Contract Marriage Rewritten
Chapter 21
“How could you embrace Her Majesty the Empress with such reckless abandon, Your Majesty!”
At the scolding, Hyperion lowered his head even further.
Reckless abandon.
Yes, that was the exact right word for it.
He had coveted his wife like a man possessed, oblivious to how much she was struggling or how much pain she was in.
“Good heavens. For her to pass out from the strain… Haah. She must have been even more tense since it was her first time….”
As the chiding continued, Hyperion could only fiddle with his fingers in silence.
He felt just a tiny bit aggrieved. It was his first time too, and he had been just as nervous.
He hadn’t the faintest idea how he had gotten through his duties all day. He had clearly been looking at documents, but the words simply refused to register, prompting Signo to heave loud, deliberate sighs right beside him.
His hands had trembled as he repeatedly picked up his pen only to set it back down. Every now and then, he would suddenly blush all on his own.
It had been a thoroughly chaotic day.
As evening approached, his heart thumped harder and harder against his ribs.
When he finished his duties and returned to the Main Palace, the sight of a lit window made the corners of his mouth lift unbidden.
His wife was in there.
His wife, whose hand he hadn’t even properly held over the past three years.
Hyperion had hurried to his chambers to wash up.
While he usually paid attention to cleanliness, today he had scrubbed himself raw, as if intending to scour his very skin away.
‘I’ve only ever shown her my filthy state.’
On the rare occasions he returned to the Imperial Palace once every few months, Hyperion knew better than anyone what a wretched sight he must have been.
Caked with dried grime, bloodstains that wouldn’t wash out completely no matter how much water he used, and utterly disheveled from riding frantically for days on end—his appearance had been beyond dreadful.
Even so, Laniakea had never uttered a single word of complaint. Her face had simply turned pale at the sight of the bloodstains.
‘Next time, I’ll have to kill them so that as little blood splatters as possible.’
Hyperion would occasionally receive uninvited guests.
Even so, a guest was a guest, and he always gave them an appropriate welcome.
Lopping off their heads or severing their feet. He wasn’t particularly fond of stabbing them in the belly, since the stench of filth was foul.
Yet, there was just one occasion where he sent a guest back with their life intact. It was the day a knight sent to attend a charity banquet returned.
It was an event no one wanted to attend, so the poor fellow who lost the lot-drawing had been sent. Usually, he would have returned grimacing in disgust while handing over the gold coins the nobles had tossed him in mockery, but—
“Your Imperial Highness, I received this.”
The knight held out a handkerchief to Hyperion.
On the chaotic battlefields of the Border, a soft, pure-white handkerchief looked completely out of place.
Hyperion glared at the handkerchief with cold eyes. It clearly belonged to the Imperial family. Which meant, to him, it was practically poison.
Assuming the Empress had pulled yet another petty trick, he was about to order it thrown away when he caught sight of the embroidery on its corner.
Whenever the Empress embroidered something, she always proudly included her family crest alongside the Imperial crest.
But the handkerchief the knight brought bore only a single embroidered initial.
[L]
Wondering for a moment who it belonged to, his mind soon conjured the one person connected to him who held that initial.
The person who always welcomed him, no matter how ragged a state he was in.
Hyperion snatched the handkerchief from the knight’s hand as if reclaiming something stolen from him.
With a surprised expression, the knight spoke.
“Her Highness the Consort gave it to me, saying she hadn’t realized it was a charity banquet…”
At the knight’s words, the grip of Hyperion’s hand clutching the handkerchief tightened even more.
And that night, for the very first time, Hyperion let a midnight visitor leave alive. Because he was in truly high spirits.
“Your Majesty! Are you even listening to me?!”
The bellowing voice snapped Hyperion out of his past memories, pulling his focus back to the grievances raining down on him.
“Since you didn’t say anything, I assumed you had taken private lessons after arriving at the Imperial Palace, but to think… Didn’t I tell you before? What Your Majesty possesses is far above average, so….”
“Stop badgering His Majesty! Can’t you see he looks ready to crawl into a hole and disappear?!”
The man’s rant, which seemed as if it would go on forever, was finally halted by the shout of the middle-aged woman beside him.
Hyperion looked at the two standing before him.
Gemma Ency.
Tamil Ency.
The two were a physician couple who had always remained by Hyperion’s side when he was stationed at the Border.
Before they could be executed under the false accusation of poisoning a rural lord, Hyperion had saved their lives. Ever since, the couple had followed him everywhere, tending to him and his knights.
After Hyperion became Emperor, they had earned their qualifications as imperial physicians and were finally scheduled to enter the Imperial Palace today. Furthermore, they were the most harmoniously devoted couple Hyperion knew, blessed with five children.
