Chapter 15

“Different?”

“Well… I don’t want to be friends with him. I want to marry him.”

What kind of expression had Lawrence made back then? Rabiana, caught up in her own emotions, hadn’t even looked at him.

“I’m going to marry Vel! No matter what!”

From that moment on, Lawrence never liked Vel. In fact, he seemed to dislike him even more, which only upset Rabiana. She remembered once grabbing Lawrence and asking him to be nice to Vel. That was the first time Lawrence had looked at her with truly wounded eyes.

“I don’t want to lose you to anyone, Rabiana.”

A month after that, the accident happened.

In the accident that killed her entire family and her friends, Rabiana was the only one who survived.

She had passed out, overcome by smoke and flames, and someone had carried her in their arms.

“You’re coming home with me, Rabiana.”

Through her blinking vision, she caught a glimpse of Lawrence’s face looking down at her. She couldn’t remember whether he had been smiling or crying.

***

“Hhngh… ugh…”

Her feverish body tossed and turned in the bed. Alberto couldn’t tell if she was fighting the illness or battling a nightmare. Either way, he stood with his arms crossed, silently watching over the sleeping Rabiana.

Alberto, leaning his shoulder against the wall, looked exhausted. Yet he was deeply confused.

It was all because of Rabiana.

It wasn’t only that she had suddenly left the estate. That was confusing enough, but more unsettling were the memories that forced their way in after she fainted.

He remembered a young girl’s tear-stained face. He couldn’t recall her features, but he remembered how terribly she had cried, how she reached out and grabbed his hand the moment she saw him, how her body had trembled.

He couldn’t tell when it happened, who the girl was, or even whether his memory was accurate.

“Troublesome.”

The word slipped from Alberto’s lips.

Dealing with noblewomen drained his energy. They always wanted so much—hoping he would be a tender, flawless husband. Fed up, he had chosen Rabiana.

He had expected nothing from a marriage that seemed meaningless either way. And it still held no meaning.

Rabiana was simply troublesome—she required so much attention that he couldn’t just leave her be.

A misjudgment.

Even a blind woman without the will to live still possessed the instinct to survive.

What should he do now?

She no longer met all the conditions he wanted in a wife.

Had he been greedy?

Would finding someone new, even now, consume less needless energy than continuing this marriage with Rabiana? Alberto’s mind was turning through calculations when Rabiana’s sleep-talk cut his thoughts short.

“D-don’t… go…”

He could barely hear her. Alberto paused, then bent closer. Words mingled with her ragged breaths came out wet with tears.

“D-don’t… go…”

“…”

“It’s my fault… please…”

Deciding there was no point in listening further, Alberto straightened. Her brow was furrowed as if she were in pain, and he wondered who appeared in the dream that made her plead so desperately.

The strange one was Alberto.

Rabiana’s sobs were unsettling his emotions.

He had rarely been emotionally affected by anything. It was widely said that both his memories and feelings had vanished long ago.

And yet, the moment he heard Rabiana speak, his chest tightened, and his eyes burned.

Alberto turned his head, laughing hollowly at the absurdity. He didn’t know what part of her words had tugged at his heart.

It certainly wasn’t sudden pity for her situation. When he found her trembling in the restricted zone, his emotions had been far from sympathetic. He had felt annoyance, frustration, and a sense of futility.

So why? Why now?

Why was he stirred by the weeping of a woman whose only role in his life was to bear a child?

Alberto left the room and immediately summoned his aide, Pell.

What had haunted him ever since that first night—the inexplicable feeling of longing he had when he saw Rabiana—was becoming impossible to ignore.

“Investigate Rabiana Selden thoroughly. I want to know everyone she’s ever met and everything about her past.”

***

Alberto’s memory began with arriving at a dark manor, holding a man’s hand.

The man had worked as a stable hand for many years. His back was hunched from bending over horse feed, and his hands, darkened by constant cleaning, were rough and calloused.

“Where are we going?”

Alberto finally asked the question he’d been holding in.

He had awakened in a cabin deep in the mountains, and the man had wept the moment he opened his eyes.

He said he was Alberto’s father.

Alberto didn’t believe him. The man looked far too pitiful to be convincing.

His cheeks were sunken, his face worn down by the years, and his eyes were void of life.

Something about him just felt… wrong.

“Where do you think? To the place you were always meant to be.”

“The place I was meant to be?”

Was there such a place?

No. Before that, Alberto had no memories at all. His mind was so blank that he couldn’t even confirm whether this man was truly his father.

Upon realizing his condition, the man was instead glad. He said it was for the best. That there was nothing worth remembering. That it would only make things harder. That he should erase all the filthy and frightening memories and live a new life.

“Your mother, you see. She was so beautiful, someone like me wouldn’t even dare look at her. She was weak, so unlike her siblings, she couldn’t ride horses, but she kept coming to the stables. She was such a refined young lady, I figured she simply wanted to ride like the others, and I even pitied her. But turns out she was coming just to see me.”

There was no way he could be interested in stories about people he didn’t even know.

“I shouldn’t have let you find that out…”

After that, the man no longer spoke of his past. The journey to the north was tedious.

They often stopped to stay in villages. The man, worried about the quiet and uncommunicative Alberto, dragged him around various places in town.

Around that time, Alberto found the man extremely annoying and unpleasant.

He was already exhausted from the carriage ride. His head felt like it was splitting, and the burns on his back would sting and throb, keeping him from sleeping.

Whenever he tried to rest, the man would push him forward saying there were fireworks or something happening.

“This too will become a memory. It’ll be too late to be thankful for it later.”

He only came to understand those words after arriving at the northern duchy’s castle.

The man stepped forward with Alberto and said something. The people around them were speaking so frantically that all he could make out were fragments: legitimacy, her child, hidden, stable.

“This is outrageous!”

A woman who had been quietly listening suddenly stood up. Her waist-length golden hair swayed, and her face turned bright red like someone who had been humiliated.

“Father. There’s no way my sister would ever have been involved with some lowly stablehand!”

The woman approached with the sharp sound of her heels and grabbed Alberto by the shoulder. Her sharply manicured, red-painted nails jabbed at the side of his neck.

“How could this face possibly resemble my sister’s? There’s not a hint of similarity. Can’t you see he’s lying about her death? He’s after our family’s fortune…”

“Bianca. That’s enough. I’ve heard the rumors too. That the eldest child often met with that stablehand.”

“Maybe it’s true. Maybe this child really is my sister’s. But don’t think for a second she had him willingly. That filthy, vile stablehand must’ve forced himself on her! That’s why she never told anyone! No—no, wait. Did anyone even see her pregnant?”

Her words sank the atmosphere of the mansion into a heavy silence. The man clenched his fists. Alberto looked up at the side of his face, as if studying it. He looked like he was about to explode, to curse and lunge forward—yet he did neither. Instead, the man silently accepted the insults.

Thud.

Then he dropped to his knees.

“It’s true that I harbored feelings for her. I bore a love I never should’ve dared to. But I never forced her. She didn’t speak of the child because… she was afraid of losing him.”