Chapter 4

“You didn’t even love me. You said there was no such thing in you. So why……”

That kind of madness could never have been love.

If Leonid were right in front of her now, she would want to grab him and scream. But she could not see Leonid, so there was no one to confront. And it was the same for him.

“Sob.”

Ellen could no longer hold back the tears that had been rising, and she broke down at the scene where, long after her own death, he was still missing her and suffering.

In the book, he called Ellen’s name with heartbreaking longing and reached out into empty air. He groped through the space around him like a man who had lost his mind. Then he flew into a rage and reduced his study to wreckage, while his terrified attendants could only bow their heads and tremble.

Without thinking, Ellen reached out and touched the page.

As though reaching toward Leonid. But no matter how far she stretched her hand, she could not reach him. There was no path by which two figures living in different times could ever touch.

Ellen quickly pulled back the hand that had been stroking the book.

“Sob.”

Perhaps it was the smallness of the room. Curled in on herself, she couldn’t breathe. Ellen gasped and rolled across the floor for a long while.

“……Where did it all go wrong.”

Ellen wiped away the tears running down her face and stared blankly back over the past.

Had meeting Leonid, being dragged into his harem, been the start of all this misery?

Ellen shook her head. She had been unhappy from the moment she was born.

Lowborn. Half-blood.

Half her blood was that of noble lineage, yet people called her those things. All because her mother had been a serf.

But Leonid had brought Ellen into his harem as though her bloodline meant nothing at all.

“……”

Leonid’s harem was filled with beautiful women. Yet the only one he ever brought to his bed was Ellen alone.

She hadn’t understood it at the time. His obsession and the seething envy of those around her had worn her body and spirit to nothing.

But why was it that she thought she understood now. Those women had been nothing more than hostages.

He had seized the throne through blood, so he had taken the daughters of the nobility as captives to ensure they had no room to think otherwise.

“Why didn’t I see it then.”

Ellen’s face was wet with tears again.

She understood only now that he had never once treated her as a hostage.

Ellen had been Leonid’s only woman. His way of showing it had simply been terribly clumsy and obsessive.

She thought back to what had happened in the Emperor’s bedchamber. Leonid’s pathological fixation was still vivid in her mind.

He was rough and without consideration. There had not been a single day she walked out of Leonid’s bed without difficulty.

Whether it was an attendant or anyone else, if another man so much as met her eyes, neither of them came away unscathed. Ellen had to beg on her knees in his bed until his fury subsided, and the man would either hover near death from t*rture or never return at all.

Had that been love to him.

She didn’t know. What she knew for certain was that she had loved him. It had left her utterly broken……

Loving Leonid had been too painful, and waiting for a heart that never turned toward her had been no different from hell. She’d had no choice but to break free of him.

“……Your Majesty.”

Ellen’s cheek was wet with tears. She picked up the fallen book again.

She had to know. Whatever had happened to Leonid, she wanted to know all of it.

[Leonid Del Raphae. Third of the late Emperor’s three sons and two daughters.

In the year of his birth, an unprecedented catastrophe struck the Cavern Empire.

A plague of unknown origin killed one eighth of the Empire’s population, and most of the livestock perished as well, compounding the disaster with a food shortage.

This caused enormous unrest among the people, as well as among the nobility and the imperial family.

To protect his imperial authority, the Emperor joined hands with the Archbishop of the Holy Council and fabricated a divine oracle.

The fabricated divine revelation was……]

“……That Prince Leonid had received a divine curse, and that was why the catastrophe occurred?”

Ellen could not trust her own eyes.

“The oracle was……fabricated?”

The root of all Leonid’s misfortune. The reason he had climbed to the throne drenched in blood was that very oracle.

Crimson eyes deeper than bloodstains. The only black hair in the entire imperial family. The fact that his appearance differed from the other members of the imperial family, and the crime of having been born in the year the catastrophe struck.

Those two things combined meant Leonid had lived a wretched life all the way up to his ascension to the throne.

‘Wretched is almost too mild a word.’

He had been left to endure his mother’s prolonged *buse, and he had been betrayed by the nanny he had trusted above all others. And in the most brutal way imaginable.

So of course he hated women. Every person who had destroyed his soul had been a woman.

“Eliza En Dri. The Emperor’s second consort and Leonid’s birth mother.”

