Chapter 3
‘The Crown Prince… was it Lexion?’
For a fleeting moment, she thought it might have been the Crown Prince. But the one she knew bore no trace of silver.
His colors were the gold of sunlight breaking apart and eyes of deep green, like emeralds.
‘Our eyes met… didn’t they?’
Perhaps she was mistaken. Even as she considered it, Johansan was shouting furiously.
“Do you not even think you’re being ungrateful?”
“Ungrateful?”
“It’s thanks to Father’s grace you’ve safely come of age. Do you truly not realize the disgrace you’re bringing upon our house by clinging to His Highness the Crown Prince?”
“……”
“Every moment you pull these stunts, you’re handing His Majesty a reason to seize upon Father’s weaknesses—!”
“Ha!”
Kyrie let out a hollow laugh.
“Don’t you think you’re the one being ungrateful, Johansen?”
“What?”
“You’re the one who left dead rats and insects in Elise’s bed.”
At those words, Johansan’s face turned deathly pale, as though he might faint.
“You…!”
“Why? Did I say something untrue?”
Though most of the rumors surrounding Kyrie were things she herself hadn’t known, there were a few matters she was all too clear about.
How her two older brothers, outwardly welcoming their stepmother and her daughter, had in truth refused to accept them and secretly tormented Elise, pinning the blame on Kyrie in her absence.
How the maids stole the keepsakes her nanny left behind, hiding them away in the Duke’s study, and how, breaking the door latch with a hatchet to retrieve them, she ended up starving for a week, only to lose them for good.
“How could a girl like her have been born in a ducal house? Wasn’t it that the late Duchess had committed some sin?”
Once, she had slapped the cheek of a count’s daughter for speaking so cruelly about her to Elise and was placed under house arrest yet again.
Whenever her heart ached, she’d lock herself away in her mother’s beloved greenhouse to calm her spirit, only for a poisonous plant to be found there, sparking rumors she had tried to poison her stepmother.
The greenhouse was soon demolished, and she lost yet another place of refuge.
As these memories surfaced, Kyrie quietly reached for the pendant around her neck. Her nanny’s voice rose unbidden in her ears.
“This is yours, my lady.”
“Mine?”
“It’s a necklace the late madam meant to leave to you. It’s made of a gem symbolizing happiness.”
“……”
“You must never let anyone take it from you. It holds your happiness.”
That was why she had clung to it so desperately, even as she was beaten bloody.
Because if she was to reclaim even a shred of happiness, she’d have to fight for it, with every last breath, no matter how battered she became.
Kyrie had endured by gritting her teeth and smiling. Her despair and tears were worthless things.
At some point, she began to smile when she was angry, smile when she wanted to cry, smile when her hands were bloodied, smile even as she limped from the punishment room, starving and crawling along the ground. And when she did, the people who mocked her recoiled and fled, as though they’d seen an evil spirit.
And so she laughed and played the mad dog. Before the meager allowance she was given could be embezzled by the servants, she squandered it on dresses and jewels.
She slapped the faces of servants who served her spoiled food, and though her nickname became mad dog, though people called her wasteful and vain, she didn’t care.
Better to squander it herself than let others steal it, at least then, she could sell it off later.
When she protested in her own way against insolent servants, they would watch their step around her for a time.
Though her chamber grew tattered and thick with cobwebs, her jewelry box and wardrobe grew increasingly extravagant.
Through it all, Kyrie wore a bright, dazzling smile, until that expression became second nature to her.
“I shouldered the blame for your crime, and now you call me ungrateful?”
“……”
“Seems to me you’ve chosen the wrong person to accuse.”
As the years passed, the two older brothers who had once framed her began to accept Elise and the stepmother as family, as though nothing had happened.
After the stepmother’s death, they cherished Elise with all their hearts, as if wracked by guilt for their earlier cruelty, as if she were their one and only true sister.
Kyrie, at some point, ceased wondering why such guilt could be so easily mustered for Elise and never once for herself.
