Chapter 5

Since her mother and father would worry if she did not attend the banquet, she sent a servant back to the Imperial Palace in the carriage with a brief letter explaining her urgent situation. After that, for the first time in a long while, she sat quietly at the desk in the middle of the mansion’s study.

There, in one corner of the bookshelf, the diary she had hidden in childhood was still resting just as it had been. Opening it, she began writing down every single thing she could remember about the life that would begin rushing wildly onward after today.

If I was to avoid the tragic life I had experienced……

There was only one thing she could do with her own strength.

She must never meet the Crown Prince again.

And so she must not become his first love.

If she wished to avoid becoming the sacrificial victim of the monstrous evil that Safiella, the Duke’s daughter of the Montiac Duchy, who had long coveted the position of Crown Princess, would commit in order to tear her apart from him….

Only then could she avoid losing her precious people once more, and protect the lives of these shining, beautiful beings, her mother, her father, Nanny Lariesa, Elonzo.

Once again, hot tears fell.

The demonic faces of those who had tormented her in those days, which had been like a long nightmare and yet remained so vivid that there was no explanation but that she had truly lived through all of it, rose before her, and her whole body trembled.

Safiella Montiac, and her elder brother, the Young Duke of Montiac, Barville Montiac.

These siblings were evil incarnate, existing solely to drive her life and her family into ruin.

Safiella Montiac would of course attend the banquet, believing the position of Crown Princess was naturally hers. Just as she had in the past. She intended to ask her elder brother Barville Montiac to hand the Crown Prince champagne laced with a drug, and using the resulting weakness, struggle desperately to become his woman.

But when the Crown Prince spent time with Irenia in the garden instead of with her…… and then declared that he intended to become engaged to Irenia, Safiella lost her senses and committed madness. Her father, Duke Montiac, was likewise cruel by nature and skilled in schemes, so far from stopping Safiella, he willingly helped her.

He immediately arranged a hunting tournament to catch a deer to be presented to His Majesty the Emperor, and there he framed her father by claiming that he had meant to offer the Emperor a deer felled by a poisoned arrow. Her father was imprisoned on the spot, and her mother too was seized. The two of them vanished upon the execution ground, and the del Tieri mansion as well was set ablaze by someone, until everything burned. On the day all of her happy childhood was swallowed in flames, she also lost Elonzo and Lariesa.

Her misfortune did not end there. On the night of the banquet, she had lain with the Crown Prince, and that one deep, intimate time left Delphinia inside her womb.

Barville Montiac, the eldest son of Duke Montiac, desired her so much that…… even though she was already carrying Martinez’s child, he kidnapped and imprisoned her after she lost her reason in the aftermath of the mansion fire.

As the daughter of traitors, she should have been imprisoned or exiled, but before Martinez, the Crown Prince, could do anything to save her, she was confined in the basement of a villa owned by the Montiac family.

After that, she suffered all manner of horrors there…….

And her poor baby, Delphinia, had no choice but to be born in that pit of evil.

‘You filthy wench. You kept rebelling every time, without even being grateful that I spared your life. Ha, unbelievable. So you hid so neatly all this time that another man had already touched you. Something filthy like you is only fit to spend its life taking one man after another. Just wait. I’ll sell off even what you’ve given birth to.’

When Barville saw that the baby born from her had not inherited his own eyes and blond hair, only then did he lose interest in her, cursing her as filthy and threatening to sell her to a brothel.

‘Even if you get out of here, the moment someone realizes that you and your baby are descendants of a traitor’s family, you’ll both be dragged to prison. Want to bet whether you’ll be hanged, or have your head cut off like your parents?’

Safiella appeared before her while she was trembling in fear, unwilling to let her newborn child live in a brothel, and mocked her with that vicious tongue.

‘L-Lady Safiella…… please, at least spare my baby……’

Because her father had been branded a traitor…… she wanted to prevent at least this, that her daughter, who was certainly the Crown Prince’s child…… would be put to death by imperial command the moment she was born. She could not let that dreadful chain of sin…… entangle the daughter born of him and her.

‘Then drink this. I’ll make sure your daughter is raised well in the house of a relative of mine who lives in a very distant region. It’s my aunt’s house, and since she has no children, if I simply do not bother revealing that the girl carries the bloodline of a traitor’s family, she ought to live without much trouble. Well? Will you drink it? If you drink this, you will never be able to see anything ever again. Ahahahahaha.’

The wicked laughter of that fiend was still vivid in her ears. That day, without hesitation, she drank down in a single gulp what that vicious witch, Safiella, handed to her. No one would ever think that the only daughter of the del Tieri family would become a blind beggar……. Yes, even if she lost both her eyes and became the lowliest of beings, living a life at the bottom…… if only she could save Delphinia……

At the time, she believed that was the best choice.

But she had been naive. She writhed in dreadful pain until she lost consciousness, and when she opened her eyes, she had been abandoned beneath Elmanyef Bridge. In that darkness where she could not see ahead, she lived in silence until she learned, in bitter desperation, where that place was and how to survive there.

For a long time, she heard no news of her daughter.

She endured only by hoping that the child was growing up safely in the childless household Safiella had spoken of. So she was able to go on. There had been no one by her side except stray dogs…….

Still, she relied on the dog that never barked fiercely at her or lunged at her, that did not leave her even though she, barely able to move properly, could not even provide it with food…… and she called it Elonzo as she pleased, and somehow survived.

Then one day, whether it was fate’s cruel joke or its final gift…… in her old age, she met Delphine.

The truth was, Delphine was the only trace left in this world by her poor Delphinia, who had failed to grow up with proper love and care in any household, had eventually been sold to a brothel at a young age, and after enduring that life of hardship and trial for a little over twenty years, had left behind only that child.

Delphinia died giving birth to Delphine…… and it was only because Elza, Delphinia’s friend, who fled the brothel with pitiful little Delphine, drifted all the way beneath Elmanyef Bridge, where Irenia lived.