He sat naturally in the chair beside my bed.

Ever since he started staying by my side whenever I coughed, a chair for him had appeared next to my bed.

“I felt a bit stiff today, so I stayed in bed.”

“If you’re stiff, you should get up and move around more. Exercise a little.”

“Oh, is that so?”

I smiled awkwardly and lifted my upper body to lean against the headboard.

“But I’m not in such bad shape that you need to worry about me.”

Lately, I’d been telling him not to worry about me so often. Even though I knew he wasn’t the type to worry about anyone.

“Actually, I feel healthier after getting so much sleep. Though it’s probably just my imagination. Still, if I could skip exercise today, that would be nice.”

Maybe it was because I wasn’t fully awake yet, but I was rambling. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying.

Kyron must have been bewildered by my incoherent words, so I glanced at him to gauge his reaction.

But he didn’t seem to be listening to me at all.

His gaze was fixed downward. At the end of it was my wrist, which was sticking out from under the blanket.

My wrist, which had been grabbed so roughly by the Crown Prince last night, was slightly swollen.

I quickly hid my hand under the blanket. This was evidence of last night’s outing.

Hiding my wrist, I tried to speak casually again.

“Do you know how insistent Henson is about my exercise? He’s just as bad as you…”

“Where did this happen?”

Kyron interrupted me, pulling back the blanket as he asked. His voice was low and heavy.

“What do you mean?”

Maybe I should just deny that it’s swollen. In this situation, playing dumb might be my best option.

“It’s swollen. Your wrist.”

Kyron examined my wrist with a stiff expression, his lips pressed into a thin line.

“Really? It looks the same to me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Unless your wrist was tied up somewhere, there’s no way it would still be swollen after a night’s rest. This means it was grabbed very hard.”

“….”

So much for playing dumb.

Though he held my swollen wrist gently, his gaze was ice-cold.

“Are you not going to tell me?”

It felt like I was being interrogated.

The swelling had gone down significantly overnight, and there was barely any redness left. It was just slightly swollen, but his sharp eyes still caught it.

“Surely no one in this house would do this to you… So, did something happen last night?”

His guess was so accurate that I was at a loss for words.

As expected, he wasn’t the mastermind for nothing.

“Answer me, Ekette.”

At that moment, I wanted to pull out the teleportation mirror I bought last night and escape.

Then, suddenly, I felt a tickle in my chest…

“Cough, cough!”

What perfect timing.

Maybe last night’s outing had been too much for me, as I let out a light cough.

But the coughing didn’t continue. It stopped after just one or two. At least it didn’t seem like I would cough up blood.

Kyron’s eyes widened at my cough, but after confirming that it had subsided, he let out a faint sigh.

He released my hand, turned away, and opened the bedside drawer to take out a bottle of medicine. It was a nutritional supplement meant to boost stamina.

Kyron pulled the bell cord to summon a servant and had them bring water.
When the servant brought a glass of water, he handed me the medicine and the cup.
He didn’t say much.

I quietly accepted what he offered, swallowed the pill, and drank the water.
I thought he would resume questioning me after I took the supplement, but to my surprise, he got up from his seat without a fuss.

“Think about the answer you’re going to give me. I’ll come back later.”

The fact that he said he would come back later meant he was determined to get an answer out of me, no matter what.
As I instinctively sensed trouble brewing, Kyron left the room.

***

“Have you still not figured out how Ekette came to know about that place?”

The butler lowered his head.

“My apologies, Your Grace. We haven’t been able to determine that yet.”

Kyron already knew about Ekette’s outing last night.

That she had gone to such a dangerous place alone, without even a single knight escorting her.

Another mystery was how Ekette had learned about that shop and why she had gone there. She must have visited to purchase something, but what was it?
It had to be something secretive, different from the luxuries she enjoyed at the Duke’s estate.

That said, he didn’t want to stoop so low as to search his wife’s room.
Kyron ran a hand roughly through his hair and sighed.

There wasn’t a single thing about last night that he liked. What had all the people in the Duke’s estate been doing while the Duchess ventured to such a dangerous place? And why had Ekette gone there? And what had happened to her wrist to leave it in that condition?

In truth, what weighed on his mind the most wasn’t the other issues but Ekette’s wrist.
Who was the bastard that had dared to do that to his wife’s delicate wrist?

He couldn’t just sit idly by and wait for his subordinates to investigate. He decided to visit the shop himself to find out. He began preparing to go out.

Kyron was the kind of person who always returned a blow when struck. No, sometimes he returned it with even greater force.
It was that very nature of his that had put him in the position of Duke.

The day his mother was murdered. He had witnessed her final moments with his own eyes.
Her face, smeared with blood, had fallen lifelessly onto the table. Her unfocused eyes had been directed at him. He had been eleven years old.

That day had marked the beginning of his journey of revenge.

At eighteen, he killed his eldest half-brother, Fiata. He had returned his mother’s death to him in the exact same way. On the same date, in the same place, and using the same method.

The boy who had once been small had grown so much in seven years that he towered over Fiata. And it wasn’t just his height that had grown. He had secretly built his own power.

After his mother’s death, Kyron had gone to the North, where he bided his time and built an organization composed of those who believed in his potential and joined hands with him.
That organization became the precursor to what is now known as the Black Lake Knights.