Chapter 3
Just where exactly is my body touching yours?!
Swallowing the question she desperately wanted to ask, Lottie concentrated all her senses on her back.
First, a man. He sounded like a young man with a smooth bass voice, and while there was a hint of amusement in his tone, he seemed just as tense as she was.
And for good reason. This was a place whose very existence was unknown to anyone outside the Royal Family….
‘Then who on earth is this man?’
Lottie began filtering through the young men of the Royal Family who fit the criteria, but she swallowed a curse inwardly as she realized her own predicament a moment too late.
‘In this situation, the most suspicious person isn’t him—it’s me.’
How was she supposed to explain this situation, where a noble lady from the countryside had unhesitatingly pushed her way into a secret space known only to the Royal Family?
Lottie had been taught that running away was the winning strategy in a hopeless situation, but she couldn’t even flee because of the man who had grabbed her arm from behind.
“I told you not to move.”
The man, who had growled coldly, faltered as if surprised that the arm gripped in his hand was thinner than expected.
As soon as he released his hold, Lottie sprang away from him as if burned.
Pressed tightly against the door, Lottie stood facing her opponent.
In the darkness, their gazes busily darted back and forth, searching for clues about the other.
“This is a place whose existence is unknown to anyone but members of the Royal Family.”
The man in the darkness spoke with such confidence, and Lottie felt stifled by the reality that she couldn’t offer a single word of protest.
I was the Queen! And who are you? She couldn’t exactly say that.
“If you cannot provide a proper explanation, I will have no choice but to hand you over to the guards.”
“I-I will explain later. For now, just for a moment here…”
“Explanation first.”
The way he drove the conversation after already deciding on the answer was incredibly irritating, but what could she do?
To avoid being dragged away by guards, Lottie squeezed her brain to come up with a clumsy excuse.
Since it was so dark they couldn’t see each other’s faces anyway, wouldn’t it be okay to roughly pretend to be from a branch of the Royal Family?
“I am….”
Her mouth, which had gotten that far, came to a dead stop.
—If I let you go alive, what if you run straight to that bastard and confess everything you saw and heard?
A reckless conversation that felt like the answer was already decided. A low, mid-range voice.
Even the voice that seemed to have laughter mixed in but was actually nothing but cold.
Things she had dismissed as coincidences gathered together to point to the man standing a few paces in front of her.
Her eyes, which had grown somewhat accustomed to the light leaking through the slightly ajar door and the darkness, drew a faint silhouette of the man before her.
‘Calyx Valdea.’
The image of the tyrant, as cold and beautiful as when he had shot her dead.
At that same hour, as the ball in the Grand Banquet Hall reached its peak.
Patrick, the Crown Prince of Matila and Lottie’s ex-husband, stood back on the landing, watching the dance floor filled with heat.
Dressed impeccably in formal attire, he presented an image that was both pure and refined, with his neatly combed brown hair, thick eyebrows, grayish-blue eyes, and a jawline that hardened firmly when he closed his mouth.
“Your Highness.”
Someone approached Patrick cautiously as he watched the dance floor with a faint smile. It was Philip Mons, the man who had shared the first dance with Lottie.
When Patrick moved only his eyes to look at him, Philip quickly bowed his head.
“My apologies. I tried to steal the feather when the opportunity arose, but that woman disappeared as soon as the first dance ended….”
“You failed.”
Patrick finished Philip’s sentence for him. Unable to respond, Philip bowed his head even lower with a look of dismay.
Patrick, who had been silently twirling an empty champagne glass this way and that, suddenly burst into a short laugh.
“Baron.”
An official who looked to be in his late thirties approached Patrick and Philip. He was holding a small box in his hands.
When the official opened the box, a familiar feather appeared inside. It was the mysterious purple hair ornament that Patrick had ordered Philip to steal.
“Is it not the virtue of a King to prepare a second and third alternative just in case?”
“It… it is exactly as you say, Your Highness!”
Philip quickly chimed in as Patrick gazed at the feather in the box as if it were something precious.
If he was going to forge an identical feather anyway, why did he make him go through all that trouble? The doubt arose, but he dared not give voice to it.
“Your Highness. If so, what about the title you promised me….”
Philip, who was continuing his words with a groveling face, suddenly fell silent. It was because he had read the look in Patrick’s eyes directed at him.
Philip felt his face flush as he sensed the contempt and mockery barely hidden in those eyes.
“Go back. I will send someone to the House of Mons soon.”
That would likely never happen.
Philip withdrew hesitatingly, pressing down his burning face. Patrick didn’t give him a single glance until he had completely disappeared.
“Charlotte Evanshire has disappeared….”
Patrick chuckled as he recalled Philip’s words. At his nod to the official, the man quickly vanished somewhere with the box in his arms. Patrick cast his gaze toward the dance floor with a smile.
