“Did you know about your husband’s infidelity?” I asked.

“…Yes.” Rayne stood at the stand, her expression as blank as Violetta’s mind was. “You think I killed my husband, don’t you?”

Fuck yeah I did, and I was going to prove it. “I’m just presenting the possibility,” I said, holding back how excited I was to bring the hammer down on Lyili. As if on cue, Brad finally slinked into the room.

“Brad’s back.” Yaika pointed. “And he’s got ice cream!”

Ice cream. Now that I thought of it, did that mean there were demon cows? Were they just regular cows or were they ten feet tall with rocket launchers for utters or something? I guess it didn’t really matter.

“You’re just in time,” I said.

Brad looked up from the still-wrapped ice cream bar sitting in his tentacle to see everyone in the room staring at him. You’d think some of the eyes on his back would have noticed earlier, but apparently ice cream took up a lot of concentration. “Just in time for what?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, very good,” the king said, his eyes practically bulging out of his sockets. “I see you’ve, um, brought me the very important ice cream I requested.” I guess appearances were really everything when it came to royalty. Anyone buying his act was a complete dumbass, though.

Brad narrowed all of his eyes. “…Huh?”

Well, it was time for me to make the king look good.

“Actually, we need that ice cream bar to make a point,” I said. “If you could please give it to the witness.”

Brad’s eyes drifted to his ice cream, then back to me again. “Dude… Not cool. If you needed an ice cream bar, you could have totally asked me to get an extra one.”

“…It was the king’s idea.”

The king cleared his throat. “Oh no, I can’t take all the credit, Mr. Allard. I am… impartial after all.” Fuck you, your majesty. Of course he’d take the credit when it was convenient for him, and then push it back onto me when it wasn’t anymore.

Brad gave me the look I imagined girlfriends gave their boyfriends when they caught them in a lie.

“I uhh… only thought of it after you left,” I said. In reality, I thought of it before he left, and could have easily asked him to just get an extra one. I would say that it was payback for the short notice on the trial, but I already said that when I made him give the opening testimony. This could be revenge for the… tentacle thing.

Yeah, I guess I was kind of just an asshole this time.

Brad sighed. “Weak…”

“This will help me win the case and save Violetta.” And myself, obviously. “I promise… I’ll get you a new one later… bro.”

“Ah yes,” the king chimed in. “For the trial. The trial, of course.” He looked at me, his veins popping out of his neck, and gave me a thumbs up big enough for everyone in the whole room to see. Was this a thanks for taking the blame? Fuck that. He could keep his thumbs to himself.

“Alright…” Brad held out his tentacle to Rayne.

“Mr. Allard.” Rayne’s cold eyes settled on the slime covered wrapper. “I’m in no need of… refreshments.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” I said. It was finally time for me to shine. “All I need you to do is sink your teeth into it.”

Stolen story; please report.

“Go on, Madam Rayne.” Lyili twirled a lock of her dark hair with her finger. “By all means, do as Sir Allard asks.”

Rayne reluctantly took the ice cream bar from Brad, dangling it from the corner of the wrapper between her fingertips. Slime dripped from it onto the stand. Yeah, not exactly appetizing.

“Please open it,” I continued. “This is essential.” Fucking do it.

Rayne stood quietly for a moment, then carefully unwrapped it to reveal a chocolate bar. She grabbed onto the wooden stick handle and brought the ice cream up to her mouth.

“One more thing,” I said, stopping her. “If you could please… only use your canines.”

“My… canines?”

“Your canines look pretty sharp, Rayne.” I put my hand under my chin like a total boss. “I’m just curious about how easy it would be… to imitate a Succubus’s bite.”

The crowd started to stir again, whispering to each other. I couldn’t make out any words, but it was obvious what they were talking about. They were starting to wonder if ‘loss of life force’ was really the cause of death, and that was exactly the line of thinking I needed them to follow before I presented my evidence.

“Very well.” Rayne opened her mouth, placing her top teeth on the ice cream bar. She bit down.

“Brad, could you bring that to me?” I asked.

“Now you’re just adding insult to injury, bro,” Brad said. He snatched it out of her hand and jammed it into mine. He really was angry about this. Ice cream was serious business in the Demon World.

“T-Thanks…” I looked down at the ice cream bar. Sure enough, there were two perfectly spaced holes pierced in it. Now I just needed to play it cool. I didn’t want to sound too excited about this. “Hah! Fuck you, Lyili! Volk’s cause of death wasn’t from the bites on his neck after all!” Okay, I couldn’t help myself there.

The king leaned forward on his throne. “Wait… huh?”

“T-That’s right.” I recomposed myself. “I would like to, uh, present to the court an alternative way that Volk could have been killed.”

“The knife, correct?” Lyili smiled. “Go on, present it for us.”

“Huh?” How did she know about the knife?

Lyili smiled. “What’s wrong, Sir Allard? You seem surprised.”

I turned to Yaika. “Why the hell does she know about the knife?” As far as I knew, it was illegal to hide evidence during a trial, but I hadn’t said anything about that to them. I wasn’t in pursuit of the truth, I was in pursuit of saving my ass.

Yaika stared back at me with her big empty eyes. “I showed her the notes Brad took.”

Fuck.

“How else was she supposed to know about the crime scene and be the prosecutor, silly?” Yaika shrugged. “She didn’t go with us, remember?”

Cool. So basically, what Yaika was telling me was that I apparently never had the upper hand. Lyili knew about the knife the whole time, and judging by the way she was talking, she was confident it wouldn’t stop her from proving Violetta was the killer.

Whatever. Everything was starting to make sense in my head. I wouldn’t know until I tried.

“Your majesty, we found a knife behind a bookshelf in Volk’s office,” I said. “A knife with blood on it.” I motioned for Brad to bring the plastic bag containing it. He pulled it out of his gelatinous body and plopped it on the table.

The king gasped. “Blood?”

“I believe it was the real murder weapon.”

“But then… what about the loss of life force?”

I shook my head. “That was a ploy set up by Rayne to make it look like a succubus had done it.”

The king’s eyes drifted over to Rayne and then back to me. “But… why would she do that?”

My god, the king was dumb. All brawn, no brains. I had no idea why more demons weren’t concerned about who their leader was. “She used the knife, and then used her sharp canines to leave the marks,” I said. “It was her alibi. The trap that was supposed to pull all suspicion off of herself.”

“But… when would she have had time to do it?”

“It’s simple,” I said, starting to feel my confidence coming back. Lyili wasn’t saying anything. Maybe she hadn’t anticipated my argument to be so good. “After Violetta left her meeting with Volk, which according to Rayne’s own testimony, ended a few minutes early, she went into his office to kill him.”

“To kill him…” the king echoed my words. Nice input.

“Underneath Volk’s desk, we found scraps of burned paper. I believe that Rayne lit some paper on fire, left the room, and locked the door.” My god this felt good. “By the time she got back to her desk, the smoke from the paper traveled up to the fire alarm and set it off.”

“It… all make sense,” the king gasped.

The room aww’d again. This time, it was more like the kind of aww you heard when a magician made something disappear. I felt a rush of adrenaline go through my body. I had pulled off the miracle I needed to turn this around.

Or maybe not.

“Enough.” Lyili slammed her fist down on her table, silencing the crowd.

The king jumped. “Ms. Lyili?”

Lyili whipped her black hair behind her shoulder with one of her glossy hands. “Sir Allard has spun us a very convincing tale now, hasn’t he?”

Uhh… Hadn’t I?

A smile creeped onto her face as her eyes met mine. “I will now proceed to completely crush every point brought up in his argument.”

Seriously? Every point? Could she… at least let me keep one of them?