【 Guide to Playing the Role of Grand Duchess 】

“We have arrived, Your Highness.”

As the carriage came to a stop, the momentum tilted her body briefly forward before it settled back into place.

It was the Grand Duchy estate, reached after several days of travel. Caesar stepped out of the carriage with weariness plain on his face.

The sky had cleared for the first time in a long while, and a vivid blue filled his entire field of view.

His estate was as quietly serene as ever, and he liked that stillness.

But the tranquility that had seemed as though it might go on without end was soon to be broken.

Two figures came rushing toward him from the direction of the entrance. They were the butler Christopher and the head lady’s maid Laura.

Always impeccable without so much as a hair out of place, they looked unusually flustered today.

Christopher and Laura barely managed to suppress their labored breathing as they paid their respects to their lord.

“Welcome back, Your Highness.”

“Yes.”

They were capable. Above all, they were people who never lost their composure in their effort to maintain the perfection Caesar demanded. The mere fact that they were this unsettled was enough to tell him that something out of the ordinary had occurred at the estate.

Caesar asked Christopher in a low, measured voice.

“What happened?”

“We escorted the Grand Duchess, who arrived a short while ago, to the room we had prepared. However…….”

“Tell me on the way there.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

It was the moment his principles were already being broken.

He had anticipated this the moment another person set foot in his domain, but it had come far too soon. His steps moved without hesitation, cutting through the corridor.

The place where Caesar came to a stop was the Grand Duchess’s dressing room, prepared for Adelia.

A commotion was already leaking through from inside.

The moment he looked in through the open door of the dressing room, the place was in complete disarray.

“This one too. I don’t like any of them.”

Adelia, the culprit behind the chaos and the source of the commotion, was flinging dresses in every direction as she rattled off scathing commentary on each one.

The fabric was shoddy, she said. The style was out of fashion. The colors were not to her liking. The reasons were as varied as the dresses themselves.

The maids standing beside her were crouching low, at a complete loss for what to do.

Head lady’s maid Laura, who had been watching the scene alongside him, leaned in and quietly informed Caesar.

“The truth is… ever since she arrived, she has been saying that nothing in the Grand Duchy estate is to her liking. At first she took issue with the furniture and furnishings in her room and left it in a shambles, and today the dressing room has become like this…….”

“Everyone out.”

No sooner had Laura finished speaking than a low voice descended like a north wind.

The maids, who had only then noticed Caesar’s presence, hurriedly bowed their heads and filed out.

But there was one exception. Adelia alone remained.

She looked at Caesar with a composed expression and spoke.

“You’re back? There were a few things in the Grand Duchy estate that needed attending to. So I was giving some instructions in advance.”

Luna’s plan to be set aside by him had begun the moment she arrived at the Grand Duchy estate.

But now that everyone had withdrawn and the two of them were alone in the dressing room, nothing but a terrible silence hung between them.

Right. A wild filly that acts up must be broken in.

Caesar’s silver-grey eyes were frozen cold. The corner of his mouth twitched slightly as he spoke.

“Instruction? Instruction, you say. Since when did you take sole charge of instruction in this household?”

“Well… if there are areas that fall short, correcting them is… the duty of one’s superior.”

But no answer came from his lips.

Only a short, humorless laugh slipped out.

Caesar stepped over the dresses scattered carelessly across the floor without a second thought and moved toward Adelia.

Drawing up right before her face, he spoke in a low voice.

“Do you think becoming Grand Duchess makes you something?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Or perhaps you have become intoxicated by the empty title of Grand Duchess.”

“What exactly have I done that is so…….”

“Otherwise there would be no reason to pull something like this the moment you arrive at the estate. And with such an air of having waited for it, at that.”

At Caesar’s words, her eyes wavered almost imperceptibly with something like alarm.

A cold bead of sweat traced its way down her spine.

She composed herself inwardly and spoke to him, keeping her face carefully neutral.

“I simply found the room I am to live in and the dresses not entirely to my liking. As you know, I have never been able to tolerate anything that is not beautiful.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. I believe it is only natural for the mistress of a household to do at least this much. You are said to be enormously wealthy, are you not? If you have the means, spending it on maintaining one’s dignity is a matter of course. Surely you are not going to be petty about money?”

She spoke with her back held perfectly straight.

A taut tension hung between Caesar and Adelia.

Even in the face of her brazen words, Caesar maintained an expressionless face without a single crack.