The seventh dance was about to begin.
“I, I am….”
“…….”
“……E-Excuse me.”
She knew that at this moment, he had neither a gun to pierce her heart nor an army to lay waste to a village, but the sensation of dying from a gunshot was as vivid as if it were happening right before her eyes.
Therefore, like the instinct of prey fleeing a predator, Lottie grabbed the doorknob, abandoning even the explanation he had demanded.
‘Knock, knock. Knock.’
“……!”
And she froze once again at the sound of the knock that followed.
Two short, then one. The guest outside the door repeated an ominous knock at regular intervals.
At this point, shouldn’t the title of ‘secret space known only to the Royal Family’ be revoked?
Even as her heart hammered against her ribs, such a joke crossed her mind. She was so tense she didn’t even realize it.
After a brief sigh was heard in the darkness, Calyx, who had been standing across from her, began to approach the door.
Calyx knew whose this suspicious knocking was. The promised time and place, and the pre-arranged knocking sign.
It was the accomplice who had helped the uninvited deposed Crown Prince enter the capital safely.
“I have a guest.”
Calyx said, looking down at Lottie, who stood with her back turned. It was a beautiful mid-range voice, but his tone was terribly indifferent.
When Lottie, standing defiantly in front of the door, flinched and trembled, Calyx slowly leaned in without any change in expression.
“Weren’t you just about to leave?”
“……!”
“If you want, I’ll open it for you myself.”
“……! W-Wait.”
Calyx reached out his arm past Lottie’s shoulder without hesitation.
His large hand covered Lottie’s gloved hand, which was gripping the doorknob.
His firm fingers intertwined between her slender ones, and the doorknob was slowly twisted.
“……!”
Calyx came to a dead stop because of the small hand firmly clutching his arm.
“Just a moment will do. I will leave quietly once some time has passed. I will forget everything I saw and heard here, so please….”
The woman’s hand, which had been pressed under his large one, hesitantly pulled away.
A moment later, her slender body turned half a circle beneath his arm, which he had extended as if to embrace her.
“…….”
She was now standing with her back to the door, facing him.
At a distance where their breaths could touch, Lottie whispered.
“Don’t open it, please….”
Lottie didn’t know that the intruder outside the door was someone who had come under Calyx’s orders. So she thought another member of the Royal Family had burst in.
Funny enough, only one name came to her mind, which had already gone blank.
Patrick.
Seeing her ask for help from the madman who had driven her to her death just because she didn’t want to get involved with her ex-husband, it seemed she hated the idea of marriage more than death itself.
Lottie’s hand clutching Calyx’s sleeve trembled desperately at that realization.
To use a metaphor, it was like a strangled young animal clutching the strangling hand with its small paws.
“…….”
Calyx watched the sight for a moment, then finally let out a low, mocking laugh.
‘This woman is not a spy sent by Patrick.’
Once he was certain of that, the faint tension that had settled over his body dissipated. He let out another hollow laugh at the fact that it was a sensation he hadn’t even realized he’d felt.
‘Then again.’
If the secret meeting between him and his accomplice had leaked to the Royal Family and this woman were a disturber sent by them, she wouldn’t be appealing with tears like this; she would have employed a honey trap.
Since that would have been the best scheme the mind of his cousin could come up with.
‘However.’
Just because she wasn’t a disturber didn’t mean he had any reason to help this woman.
Calyx knew the temperament of his accomplice standing outside the door well. Rather than risk his identity being discovered, he would choose to quietly dispose of whoever the woman before him was.
Calyx, who chose to open the door, felt no guilt whatsoever. Just as no one feels guilt toward a hungry baby mouse that crawled into a kitchen.
It was at the moment his heartless hand twisted the doorknob.
“…….”
A single ray of light seeped in from somewhere into the secret room that had been tightly sealed in darkness. It was a bluish beam of light that held the moonlight.
At its end was the woman.
In the place where the pitch-black darkness had receded slightly, the woman’s face, which had been only a blur, became clear.
The eyes of the woman begging for salvation were of a light green color that no jewel could ever hope to match.
A color that made even a man with no aesthetic sensibility hesitate for a moment, wondering what expression to use.
“…….”
Before it, Calyx belatedly realized that he had been holding his breath.
At the end of the realization was bewilderment, and at the end of the bewilderment, that light green again.
Even in the darkness as black as poured ink, there was a woman looking solely at him.
“Do you want to live?”
Words that were the exact opposite of what he had thought came out.
“If I save you… what benefit is there for me?”
Calyx took a step forward. Even though it was already a distance where not even a sheet of paper could fit between them, he pressed closer as if it weren’t enough.
Standing as if he would swallow her whole, he slowly lifted Lottie’s chin. The light green eyes he met wavered beautifully.
“Think carefully. So that I won’t be able to help but assist you.”
