Prologue

“They do say this shouldn’t happen, yet you’re quite soaked, Adeline.

At his gaze, which somehow seemed angry, Adeline pulled up the skirt hem that had fallen all the way to her hips. But the skirt did not even make it past her knees before slipping back down to her hips once again.

A cold breeze brushed over the damp fabric. At first it was a stimulus, and the next moment it became awareness. Awareness that the door leading to the balcony was open.

Since this was the third floor, there was no way anyone could see her from outside the balcony, but the very fact that they were doing this with the door open was deeply embarrassing.

The moment Adeline’s wavering gaze turned toward the balcony, a spiteful finger pressed hard against the round, damp patch on the cloth.

“What are you going to do if you’re already like this. We’ve barely done anything.”

“Ishiel, w, wait a moment.”

Adeline’s voice trembled pitifully. It was the sort of voice that made it hard to tell whether she truly meant to ask him to wait a moment or not. Embarrassed as though her true feelings had been discovered, Adeline’s face turned as if she might burst into tears at any second.

“I feel like I’ll be blamed if I stop.”

Ishiel’s lips twisted at an angle. His hand seemed as though it would brush back her disheveled hair, but instead it seized her br*ast.

“Ah……”

A m*an mixed with surprise slipped out. Adeline bit her lip. This was not even the first time she had done such things with him, and yet for some reason she felt overwhelmingly ashamed. Was it because of the scar on his arm that she had never seen before, or because his touch had somehow grown rougher?

Or perhaps it was the shame of committing such an improper act with another man the moment her husband had died. There was not even a single blade of grass yet growing over his grave, and already she had brought another man into her bedroom.

If anyone found out, they would point at her and call her a shameless woman.

“Please, the door, at least the door……”

She begged him at least to close the balcony door, but Ishiel remained entirely absorbed in her chest, as though he could not hear her pitiful voice at all.

“It feels like they’ve grown a little bigger.”

As if measuring a lump of bread dough, he gripped Adeline’s br*ast in one hand and shook it up and down. It was unbearably humiliating, but inside her belly a heat she could no longer control kept rising.

“Really? Have they gotten bigger?”

“I, I don’t know.”

Adeline shook her head. She had never particularly felt that her chest had gotten any bigger.

“It’s your body, so why don’t you know? You can tell when you put your clothes on and things like that.”

A faint irritation colored Ishiel’s voice as he asked again. Why was he angry? He had always liked Adeline’s full br*asts. Then if they had gotten bigger, should he not be even more pleased?

“Mm……!”

Her puzzlement did not last long. Without warning, he twisted her n*pple. As though he was annoyed that she was thinking about something else right in front of him.

“How much must they have been touched and kneaded.”

He clicked his tongue, sounding displeased.

“Well, he could touch them legally, so it’s not as if he would’ve left them alone, unless the bastard was impotent.”

Still, it pisses me off. Ishiel muttered. Adeline could not understand what in the world he was talking about. Perhaps it was because her senses were focused on the tingling space between her legs, made weak by the pinching of her n*pple.

How had things ended up like this. By the time she came to her senses, she was sitting atop the bedroom table with her legs spread wide open, receiving his tongue.

And those same legs were now trembling from the sharp heat that had begun with a kiss.

“N, no more……”

Squeezing out what little reason she had left, Adeline pushed at his shoulder. It was hardly a forceful gesture at all, but it seemed to have offended Ishiel’s temper.

There was spite in the touch of his fingers as he caught the red wetness between his index and middle fingers and rubbed it. The kiss that seemed as though it would swallow up Adeline’s lips was terribly rough.

The tongue that pushed in through her parted lips, opened by her m*ans, stirred through every corner of her mouth.

Because of that, she lacked air, but she did not twist her head away or spit out his tongue. She only tapped at his shoulder as if knocking, asking for breath. Whenever she did that, Ishiel had always given Adeline room to breathe. That was why she did it, but…….

“You’re obedient. Was that your husband’s preference?”

A misunderstanding had somehow occurred. The voice murmuring to itself in its own mistaken conclusion was dark and suggestive.

“Mmh.”

His fingers pushed aside her soaked undergarment and slipped in. Adeline trembled at the rough sensation against her tender flesh.

“My, Adeline. It seems the material of your underwear is rather poor. It doesn’t absorb any of your wetness at all. Look, it’s pooled up in here.”

At the fingers teasing the entrance, a wet sloshing sound echoed all through the room. Adeline’s face flushed bright red.

Ishiel’s once delicate hands had now become wholly those of a seafarer’s, and the boy who used to grow shy even over a kiss had become a man who spoke vulgar things without the slightest hesitation.

He suddenly felt unfamiliar. Was that why? The touch of his hand below was so intensely stimulating. Even though he was only doing what he had always done.

“Haa, hn……”

Adeline’s chest swelled greatly, then fell, over and over. Ishiel, who had quietly watched her catching her breath, suddenly pushed a finger into the narrow entrance.

“Ah……!”

His fingers, thickened at every joint, entered, forcing open the closed passage. As he stirred through her heated interior, he seemed to decide he could add one more, and pushed in another finger.

Her wet opening accepted him easily enough, but at the sensation of being spread below after so long, Adeline did not know what to do with herself. Her arms, which had been wrapped around Ishiel’s nape, tightened with force.

“Relax, Adeline.”

His gentle kiss landed at the corner of her squeezed-shut eyes. Unlike his quite tender voice, the hand moving inside her showed not the slightest consideration for Adeline’s condition. Tears welled in her eyes at the sensation that shot sharply up her spine.

His thumb, full of malice, found the swollen nub hidden in the flesh and rubbed it. Adeline alone was the one left at the mercy of that cruelty.

At the sensation that made her toes curl of their own accord, Adeline jerked her hips.

“Ah, ahng!”

A strange sound filled the room. It would be terrible if this were heard outside. Adeline forcibly shut the lips that would not close on their own.

“How many times did you do it with your husband?”

There was no way she would have counted something like that. Clinging to him, Adeline weakly shook her head.

“I asked how many times you did it with your husband.”

As though merely shaking her head was not enough for him, he asked again. He did not even hesitate to threaten that if she did not answer, he would put in one more finger.

His ring finger began prodding insistently at the opening beside the one already holding two of his fingers. Not three, not three, I can’t take it. The answer burst from Adeline’s lips like a m*an.

“Hngh, I, I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

Wouldn’t there be fewer people who counted such things? It would have been nice if she could have given such a logical answer, but Adeline’s head could no longer think properly because of the rising pleasure.

“Ah, is it because you did it too many times to count?”

So you weren’t a couple in name only after all. He muttered. F*ck, this is rotten. Adding curses that the Ishiel of the past would never have dared to utter aloud.

Startled, Adeline lifted the head she had rested against his shoulder. At that moment, she met Ishiel’s eyes as he looked down at her.

“Well, you were husband and wife for five years, so of course you must’ve done it more times than you could count. It’s alright, Adeline. Really.”

It sounded not alright in the slightest.

“We can just do it even more than that from now on.”

“W, we said only once……”

Looking down at Adeline with the gentle eyes like an autumn wheat field that she had once loved, Ishiel whispered,

“Only once, Adeline? You’ve been shut away in this backwater for so long your arithmetic has gotten worse. There’s no way the price of your life could be worth only that little.”