Instead, she began doing precisely what Johansen had called ungrateful.
Clinging to the Crown Prince. Flaunting herself in a way that threatened to hand the Emperor leverage over their house.
Enough so that even the Emperor eventually permitted her pursuit of the prince, for fear of causing a greater scandal.
For Kyrie, it was her final option.
A noblewoman can only leave her house through marriage.
Ever since that blood-soaked day of the funeral, she had thought of nothing else. The pendant, slick with her blood, had whispered it to her.
“You must be happy, Kyrie.”
Those words seared themselves into her mind like a brand. Even as infection set in, her fever rising, her consciousness fading, she resolved to survive.
To laugh more brightly than anyone. To pursue happiness more desperately than anyone.
But first, she had to escape the ducal house. Marriage was simply the means to that end.
Of course, no respectable noble family would risk aligning themselves with the notorious mad dog of House Ehrenberg.
No one proposed. And so Kyrie sought a man who, by position alone, could not refuse the courtship of others.
The Crown Prince.
In her debutante year, she secretly approached him with a proposal.
When the time comes, I’ll divorce you on my own fault. I’ll leave with a dowry, and I’ll slip you the book the Duke keeps, the one recording the aristocrats’ dirty secrets.
That man was none other than Lexion, the Empire’s sole heir.
It held no other meaning. He was simply the best option available.
The Emperor, blinded by power, cared little even for his own son. He paid no mind to whomever Lexion chose to associate with, much less his suitors.
And Lexion, eager to catch his father’s eye by any means, seemed to view the public obsession of a duke’s daughter as a useful tool.
“Fine. I’ll marry you when we come of age. But the divorce will be within half a year.”
“……”
“You’ll have to cause a scandal. One so notorious no one in the Empire will fault me for demanding separation.”
He had spoken like a man bestowing charity. Kyrie gladly accepted both his words and the secret betrothal.
It doesn’t matter.
Her name was already long dragged through the mud. A scandal or two was no feat.
And now Johansan, ignorant of that arrangement, was here tormenting her.
How tiresome.
Kyrie made her conclusion, still smiling softly as she whispered.
“Say one more word and this time, I’ll tell Elise everything you did.”
“You…”
“So take my mercy while it’s still offered. Get lost, Johansen.”
“…You’ll regret this.”
Pale as death, Johansan spat the words before finally leaving, heading toward Baron.
‘Regret?’
There’s nothing left to lose, so nothing to regret.
When he was gone, the noble spectators who had gathered for a show lost interest and dispersed.
Left alone in the silence, Kyrie reached up to touch her pendant, stained with her blood, clinging still to her mother’s gift.
‘I will be happy.’
And for that to happen, she had to secure Lexion first.
Contrary to their agreement, Lexion had gone out of his way to avoid her the moment they both came of age.
For the past year, he’d spent most of his time away from the capital, gaining military merits alongside Duke Haswell under the Emperor’s command.
If not today…
If she let him go again, he would vanish under the pretext of another campaign. She needed to extract a definite promise about their marriage before then.
‘I don’t like the way things feel.’
A few days prior, a strange thing had happened, the Duke summoned her to breakfast, something he had never once done in his life.
Without a word, he handed her a booklet. Kyrie still remembered the fine, elegant script written on its cover.
[Flaubel Convent]
She immediately grasped his intention.
‘He wants to lock me away.’
The convent was infamous for its cruelty, so strict it bordered on barbaric. Whispers abounded of women sent there never returning.
I refuse to wither and die in a place like that.
She didn’t know what happiness looked like. But she knew she had to claim it. Otherwise, there was no meaning to everything she’d endured.
And the start of that happiness, whatever it was, would come through Lexion, by marrying him and then divorcing.
‘I’ll never let them write the ending they want.’
As she lowered her gaze, quietly determined, a man watched her from within the Crown Prince’s palace.
“Um, excuse me…”
One of the attendants cautiously addressed the man.
“Your Grace, Duke Haswell.”
At those squeezed-out words, the man turned his head.
