Chapter 6

“Come when I call and help me. As you can see, I’m not in a position to ask anyone for help, and there’s no one I could ask anyway.”

“You’re asking me to help with personal matters.”

“That’s right. I’m not asking for long. Just until the matter involving Duke Shurn is resolved, as I said before.”

“Hmm.”

Watching Deriel hesitate, she felt he might actually agree. Ellen gripped her skirt hem and hid her anxiety.

“Besides, Duke Shurn will soon……”

“That’s true. That man.”

Deriel’s eyes gleamed with meaning. He seemed to understand what Ellen was implying.

“Yes. So I’m only asking until then. A stretch of time like that is nothing to a spirit.”

“That’s true enough.”

Deep consideration settled into Deriel’s eyes. He could simply refuse and be done with it, but for some reason the words wouldn’t come.

This was practically the Spirit King himself being pushed around by a mere human. Unthinkable. And yet, for this one human called Ellen, he found himself wanting to give in.

“I’ll only call you when I truly need your help. So……”

Please help me.

Ellen couldn’t get the last words out and dropped her head. The way he kept almost giving in but not quite made it seem like he wasn’t going to grant her request after all.

It was at that moment.

“Fine. Returning what was given is also the law of my world. You suffered because of me, so I should make amends for that.”

Just this once. She is his life’s savior, after all.

He concluded that was the reason for his uncharacteristic behavior.

“Good. So our contract is settled with this?”

“It seems you’ve come to understand the spirit world a little. That’s right, we need a contract.”

Deriel snapped his fingers and a transparent parchment appeared.

“Sign here.”

Before his words had even finished, Deriel snapped his fingers once more. A brilliant light swirled around Ellen’s fingertips.

Ellen reached out and wrote her name across the transparent parchment. Then Deriel inscribed his own name over it.

“With this, the contract between you and I is concluded.”

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Deriel said he would reappear when she called and vanished. Ellen sat on the edge of the bed and sank into thought.

‘First I have to leave this house. But I can’t leave empty-handed.’

She would need funds to travel to the capital where the imperial palace stood. She couldn’t arrive with nothing and sleep on the streets.

‘In that case……’

Something came to her as she sat deep in thought. At that moment, a maid flung the door open and stepped into the room to check whether Ellen had woken.

“Oh!”

The maid startled at finding Ellen already up. She quickly composed herself and spoke.

“Miss. The Count is asking for you.”

“……All right. Tell him I’ll be out shortly, please wait outside for a moment.”

“Yes.”

Rosie, one of the manor’s maids, gave a careless nod and left. Ellen watched the spot where Rosie had gone and let out a long breath.

“I really did come back. Judging by how I’m still treated.”

Miss in name only. Rosie had delivered the Count’s message with a look and tone that spoke down to Ellen as though she were beneath her, then disappeared.

If she were to ask for proper attendance on top of that, Rosie might grab her by the collar. That was the kind of existence she was in this household.

Even the servants looked down on her.

‘But not anymore.’

She would never repeat the mistakes of her past life again.

She left the room and followed Rosie to meet the Count.

It had been a long time since she had seen him, but she felt no gladness at all.

He was someone who had treated her like an object, someone she had only ever feared until the day she left this house.

The mere thought of it made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

“Hah……”

In truth, she wasn’t as frightened as she used to be. She had been through far worse things since then.

Even so, the tension was unavoidable.

‘But to change my future, the first thing I have to do is confront Father.’

Only by resolving this confrontation would there be any hope of escaping a hellish life.

Having sorted her thoughts in an instant, Ellen walked down the narrow corridor with a resolute expression.

She descended the narrow staircase from the attic to the floor below and came out into a long hallway. Count Nockton’s study was at the far end.

Ellen stood before the door and stared at the firmly closed entrance.

“Aren’t you going in?”

“Just a moment.”

Ellen gathered her thoughts, recalling the point in time she had returned to.

According to what she had confirmed with Deriel, she had been sent back to two days after the day she saved him.

That meant this was the day she had barely opened her eyes after being absurdly dragged back home following her failed escape.

She had collapsed right after saving him and had been lying there ever since.

“What odd timing.”