Though they had decided not to have any more out of concern for Gemma’s health, Gemma and all five children were remarkably healthy.
That was why Hyperion had sent a letter to them when they said they would take their time traveling up.
[I require your counsel. Make haste and come at once.]
Because of that, the two had rushed up to the Capital.
Which was today.
They had been unpacking their bags, intending to pay their respects to Hyperion tomorrow, when he came rushing in like a madman searching for them, which resulted in them being brought straight into the Main Palace like this.
Seeing Hyperion looking uncharacteristically dejected, Gemma kept slapping her husband’s arm.
“Do you really think His Majesty wanted to knock Her Majesty out?! Don’t you remember how secretly excited he looked whenever Her Majesty the Empress was mentioned? How eagerly he must have waited for today!”
“Well, yes, but….”
“You were a complete mess your first time too! His Majesty may be skilled at everything else, but he’s allowed to be clumsy with at least one thing!”
At Gemma’s blunt remarks, there were now two thoroughly demoralized men in the room.
“At any rate, she fainted from the shock and pain because she was far too tense. Fortunately, there is no physical harm… um, but she might have suffered mental shock, so I will have to examine her again once she wakes.”
Only upon hearing Gemma’s reassurance that there was no physical harm did Hyperion finally exhale a breath of relief.
Just then, a rustling sound came from the bed where Laniakea lay.
Turning his head, he saw that her position had shifted slightly.
‘Is she waking up?’
Hyperion scrambled toward the bedside.
Up close, some color had returned to Laniakea’s face. Yet to Hyperion’s eyes, she still looked deathly pale.
Hyperion lowered his gaze. Though she lay beneath the duvet, the outline of her slender frame was unmistakable.
Compared to him, she was so very small. And yet, he had gone and….
Recalling that moment, Hyperion pressed the back of his hand against his flushed nape.
Feeling dizzy as he recalled it in a situation like this made him feel like the foulest beast in the world.
But the sights he had witnessed kept flickering before his eyes—the memory of Laniakea sitting before him, her body far more beautiful and delicate than anything he had imagined.
In truth, what he had looked forward to most after the coronation was that he would finally be able to stay by her side.
But that had been a massive miscalculation. He had assumed it was natural for an Emperor and Empress to be together, yet contrary to his expectations, there were more days when he didn’t catch a single glimpse of her face from morning to night.
Hyperion recalled the former Emperor and Empress, who had always been glued together whenever he occasionally visited the Imperial Palace.
He hadn’t thought much of it back then, but reflecting on it now, the two must have loved each other in their own way. Otherwise, staying attached at the hip like that wouldn’t have been easy.
In any case, the moment he saw Laniakea today, Hyperion realized that the dam holding back his suppressed emotions was beginning to crumble.
It was only natural. They had been married for three years. In order to scrape together whatever time he could, he had slaughtered enemies with near-frenzied desperation and headed for the Imperial Palace without even washing up.
All just to share a single meal with his wife. And the moment that very woman stood naked before him, Hyperion had acted just like the rutting beasts he had always scoffed at.
He had wanted to hold her more, feel her more. So even though he knew she was struggling, he had buried himself deeper within her.
He had felt pain in that moment as well. Yet every sensation, the pain included, was intoxicatingly good.
Enough to make him understand why others went utterly mad over matters of the flesh.
And so, Hyperion had sought to push even deeper.
But the moment he moved his hips and drove deep, Laniakea’s body shuddered violently before going completely limp. She had fainted from the sheer shock.
Even as guilt weighed heavily on his conscience, a spark of resentment flared up as well.
If it was that unbearable, she should have just told him. Why did she endure it until she passed out…?
Just then, Laniakea’s closed eyelashes fluttered. Soon opening her eyes, she blinked slowly, then murmured as she looked at Hyperion:
“Is this a dream….”
A dream? Had he become a nightmare to her?
Even as that worry crossed his mind, the words of grievance he had been harboring spilled out.
“Why didn’t you tell me to stop?”
He hadn’t meant to, but his voice came out harsher than intended.
At that, Laniakea’s still-hazy eyes rounded. She realized this was no dream, and that he was speaking directly to her.
“If you had spoken up beforehand, it wouldn’t have come to this…!”
Hyperion, about to say more, clamped his mouth shut in shock. In Laniakea’s round eyes staring up at him, tears were already beginning to well.
“No, I mean….”
While a flustered Hyperion fumbled, at a total loss for words, Gemma and Tamil stood behind him, clicking their tongues in pity.
Somehow, it felt as though the imperial couple had a long, rocky road ahead of them.