Chapter 33

With the maid gone, opening her mouth became even harder. Owen didn’t even look at Lea. He continued what he had been doing, as though she weren’t in the room at all. Lea took a breath in front of the man who refused to acknowledge her presence and forced herself to speak.

“Owen.”

“……”

“I have something to say. Something important……”

Only then did Owen set down his pen and look at her steadily. His expression was that of someone watching a pet dog bark in an irritating way. Dismissive, and faintly annoyed. But Lea didn’t back down. She needed at least a minimum of privacy.

“What.”

Even seeing the resolve in Lea’s eyes, Owen maintained his openly indifferent expression. His manner suggested he would hear her out, just barely, and Lea felt her confidence falter again, but she opened her mouth.

“I found out…… that you’ve been having me watched.”

“……”

“Owen. I, I need privacy too. At least a minimum of……”

Lea said it with a tense face. A heavy silence hung in the room for a few seconds. Owen looked at her with an unreadable expression before letting his contempt show openly.

“Privacy. The fact that you ever had such a thing is more surprising to me. Wasn’t that something you never had to begin with?”

“……”

“Or now that your body is comfortable, you’ve decided you’d like to start claiming things like that?”

Lea closed her mouth at Owen’s sarcasm. He was half right and half wrong. Until now, Lea’s hardships had been too great to think about privacy. In a textile factory, privacy was a word that barely existed for the women workers.

But that didn’t mean she was accustomed to someone following her around and watching her every move at all hours. Those eyes everywhere…… If this kept up, she might truly lose her mind. Lea kept her gaze on the floor, chose her words carefully, and pushed back.

“I know my position. So I’m not asking to be completely free…… But I can’t live under surveillance every hour of the day.”

“Is that so.”

Anyone would feel resistance at the thought of everyone watching and listening, even to what they eat and what they mutter to themselves. But Owen smiled with contempt at her objection.

“I happen to know very well what it’s like to live under surveillance all day.”

“……”

A single sentence was all it took to close Lea’s mouth. Owen was speaking of the time he had been kidnapped and kept under Lea’s watch. She realized only then that she had been fighting a battle that was against her from the start.

“You……”

But instead of yielding as she usually did, Lea opened her mouth with a composed face. She hadn’t noticed it before, but once she did, the suffocation was real. She could accept that no one took her side or tried to get close to her. Loneliness was familiar. But everyone around her watching and listening to her every word and action was an entirely different matter.

“I know you resent me.”

“……”

“And I know you have reason to…… Even so, Owen, I have no power at all. Someone like me isn’t even worth watching. So……”

Lea’s words were desperate and wretched, like begging. She was used to diminishing herself, and it was also the truth. She couldn’t escape from this vast residence, and even if she did, she had nowhere left to go. Her face had been printed in the newspaper, and Owen would certainly find her wherever she ran. What Lea wanted was the smallest, most basic freedom. The only mercy she was asking of him was enough to let a tethered dog turn over a small bucket and have somewhere to rest.

“Lea.”

But Owen didn’t let her finish. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through narrowed eyes as he continued.

“That’s for me to decide. Not you. How many times do I have to say it before it fits inside that small head of yours? You can’t do anything, and you’re not to think about anything.”

“……”

“Well…… I’ll grant you the part about having no power. What I’m curious about is what level of intelligence leads someone who knows that to keep bothering me.”

“I, I……”

The harsh words made Lea flinch, but her heart, already worn ragged by so many insults, no longer lurched at the impact. She spoke in a calm voice.

“I have nowhere to go anymore…… No room to make other choices. Even if I ran, finding me again wouldn’t be difficult for you.”

“Easy doesn’t mean it isn’t a nuisance.”

Owen turned his eyes back to his papers and said it without interest.

“Even stepping on a bug becomes a nuisance the moment you have to think about it.”

Lea understood perfectly well who the bug referred to. But even after being compared to a bug, she couldn’t bring herself to leave.

Owen knew she was still standing there and deliberately ignored her with complete thoroughness. In the silence, the only sound was the scratch of a pen on paper.

Watching Owen with no apparent intention of continuing the conversation, Lea spoke first. She bit her lip with an anxious expression and pleaded.

“I’ll never run. I promise.”

“That’s what you’d say.”

Owen’s eyes narrowed as he looked her up and down. The gaze was meant to demean, and Lea’s cheeks flushed, but Owen didn’t stop his mockery.

“If you were bait like a piece of meat in a mousetrap, I’d have stopped worrying. I’d have given you the privacy you want.”

“……”

“But unfortunately, the bait I’m using has legs. And a brain, which means it’s capable of something called betrayal.”

Owen tapped his temple pointedly with one fingertip. Then he continued, as though granting a great concession.

“Of course, if you’re willing to give up either one of the two reasons you make me uneasy, I could set my concerns aside.”

“……”

Lea was silent. Owen’s words meant he had no intention of lifting the surveillance unless she gave up her legs or her mind, one or the other.

The only kind of persuasion she knew was to diminish herself, so Lea lowered herself once more and said:

“I’m not clever enough to deceive you.”

“What are you talking about. You’re quite clever.”

Owen scoffed at her words.

“You deceived me, after all.”

But there was not a trace of humor in what Owen said next. Cold, sharp green eyes looked straight through her.

You deceived me, after all.

Those few words, that single look, froze Lea’s heart in an instant, a heart that had grown numb to insult after insult. Owen’s words were not simple mockery or reproach. They shook the deepest layer of her guilt and self-loathing all at once.

Every time Owen brought up their past like this, the past that had put her here, Lea wanted to die. She could endure being called low, or slow, or worthless. But not this.

“……I, I’ll go now.”

Lea’s shoulders sagged as she stood there with trembling lips. She gave up on her privacy and turned to leave.

“Wait.”

But when Lea turned to walk out of the study, Owen called after her. She turned back. Her eyes went to him with a faint hope that he might, on a whim, grant even a small part of what she had asked. But Owen had not the slightest intention of doing so.

“It would be a waste to let you leave when you’ve come all this way.”

“What do you……”

“Take it off.”

The tone was light and matter-of-fact, as though asking for something perfectly ordinary. Lea’s face went pale and then red. She glanced at the windows, covered by curtains but still bright with daylight, and hesitated.

“It’s, it’s still daytime……”

“What does that matter. It’s not as though your body stops opening just because it’s day.”

The words were hard to believe coming from someone with such a composed manner of speaking. Lea knew Owen wasn’t simply teasing but was entirely serious, yet she couldn’t bring herself to undress without resistance.

Until now, their time together had always been at night, and always in the bedroom. Owen himself had acted throughout as though everything they did was less about affection or pleasure and more simply Lea’s duty as his wife. She had never once imagined he would demand it in broad daylight, in the study.