“Pardon?”

“No, I wasn’t speaking to you. Don’t mind it.”

The nanny’s betrayal, which would give Leonid his defining trauma around women, was set to occur on the day he came of age, in the dead of winter at the start of next year. It was spring now, so there was still time.

Time to pull him out of the fire.

‘Leonid……’

Ellen bit down hard on her lip and pushed open the heavy door, stepping inside. The Count, seated at his desk, looked up with impassive eyes.

“So your senses have finally returned.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then you’ll need to explain what happened two days ago.”

“That was……”

The eyes that held not a trace of feeling made her breath catch.

But I can’t back down here.

She clenched her fists tight.

“I left the house.”

“You dare say such a thing to me.”

Bang! Count Nockton slammed his broad desk.

“You’d be even angrier if I said I came to negotiate.”

“You’ve lost your mind after being carried home unconscious. Nothing else could explain words like that coming out of your mouth.”

“No. I’ve never been clearer.”

Ellen did her best to ignore her pounding heart at the Count’s outburst and kept her expression calm. She lifted her chin and sat down on the reception sofa in the study.

Count Nockton stared at her with disbelieving eyes.

“Not a word of apology, not even a hint of remorse. I have no desire to speak with you any further. Go to your room and reflect on yourself. No, you’re not even worth sending back gently. Alec, are you there.”

He reached for the bell pull to summon his chief chamberlain.

“Compose yourself, Father.”

“Father? You dare address me that way?”

“I know. That you don’t consider me your child. But what comes next is the real matter, so please hear me out.”

“And why should I?”

“Duke Shurn.”

The hand on the bell pull stopped.

Of course it did. Duke Shurn was the golden money line of the man she could barely bring herself to call father. Wasn’t that the very reason he was trying to hand over a daughter not yet twenty to an old duke nearing seventy?

“You’re planning to sell me to him. To make a tidy profit off a marriage transaction.”

“How do you know that. No, it doesn’t matter even if you do.”

How dare you, with your standing.

The Count gave a cold, contemptuous smile.

“It concerns my own marriage. How can it not matter.”

“So. Are you here to defy me?”

Count Nockton shot back in a sharp voice. As though any defiance from someone like her was utterly meaningless.

“Defiance.”

In truth, this was the one matter over which Ellen had fought with everything she had. The woman who had lived her whole life in quiet, wordless submission.

All it had earned her was cruelty.

She would not do that this time. There was no need to.

Recalling the past, Ellen quietly curved her lips upward. Then she dropped her bombshell.

“Nothing like that. What if I agreed to the marriage willingly?”

“Of course you should agree willingly. What kind of thing is that to say.”

“It isn’t obvious at all. I had every intention of resisting with everything I had. Being sold off to a man nearly fifty years my senior. Even for me, that’s not something easy to endure, wouldn’t you say?”

“What good would your defiance do.”

“Would it really? If I made a scene refusing to go, I imagine Duke Shurn, who wishes to take me as his bride, would be terribly pleased.”

He was a man who had accumulated a staggering fortune, second to none in the Empire, not to mention his title. Even if it had been built through every manner of filthy and corrupt means.

What would it look like if she trembled and recoiled in front of a duke of that standing?

It would put a real crack in the lofty duke’s dignity. If his wounded pride led him to declare he would not marry Ellen, the Count might find himself in a situation where he couldn’t get what he wanted.

Count Nockton’s eye twitched as he shuddered. The price he was selling this girl for. Something like that absolutely could not happen.

The Count steadied his cracking voice and tapped the desk.

“You don’t actually think I’d stand by and watch that happen, do you?”

Of course not. Count Nockton.

The thought of the man she could barely call a father made her stomach turn on its own.

In her past life, he had tormented Ellen mercilessly for refusing the marriage.

Locking her in her room was only the beginning, and her already meager meals were frequently cut off under the guise of making her reflect.

When she still wouldn’t change her mind, beatings followed. In the end, fighting desperately to survive, she had been forced to accept the Count’s will.

‘But this time it won’t go that way.’

As long as she knew the future, she would never have to endure that kind of cruel suffering.

Duke Shurn would never be able to marry her.