Ellen read the name from the book.

The Emperor had not produced an heir with the Empress.

All three of his sons were born of consorts. Because of this, the imperial palace was the site of endless fierce struggle over the position of crown prince .

[Eliza, in order to place her firstborn son Kayul Del Raphae on the throne, wanted to prove that she and Kayul had nothing whatsoever to do with the cursed Leonid.

She openly declared that she had merely given birth to Leonid and did not consider him her child. As if to prove it, she subjected him to unrelenting *buse……]

“Ugh.”

Ellen couldn’t suppress her revulsion and retched.

The book described in detail how Leonid had been treated by his birth mother. And the father who had stood by and let it happen.

The Emperor had encouraged the conflict among his consorts. The fighting between women each backed by powerful noble houses and great merchant families brought him considerable advantage. The more fiercely they fought, the more they ate away at each other’s power.

Ellen clutched at her chest. Thinking of Leonid made everything she had suffered at home feel like nothing at all.

“So that’s how he became what he was.”

A tyrant whose name would be etched into history forever.

It may have been an unavoidable path. Everything around him had essentially forced him into bloodshed.

‘Or perhaps.’

Perhaps it was revenge against those who had given him hell. It would have been stranger if Leonid hadn’t lost his mind in the midst of all that.

Ellen turned the pages breathlessly toward the end of the book. Reading it was so agonizing that she couldn’t bear to do anything else.

It was then. A voice broke from between Ellen’s teeth.

“He shouldn’t have……”

She bit down on her lip and swallowed the sob.

In the end, he had gone completely out of control.

After Ellen’s death, he had truly lost his mind. Just as the book described, it was because he tormented himself relentlessly, convinced that responsibility for her death lay with him.

“If I hadn’t run away, it wouldn’t have come to this.”

But she had been unable to bear it. His obsession and the women of the harem had poisoned her body and spirit.

The obsessive behavior of a man she had believed incapable of love…… it wasn’t something anyone could endure with their sanity intact inside that bleak harem.

Ellen had lasted seven years before she could take no more and fled his harem.

‘I thought he would be fine without me……’

His harem overflowed with beautiful women. In other words, there was no shortage of people for Leonid to fixate on, so she had not even worried about him in the moment of her death.

Thinking back on that now sent a pain through her chest like something piercing straight through it. Ellen winced and pressed her hand to her heart.

“Sob.”

She wiped at the corners of her eyes. It was all in a past life. Whatever had happened, she could neither undo it nor go back.

And yet her heart ached as though she might die.

Was it because she finally knew all the truth?

“……”

Her heart pounded wildly. Ellen turned the next page with difficulty.

No one would have welcomed a runaway Emperor.

With a legitimacy and base of support that had always been dangerously unreliable, he became increasingly isolated. Leonid knew it and still did not stop the madness.

He raged even harder. Like a man who was desperate for the end to come quickly.

In the end, he……

Drop. Tears spread across the paper.

This was not a ruin she had caused. Even if her death had been the spark that ignited his downfall, that could not be her fault.

And yet, in the moment the sword pierced Leonid’s heart…… Ellen had put down the book and was tearing at her own chest.

[「Thank you.」

「Gratitude to the man who just stabbed you through the heart. You really weren’t in your right mind after all.」

「Kck. If I had been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.」

The sword twisted as it was wrenched free, and blood gushed like a fountain. Leonid crumpled to the ground and pulled his lips into a sharp, crooked smile.

「……Ellen.」

He spoke her name, and a clot of blood surged up from Leonid’s throat.

「Now at last I can see her ag, ugh.」

Leonid drew in ragged, labored breaths. His lips were stained red with the blood running down them. He paid it no mind and reached up to touch his own chest.

He ran his fingers over the flesh, hacked and ruined, and smiled faintly.

「I want to see her so much it could kill me……」

A single tear traced down Leonid’s cheek. He reached out into the empty air.

The way Ellen had reached toward him in her final moment.

But with nothing touching his hand, Leonid closed his eyes and was gone.]

“Aaah!”

Unbearable pain crashed over her at his death.

Ellen thrashed and swept her hands through the air. As though she could pull Leonid’s body into her arms. But there was nothing to grasp.

Unable to contain her grief, Ellen sank to the floor where she stood. She clutched the book to her chest, pressed her hand over her mouth, and wept.