after all.
Though Ulrich couldn't care less.
He brought them to his estate, fed them, gave them clothes, ordered the maids to tend to them, and gave each one her own room though all three promptly chose to sleep together regardless.
What Ulrich hadn't anticipated, however, was that on this very night, he would find himself straddled by the eldest of the Villainesses, Airam, a knife pressed to his throat and a threat of castration on her lips.
To put it politely, at least.
The silence in the darkness stretched on as Ulrich continued to stare at her.
After a while, he spoke.
"Are you done?" He said.
Airam's eyes narrowed slightly before she pulled back her knife, the one she had definitely stolen from the kitchen. Ulrich had noticed it, actually, alongside a maid, but had told her to act as though nothing was wrong. He'd thought to let Airam keep the knife if it could bring her some reassurance, but now he was beginning to regret it a little.
She hadn't tried to kill him, though.
And Ulrich knew the main reason she hadn't was because he had tried to protect them, her and her mother both until the end.
But he had still been part of the attack on their village, and so there was a tangle of complex emotions within Airam. In the end, however, she still couldn't bring herself to trust him.
Not that Ulrich blamed her.
She was protective of her sisters which was understandable. But Airam had never been an ordinary girl. She was the most dangerous of the three sisters.
Ulrich watched in silence as Airam climbed off the bed and slipped quietly out of his room.
He sat up slowly and raised a hand to his neck, drawing back a single drop of blood on his fingertip.
'What kind of mess have I gotten myself into?'
Was he even going to survive before the start of the true story of that damned novel?
Keep your enemies closer, that was the saying, and it had been his intention. But perhaps he had taken it a step too far by literally adopting them.
Regardless, there was no going back now. He would have to live with the choice he had made.
He was now the stepfather of the Villainesses.