[A Birth Secret Viewing Ticket is now available for exchange. Would you like to exchange it?]

My mind went blank at this unexpected message.

While staring blankly at it, my hand moved on its own and pressed “Yes.”

Instantly, a completely different world unfolded before my eyes.

“……”

I found myself sitting on a hard floor.

Where am I…?

Everything was dark, but through glass windows, tree branches swayed gloomily in the storm.

The gallery-like glass windows were covered with square bars. They were different from the windows at St. Berte Castle.

Apart from the faintly visible scenery, everything else was in darkness.

I was definitely in the bedroom just now…

Unable to see anything around me, I hesitantly stood up.

When I stepped forward to approach the window, my shoes were wet. The chilling sensation made me flinch in surprise.

Barely standing up with weakened hands braced against the floor, I felt coldness rising from the wooden floor where my wet shoes had stepped. Belatedly, I realized my clothes were also damp.

As the cold rushed in, I crossed my arms and hugged myself, my body trembling.

BOOM!

At that moment, lightning struck.

The room’s interior, previously difficult to discern, flashed with light.

“……!”

In that instant, I saw indistinguishable gray faces!

BOOM! CRASH!

When thunder rumbled again, I realized their gazes were focused on me.

It was eerie.

My mouth wouldn’t open easily, and my body froze even more.

“…Who are you?”

Just as I managed to speak, I suddenly felt strange that they were looking down at me.

That is… eyes looking down at someone much smaller.

Like gazes looking down at a child.

Tap—

As I instinctively tried to step back, maids entered and lit candles all at once.

The room filled with light devoid of warmth.

Strangers I had never seen before stood with expressionless faces.

From the cabinet and frames behind them, I could tell this was someone’s home.

Then someone broke the silence.

“What a pretty child.”

A woman with hair similar to mine but with a deeper red tint stepped forward as if examining me.

She looked familiar.

“……”

Countess Azanie…?

She approached me with a much younger face than when I had seen her before, looking down at me.

She bent her knee to meet my eyes and smiled, showing teeth so white it sent chills down my spine.

“Dillan, come here and say hello.”

My hair stood on end the moment I heard the name.

I was certain this smiling woman was Countess Azanie.

So this place…

A boy with black hair and green eyes approached with steady steps at Countess Azanie’s words.

The boy, who looked like a well-crafted doll, still retained some features of the Dillan I had seen a few days ago.

His eyes were extremely hostile toward me.

So this is Lea’s past?

“This child will be your sister. She’s ten years old. We’ve named her Lea.”

Ten years old?! I looked back and forth between the Azanie mother and son, then hurriedly looked down at my hands.

The hands I saw were much smaller than the ones that had just pressed the message.

The Mary Jane shoes I wore also looked smaller.

“Dillan. What are you doing? I told you to greet her.”

I quickly looked up at the man’s voice.

A man with blond hair and green eyes glanced at me coldly as if I were bothersome, then urged Dillan to greet me.

“Can’t you hear me, Dillan!”

“I was about to, Father.”

Father? So that man is Count Azanie?

I raised my head again to look up at the man.

With his protruding belly and mustache, he seemed displeased by my gaze and put his hands behind his back, raising his chin arrogantly.

However, he didn’t say anything more.

“Hello, Lea.”

Dillan greeted me in a stiff tone, looked me over, then turned away.

Countess Azanie let out an awkward laugh and beckoned to someone else.

“Lily? Come greet your sister.”

“I don’t want someone like her as my sister!”

“Shh, you shouldn’t say such thoughts out loud. Darling, our daughter is just being truthful because she doesn’t know how to lie. Look at Lea. Her red hair takes after her mother, doesn’t it? And her green eyes take after her father. Now, greet your sister, Lily.”

When Countess Azanie forcibly pushed young Lily’s back, Lily reluctantly approached and stopped in front of me.

“Go on?”

At Countess Azanie’s sweet voice, Lily grabbed my shoulders tightly and pulled me into a hug.

“Don’t expect me to treat you like a sister. Mom said I can treat you however I want. I just needed a new toy.”

After pulling away from me, Lily grinned.

It felt like a heavy blow to the back of my head, as her words didn’t seem like something a young child would say.

Lily ran straight back to Countess Azanie.

“Look, Lily is welcoming her sister warmly, isn’t she?”

Countess Azanie had the nanny pick up Lily and spoke to her husband in a proud tone.

Countess Azanie had introduced me as a ten-year-old child.

And she said they had named me Lea.

From the reactions of Countess Azanie and the children, I could infer they were meeting me for the first time.

“……”

Was this why Lea couldn’t remember her past in the original story?

Considering how Lea had suffered terrible *buse and blindly focused on killing the Grand Duke, I had guessed she had been tormented for a long time.

But if Lea was ten years old now…

That meant she had lived such a difficult life for at least 10 years.

A chill ran through me at the future I could imagine without seeing it, making my body tremble just as Count Azanie’s expression contorted.

“Why are you standing there staring blankly?”

“Oh my, she must be scared. It’s all new to her, of course.”

Countess Azanie casually replied and grabbed my shoulder.

Unlike her smiling face, her grip was so strong and painful that my head automatically turned up to follow her.

“Welcome to our home, Lea!”

BOOM!

Lightning struck again.

Her laughter, buried under the thunder, echoed in my ears.

“Looking at you, there’s so much I’ll need to teach. You’ll have to listen well to your mother.”

It felt like my heart was being trampled.

Where had I been brought from?

Given their pointed mention that I resembled them in appearance, did that mean I was an illegitimate child? Or perhaps an orphan completely unrelated to them?

Had they simply taken a street child to use as a tool to eliminate Carlo?

“Don’t you think so?”

Countess Azanie looked somewhere as if seeking agreement with her thoughts.

I could faintly see the silhouettes of two people standing in the shadows beyond the candlelight.

“I think that’s enough for today.”

A man answered briefly and walked toward me. His figure gradually began to emerge in the light.

He was a tall, skinny man wearing glasses.

“……!”

Instinctively feeling repulsed, I tried to move my trembling legs to find the door when the man grabbed my arm.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it soon.”

Simultaneously, a woman’s voice I’d heard somewhere before pierced my ears.

A wave of coldness washed over me.

“My… you look so tired.”

The woman who stopped beside me spoke as if she had just noticed me.

Gripped by a terrible suspicion, I looked up, my damp body shivering.

Silver hair cascaded down as the woman removed her cloak’s hood.

The woman gestured to me and smiled kindly.

“Go and rest, Lea.”

It was Genevieve.

“Gasp!”

I shot up in bed, breathing heavily.

When had I lain down in bed…

My body trembled uncontrollably, and I hugged my knees with the blanket half-consciously.

The system had shown me Lea’s past.

The scene interpreted as the day she was first called by the name Lea…

The past I had viewed revealed that Lea entered the Azanie family at the age of ten.

“So from age ten, for all that time…”

She had been brutally brainwashed. So she could risk her life to kill Carlo.

A woman who, after years of *buse, offered all benefits and budgets she could receive as Grand Duchess to Count Azanie as a show of loyalty, meticulously recorded the castle’s structure, and sacrificed her own life to murder her husband…

The sensation of facing young Lea’s small hands still lingered, making my eyes sting.

Just ten years old. She must have been so scared…

…But who was that man standing next to Genevieve?

The image of them watching Lea with eerie faces in that lightning-struck mansion remained strongly imprinted in my mind.

“Haah…”

I cautiously pulled my legs together, wrapped my arms around them, and buried my head.

My mind was in chaos, and my body slumped with a sigh.

At that moment, someone stroked my hair.