Previously
Upon discovering Dolores's infertility, Adrian abuses and degrades her, triggering her obsessive pursuit of physical perfection and youth. Her father and brother James exploit her plight by placing her beloved cousin Angelica into Adrian's bed, later forcing Dolores to adopt Angelica's son as the legitimate imperial heir.
A fork sank deep into the rich, dense chocolate cake.
Then that sinful black morsel slipped straight into her pretty mouth.
Again and again. For a solid hour.
Hannah, the maid who had brought the cake, had turned as deathly pale as a condemned prisoner.
‘Well, she has every reason to be terrified.’
Her father, the marquis, watched Dolores's figure with predatory vigilance.
Dolores herself had treated her own body like a prisoner under harsh discipline.
So she had held back, held back, and held back from the sweets she loved.
Later on, she had even shoved her fingers down her throat to vomit.
All out of fear that her husband Adrian’s love would slip away.
Terror that he would run to a woman with younger, firmer skin and never return.
It wasn't even funny.
‘…Just you wait.’
Squelch. The sharp tines dug brutally into the dark crumb.
Eyes glinting, Dolores dutifully swallowed down the wicked sweetness.
‘This time, I will live differently.’
Her father, who couldn't care less whether she suffered in her marriage?
Her brother, who bled her private funds dry?
Stab! Once more, the fork tore through the cake like rummaging through a corpse.
‘I'll leave them both penniless. Even if I have to mobilize everything I know…’
Though she had been treated as an empty shell of an empress, she knew every major event that would unfold over the next twenty years.
Yet were her family members the only ones due for retribution in this life?
No. The greatest root of all evil lay elsewhere.
‘Adrian!’
Screeech.
The hideous screech of the fork scraping the plate grated through the room.
The husband she had believed was her lifelong match.
Adrian, glorious and fair, the proud future of the imperial family.
In truth, he had been utterly dissolute, mocking Dolores for her barrenness.
‘And without my consent, the bastard he had with Angelica—’
Adrian, handing Dolores a blond infant who was the spitting image of himself.
The moment the memory surfaced, Dolores hurled her fork aside.
“Ugh…!”
“Young Lady?!”
The maids shrieked in shock, but Dolores dashed toward the washroom.
Her throat heaved violently, turning everything before her eyes a dizzying white.
Cold sweat poured as if she were astride a runaway horse, and her shoulders shook uncontrollably.
“Blehh, ugh, urgh…!”
In the end, Dolores threw up every bite of the half-eaten cake.
‘Why let old memories rattle me like this?’
The people who had wrecked her were carrying on just fine, so why should she be the broken one?
‘I still have a long way to go.’
Never again would she hit rock bottom so miserably.
The poise and noble grace Dolores Rochester rightfully deserved would be guarded to the very end this time.
‘To do that…’
Dolores recalled the scheme she had conceived while eating the chocolate cake. Was it even possible?
Yet she lacked the resources.
Until she married, she couldn't even dream of holding her own fortune.
So no matter how unpalatable it was, only ‘that way’ came to mind.
‘Grand Duke Resurreccion.’
Securing that man's help.
‘We hardly got along before the wedding, either.’
Even during her years as empress, they had been bitter enemies.
He had treated her as ‘a pitiable woman clinging to an empty empress's seat.’
Dolores had naturally come to despise Resurreccion for looking down on her like a fool.
‘Still, hating him was oddly refreshing by comparison.’
Hating her husband's mistresses meant hating Adrian too, plunging her into the bottomless despair of pitying her own lot.
‘Hating the Grand Duke was simple and convenient.’
Snarling at him face-to-face always felt like clearing a blockage in her chest.
‘What’s different now, though…’
Dolores now knew what would tempt him, and how to make it happen.
Dolores turned toward the fretful maid.
“Hannah, where are Father and my brother?”
“They left together to inspect the Silberg Fief.”
“Ah. Was that today?”
That cursed Silberg Fief.
Dolores’s delicate brow furrowed faintly.
The Silberg Fief was part of her late mother's dowry.
‘By rights, it should belong entirely to me.’
In the Albion Empire, there was no way for a woman to earn an independent fortune.
Thus, tradition dictated that out of a noblewoman's dowry, the land alone be passed down to her daughter.
Yet if the precious firstborn son needed it, surrendering it was considered a daughter's virtue.
“Ha.”
How she had groveled before Adrian in the past because of that very estate.
Just thinking about it made her want to thrash her brother for gambling that land away.
This time, she would reclaim that estate too.
‘This is a golden opportunity.’
She had to hurry and see ‘that man’ while her father and brother were away.
The Silberg Fief wasn't very far, so they would be back by evening at the latest.
There was truly little time.
“Hannah, bring my cloak. Prepare to leave at once.”
“Pardon?! In this weather? Where are you going?”
“I must go to the chapel on Howard Street.”
“What…? But today isn’t a service day.”
“I wish to offer prayers of thanksgiving to God for my upcoming marriage.”
Dolores offered a casual, rehearsed answer behind a graceful smile.
‘God? What nonsense.’
She had been an atheist to her bones since her days as empress.
Though she had prayed daily while suffering as a barren Crown Princess, God had never once saved her.
‘Of course, if there is a being who granted me this second life, I would gladly kneel at their feet in thanks.’
Dolores naturally refrained from mentioning that Lancaster Mansion sat right next to the chapel.
A few hours later.
