A woman's heart was the most poisonous of all—there was absolutely nothing wrong with that saying.
Shiraishi Yoshijo raised his hand in fury, wanting to slap her, but the woman glared fiercely at him. "You bastard! You had the nerve to make this mess, but not the nerve to clean it up. And now you need to take it out on a woman?"
In the end, the slap never fell.
Shiraishi Yoshijo looked utterly dejected. Rubbing his brow, he said, "Can you give me a little time?"
"Time?" Anna said, disappointed and crestfallen. "No amount of time will do any good. You only ever pretend not to understand when you clearly do. Nianze's eldest son is already twelve. It'll soon stop being an era for sons and daughters—the grandchildren are all they'll have left, and sooner or later those people will bleed them dry. And you don't do a damn thing properly. You conquered the Land of Earth, only to hand it over to Iwagakure. Then after taking the Land of Lightning, you gave the power back to its princess. So what if she bore you children? Don't you know how brutal struggles for power are? I truly don't understand what you're doing. Are you actually brain-dead?"
"You're the brain-dead one! Your whole family is brain-dead!"
"We are family."
Shiraishi Yoshijo plopped down on a stone amid the ruins and cursed in exasperation, "You stupid, poisonous, horrible woman! I must've been blind to get together with you in the first place, and I even treated you like a treasure and made you empress. You made this whole damned mess, and you won't even leave me a way out!"
"Oh, so you've finally said what you really think! Shiraishi Yoshijo, I knew from the time I was little that you were