123. Chain of Misunderstandings
“Ruslan……!”
“Ahhhhhhh!”
Due to the tragedy of losing her only brother to her father, Klavdia couldn’t go to her lover that day.
Norbert, who waited for her at a section of Hersen Palace’s walls, felt worried rather than anxious when she didn’t show up past their promised time.
At that moment, the bell in Hersen Palace’s central tower rang three times.
It announced a death in the Grand Ducal family.
As far as Norbert knew, no one in the Grand Ducal family had been terminally ill.
It meant a sudden death.
“Your Highness, dawn is breaking! We must leave now!”
“No! I can’t leave without knowing what happened inside! What if Klavdia……”
Norbert couldn’t finish his sentence.
Extreme anxiety had overtaken him.
He found it difficult to even voice the possibility, fearing his words might come true.
“Something terrible will happen if we stay longer!”
“If word gets out that an Imperial Prince was secretly nearby when someone in the Grand Ducal family met with misfortune, it could cause unnecessary misunderstandings!”
“Your Highness!”
It could escalate into a national emergency.
But Norbert wouldn’t budge.
His subordinates forcibly put their master on horseback without giving him time to check what happened.
“Let go! Klavdia……”
The escort knight struck the back of the prince’s neck to knock him unconscious as he thrashed about like a madman.
They left Hersen Palace in perfect formation, taking Norbert with them.
He learned it was her brother Ruslan who died that day after arriving at the Charmente Empire.
Norbert understood why his lover couldn’t come to their meeting place and sent a letter consoling her.
Klavdia only realized she had missed her promise with Norbert after somewhat collecting herself from the loss.
Her mother and brother were dead, and her father had lost his mind.
She felt alone in this world.
Even before Ruslan’s death, when she struggled because of her mad father, her lover had been her sanctuary.
Needing someone to lean on, she sent a letter to Norbert.
But the letters they wrote to each other never properly reached their intended recipients.
Oksana had interfered in between.
Waiting for replies that never came, Klavdia’s mind gradually deteriorated.
Her stepmother cunningly took advantage of this.
“Klavdia, my daughter….. You’ve become half the person you were.”
“Mother……”
“That bastard Norbert! How can he be so cruel to you?”
“……”
“How could he completely change his attitude just because Ruslan died! Even if you’re no longer the next Grand Duke’s sister. To throw you away as if you’ve lost all value!”
Tears filled Klavdia’s eyes.
Was it really true?
Had she become unnecessary to Norbert?
Had she lost all value to him now that she wasn’t the next Grand Duke’s sister?
“How dare he toy with my daughter! Klavdia, forget such a terrible man. You have plenty of value just as you are.”
Klavdia, her self-esteem at rock bottom, cried in her mother’s embrace.
Though she had always been an obedient child, Oksana could completely ensnare her through this incident.
“You should reject such a man first!”
“He’s already abandoned me……”
“The mindset is what’s important! Now erase that man from your life and shake off the past completely.”
“Is that possible? Sob…… Mother, I’m so tormented by the thought that I let my brother die because I was distracted by love. I keep thinking I could have prevented it if I had gone earlier.”
“How is that your fault? It’s Nikolai’s fault for provoking your father’s anger.”
Oksana was the one who had enraged her husband Yuri that day.
She had instigated him to want to kill Nikolai.
But no one noticed her schemes.
In truth, she had wanted to strangle Nikolai for a long time.
His birth mother Tatiana kept stirring up feelings of inferiority in Oksana.
She had been the first.
Though she had promised to marry Yuri, they broke up due to opposition from her prospective mother-in-law.
After the first Grand Duchess Yevgenia died, she thought it would finally be her turn.
But that old fox of a woman refused to accept her as a daughter-in-law until the end.
The one the Grand Duchess who had so strongly opposed her had matched with her son was Tatiana.
Tatiana.
‘The woman who took everything that could have been mine!’