His impassive reaction was somehow more frightening, but she pressed on with her performance. Judging by the look of barely concealed distaste on his face, it seemed to be working to some degree.

At last Caesar dropped his gaze without interest and picked up one of the dresses lying on the floor.

Riiip―

A sharp tearing sound cut through the quiet and rang out through the room. It was the sound of soft fabric being torn apart in strips.

The sound went on for a while, and it felt like a warning spoken without words.

A cold chill, like icy water thrown over the room, was all that remained in the dressing room.

Only after he had completely destroyed one dress did Caesar’s hands stop. He spoke with a perfectly composed face, as though nothing had happened.

“It seems we will need to bring in new dresses, just as you said. They are in quite a state, after all. What do you think?”

At his question, Adelia’s body gave an involuntary flinch and trembled.

Whether from the tension, her voice came out cracked.

“Y, yes.”

And so two gazes, each concealing what lay beneath, passed between them.

The cold sweat that had been running down her back in a steady stream had by now soaked through entirely.

The sharp tension still had not lifted when Caesar spoke to her again in a voice that might almost have sounded gentle.

“Before that, I have a request. This evening, let us dine together.”

“Pardon? Wh, why?”

The alarm in her voice came through plainly in that moment.

A dinner invitation, suddenly, in a situation like this. Just imagining it was enough to turn her stomach.

“Does a husband and wife sharing their first proper meal together require a reason? Surely you do not intend to enjoy the privileges while abandoning the obligations?”

The words struck squarely on the mark, and she hid the discomfort on her face as she forced the corners of her mouth upward.

“Haha… of course not.”

“Then I will see you later.”

He walked out of the dressing room at an unhurried pace, as though nothing had happened.

In the spot where Caesar had stood, the shreds of the dress he had torn lay scattered about carelessly.

Only after Caesar had disappeared completely did Adelia, or rather Luna, quietly press a hand to her chest.

“Phew…….”

Luna was currently pouring all her effort into playing the part of a spoiled marchioness’s daughter.

Adelia’s reputation had not been built in a single day.

Any noble who had set foot in society even once could not have been unaware of her name.

She had been embroiled in scandals with any number of men, and wherever she went she stirred up trouble both large and small.

Her willful nature had reached the point where society had taken to whispering that she was an unbroken wild filly.

It was no different at the banquets held in the imperial palace, where she paid no mind to time or place.

A tipsy old duke had clung to her with persistent attention, and Adelia had reached out without a moment’s hesitation and yanked his wig clean off his head.

The suddenly exposed bald head brought a suffocating silence crashing down over the banquet hall.

The nobles hurriedly covered their mouths with fans and handkerchiefs to hide their expressions, but what played at their lips was unmistakably mockery.

Rumors followed that the duke, who had been known as a great lover of parties, was so mortified that he shut himself in his estate and refused to go out for quite some time.

Adelia had been as warm and dear to Luna as any friend could be, but to nearly everyone outside of Luna, she was endlessly and entirely her own law.

A great many people called her a woman of insufferable arrogance not worth associating with, and for someone like that to change a full hundred and eighty degrees overnight was something anyone would find suspicious.

To avoid raising suspicion, she had to play the role of Adelia perfectly.

That was why, the moment she arrived at the Grand Duchy estate, she had picked fault with even the smallest things and made a deliberate show of behaving as she pleased.

And there was another reason Luna had to keep up the act: to cut off the dangerous variable that was Caesar.

She needed to buy enough time before Luna, or rather the person presumed to be Adelia occupying Luna’s body, returned to the estate.

The leave she had told the estate about was roughly ten days.

To find out why Adelia had disappeared and where she had gone, there was no choice but to hold on.

Loveless political marriages were common enough among the nobility in any case, and she had heard that many noble couples lived as strangers to each other.

The plan for now was to drive away any goodwill with her characteristic air of insufferable arrogance and keep as much distance from Caesar as possible. To live side by side as though the other barely existed, and head off any unnecessary trouble before it could take root.

Fortunately, Luna had a talent for performance, and she was able to play the role of Adelia without difficulty.

She had been standing in for her since childhood, after all.

But the image of Caesar moments ago, his face cold as he tore the dress apart without a second thought, kept surfacing in her mind.

That expressionless face whose inner workings she could not begin to guess, and the cool, sunken quality of his gaze.

Would she really be able to manage going forward?