Dolores ended up barging into the Grand Duke's mansion by the rather uncouth method of kicking the door open.
…And so, after Dolores proposed a deal involving the Aleister Fief.
Resurreccion flashed a feral grin at the woman before him.
“Lady Dolly. I thought you were merely an empty doll with a pretty face, just as your pet name implies… but your imagination is remarkably rich.”
Her delicate face twitched faintly.
In society, beside his splendid elder brother the Crown Prince, and across countless gatherings, Dolores Rochester had always done nothing but smile.
Seeing that smiling face had always twisted his gut beyond endurance.
‘Ever since we were young…’
From the boyhood days when she was first introduced as his brother's fiancée.
Whenever the corners of those lips lifted, he felt more sickened than when crawling through the borders where the Emperor had cast him.
An artificial smile. A manufactured mask.
Seeing the corners of her lips quiver pleased him to no end.
Resurreccion crossed his arms, tilting his head with keen interest.
‘Hm. Why is she suddenly spinning those wheels?’
From what he had observed since childhood…
‘She may be the most beautiful woman in Albion society.’
The ‘Diamond of the Empire’ was hardly renowned for her sharp intellect.
Yet Dolores had just hit upon the very thing he quietly craved inside.
The Aleister Fief, where half his bloodline originated.
Dolores's contorted lips pulled taut into a smile once more.
Seeing it, Resurreccion felt a petty urge to crush that composure again.
“Since you've seen fit to mock it as imagination, I shall indulge my imagination to the fullest.”
“Go right ahead, Lady Dolly.”
“The reason His Majesty remains lenient, even when Your Highness acts like a rogue devoid of manners—”
“Ha. Insulting me to my face now?”
“—is because of the military honors you won at the border. For the glory of the imperial family.”
Resurreccion gave a silent shrug of his broad shoulders.
The role of a second-born prince was always predetermined.
The precious, noble Adrian had to be kept safe in the capital.
For if even a scratch marked the sacred Crown Prince, the world would surely end.
And so Resurreccion had been shuffled between the frontier borders.
Yet at her next words, the mocking gleam in his eyes turned cold.
“Yet His Majesty has never once mentioned granting the Aleister Fief as your reward.”
“…”
“His Majesty is afraid. He does not know how the local populace will react if he hands that land to you.”
The son of Princess Juliana, the last survivor of the Aleister royal line.
Placing Resurreccion over that territory was not a bad political maneuver in itself.
Yet would the people of the fallen kingdom remain docile?
Would they not rally around their ‘true’ master, burning to reclaim their sovereignty?
“So help me ruin this marriage alliance with the Crown Prince, Your Highness.”
In exchange, the woman offered to show him how to claim the Aleister Fief.
And Resurreccion…
“Haha.”
Letting out a dry laugh, he rose to his feet.
He closed the distance toward Dolores with slow, measured steps.
With the very presence that had made his aides grumble, ‘Warn us before you move, you look like a beast stalking prey in the dark.’
Before Dolores could react, he gently cupped her chin and tilted it up.
“Lady Dolly.”
“Ah… Grand Duke.”
“Slandering your future family member… Do you have no regard for the consequences?”
Even to his own ears, his voice sounded low and menacing.
It was quite satisfying to watch her porcelain skin turn even paler.
‘How cute. Look at her trembling after speaking so boldly.’
There was a reason they called him ‘The Beast of Albion.’
She had witnessed firsthand the rampage he unleashed in the imperial palace when he was fifteen.
Watching her try to push his fingers away with her fan was utterly laughable.
“Take your hand off me. This breaches etiquette.”
“Heh.”
Resurreccion slowly withdrew his hand.
On a battlefield it might be different, but he had no desire to dirty his hands with an unarmed woman's blood.
Instead, he gestured toward the drawing room doors with exaggerated courtesy.
“Now then, Lady Dolly, future great novelist. Thank you for the delightful conversation, but I must ask you to leave.”
“You do remember we will be seeing each other at Madame Rouare’s banquet regardless, don't you?”
“Ah. Tch.”
Resurreccion clicked his tongue despite himself.
Madame Rouare was the Emperor's longtime mistress.
As the ‘Emperor's paramour’ who maintained her ironclad standing through two empresses, even the imperial sons could not easily disregard her.
It was an especially agonizing gathering for Resurreccion, a social pariah.
“I shall expect a different answer then, Your Highness.”
Yet this woman's brazen reply irked him far more.
Had his earlier intimidation not been enough?
“Listen here, Dolores Rochester. While I’m asking nicely—”
“Number 483, Howard Street.”
“…!”
The surge of irritation came to a screeching halt.
The muscles in Resurreccion's jaw locked rigid in an instant.
It was an attack he hadn't anticipated in the slightest.
Though he swiftly reined in his expression, Dolores's green eyes sparkled like starlight.
Trying to hold her back now would only hand her more ammunition.
The one caught off guard with something to hide was always the first to act.
Dolores smiled, having already turned half away.
Both wore clear smiles, yet their eyes were charged with murderous intent as if holding fixed bayonets.
“I strongly recommend tightening your security. This spring is turning out rather dry.”
“Dolores Rochester. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I will tell you how I found out at the party.”
Dolores dipped into a fluid curtsy.
It was the textbook definition of flawless grace, befitting the ‘Porcelain Doll of High Society.’
“Well then, may you have a pleasant day.”