She thought Yuri, forced into a second marriage with a woman he didn’t love, would never forget her.
But whatever charm Tatiana had, Yuri who had been cold and indifferent eventually fell in love with her.
A wife loved by her former lover.
The youngest son Nikolai who looked exactly like them both and monopolized the whole family’s love.
When she witnessed this, rage and betrayal overwhelmed her body.
That position should have originally been hers.
‘Tatiana, if only you hadn’t existed……!’
As planned, she made Tatiana lose her position as Grand Duchess and led her to death.
Now she felt she could finally be at peace if she removed Nikolai from her sight.
“Nikolai, you should never have been born. You should have disappeared following your mother. Then you wouldn’t be in this state.”
“……”
“Should I thank you since Ruslan died so early?”
She had originally planned to drive Tatiana’s son, who was like a thorn in her eye, out of Hersen Palace.
Ruslan’s death instead of Nikolai’s was an unexpected harvest.
With this, Yuri came to hate Nikolai even more, even imprisoning him in the tower, effectively eliminating all of Mikhail’s political rivals.
Now the palace was completely her world.
Oksana helped her stepdaughter sit at the desk.
“Ruslan would want you to stop being bound by the past and live a happy new life.”
“Sob……”
“Let’s write a letter right now. You weren’t abandoned. You’re rejecting that prince first. And now you too must move forward.”
Finally bewitched by her, Klavdia wrote a farewell letter as Oksana dictated.
「I have lost my only brother. It was a time to reflect on the importance of family. I don’t want to repeat regretting after losing something again.
Norbert, I cannot marry you at the cost of hurting my father’s heart. Your brother the Emperor is someone who caused my father pain.
If I leave for someone like that too, Father would suffer. Now Father has only three children left. Among them, I’m the only child he can rely on since my siblings are young.
I now plan to marry whoever my father and mother choose for me. Family is more important to me than love. My happiness ultimately comes from my family’s happiness.
I cannot accept your love. It seems our fate ends here.
I’m wishing you find your happiness.」
Norbert received the letter but couldn’t accept the breakup and sent a reply, but after that he never received a single letter from Klavdia again.
Only when he heard news of the Princess’s engagement did he finally realize.
That she had rejected him.
The Princess’s marriage proceeded rapidly.
Then plague spread through the country and her fiancé, a nobleman, lost his life to it.
Klavdia hasn’t married since then, even now past marriageable age.
***
“Yes. I burned them all. You should be grateful to me.”
Oksana, whose schemes were all exposed, started acting brazenly.
“Grateful? For what exactly?”
Klavdia found it absurd.
If she hadn’t interfered, there would have been no reason to break up with Norbert.
He had lived all these long years cherishing even the last letter she sent enough to keep it close to his heart.
How could she be grateful after making two lovers who loved each other more than life itself suffer and separate due to misunderstandings?
“If you had eloped with Norbert then, you would never have seen your father again. You wouldn’t have been able to be with him in his final moments. And you would have lived miserably after giving up everything you enjoyed as a Princess.”
“Ha……”
Klavdia couldn’t help but laugh hollowly at Oksana’s proud attitude as if she had done her a great favor.
“Once you throw away your status as Prince and Princess, what value do you have?”
It contradicted what she had said before.
“You have plenty of value just as you are.”
Klavdia now realized those words Oksana spoke back then weren’t sincere.
“When you faced the harsh reality, you would have ended up hating and resenting each other. Isn’t it thanks to me that it remained a beautiful first love?”
“Stop this nonsense!”
“What an ungrateful girl. Is this how you repay the kindness of raising you when you’re not even my flesh and blood?”
“Mother, you only cared about your biological child in the end. I finally understand your true intentions.”
“What?”
“To install Mikhail as Grand Duke, your stepchildren were in the way. Were you afraid of the power I would gain by marrying the Imperial Prince?”
She struck right at the core sharply.
