Chapter 4
I was thirsty, just a little.
While Calix was seized by a strange impulse to ruffle those moist, light-green eyes, Lottie looked up at him, overlapping his present self with a memory from not so long ago.
- My dear sister-in-law.
The beast who, obsessed with the throne, had decimated an entire city. The man who had shot and killed a former family member without batting an eye, claiming the deposed Queen might have hidden the King in her chambers.
‘He was this kind of person from the very beginning. A madman without a single human emotion…!’
For a fleeting moment, she despised herself for having tried to beg this man for help, just as she had back then.
“…….”
Instead of pleading as he expected, Lottie closed her eyes. It was as if she were telling him to do as he pleased, whatever her punishment might be.
Watching her, Calix let out a low, mocking laugh.
‘So that’s your answer.’
His head cooled down once more, but his eyes did not. He stared intently at her closed eyelids, searching for something that had vanished.
“Do you know something?”
A low whisper scattered softly over her closed lids.
“The fellow standing outside the door has ears as sharp as a wild beast’s, despite his appearance. He can easily distinguish the breathing of an unexpected companion.”
Calix’s hand, which had been holding her chin, slowly moved upward.
His thumb pressed firmly against Lottie’s slightly parted lips.
Startled by the unfamiliar sensation, her eyelids flew open. Seeing those light-green eyes focused entirely on him again, he laughed under his breath.
“The night is deep, and the surroundings are heartlessly silent. So…….”
Calix’s other hand reached out and grabbed the lady’s right arm. Her slender wrist was caught like prey seized by the neck by a predator.
It was useless to try and escape.
When Lottie’s struggling hand showed a brief opening, his hand lunged and snatched it.
The two hands that had briefly touched and parted on the doorknob were now tightly entwined once more.
Like snakes coiling around two bodies, like a devil’s tongue, every finger was pressed firmly together so that none could slip away.
“I wish you the best of luck.”
The moment his hand pulled away, Calix flung the door wide open.
“Why did it take so long to open? A moment ago, in the Grand Banquet Hall, there was a whole—”
The man who had been standing outside the secret room, waiting anxiously, faltered when he saw Calix standing there, blocking the half-opened door.
“What are you doing?”
“Two days from now. Through the White Bear.”
Hiding behind the door with bated breath, Lottie heard the unfamiliar words the two men exchanged. It wasn’t the language of Matila, nor was it from the neighboring countries of Trie or Deisnoia.
When the man outside made a move to peer inside, Calix waved a white satin glove right in front of his nose.
It was the single glove he had stripped from Lottie moments ago.
Since a man possessing a lady’s glove meant more than simply finding a lost item belonging to some careless woman, the man let out a stunned gasp.
“Keep it within reason. If you want to preserve what little life you have left.”
After the man rebuked Calix and disappeared, the door slowly closed.
As the bright light leaking in from outside vanished, the room was once again seized by the dim darkness.
“Breathe.”
The man, who had only shown his broad back, slowly turned to Lottie as the door shut.
“You weren’t caught. Unfortunately.”
“…….”
“Well done.”
He smiled in the darkness. When his hand reached toward her head, Lottie quickly jerked her face away.
“I was trying to praise you.”
“……I don’t need it.”
“Not even this?”
Calix lightly waved Lottie’s glove. Lottie’s brow furrowed.
“Give it back.”
“If you let me finish what I was doing.”
“No. Give it back. It’s mine.”
Lottie replied firmly. Her attitude was quite different from when she had been clinging to a stranger’s arm and begging just a moment ago.
Reminded of an angry cat, Calix quietly swallowed a laugh.
“Yours, is it……”
Repeating Lottie’s words meaningfully, Calix slowly walked deeper into the room.
Navigating smoothly through the furniture placed in the shadows, he grabbed what looked like the edge of a curtain about ten paces away.
“I don’t want to.”
The moment the curtain was drawn, the thick darkness shrouding the room was driven out.
Moonlight poured in through the window, finally revealing the outline of the room, which was about ten pyeong in size.
The room, longer than it was wide, was a secret sanctuary where members of the Royal Family, weary of palace life where even the walls had eyes and ears, used to stay.
However, rather than feeling liberated by the cleared vision, Lottie felt a rising sense of anxiety toward the prince whose intentions she could not fathom.
He was a man with a large, sturdy frame exactly as she remembered, yet he gave an impression of elegance and agility rather than sheer mass.
His neatly swept-back blonde hair shimmered faintly in the moonlight. At first glance, he looked cold, but his features were refined rather than rugged.
That was the Calix Valdea standing before her. He wore a black suit instead of a navy military uniform and looked a bit younger than back then, but that chilling aura he had when he smiled and called her “sister-in-law” remained the same.
“…….”
A man who responded to a rightful request to return her property with a breezy “I don’t want to.”
Then, as if enjoying himself, he sat down languidly on the sofa in the center of the room. Clutching the lady’s glove, he soaked in the moonlight pouring from behind him, as if daring her to try and take it.
“Since I helped the young lady as she pleaded, isn’t it only natural that the young lady pays the price as well?”
“…….”
“Who are you?”
A single question was entwined with numerous implications.
He was asking for her name and family of origin, and why she had sneaked in here.
He was asking how she knew of this place, which no one but the Royal Family should know, and why she had begged so desperately for him not to open the door earlier.
And as a result, he was asking how he should deal with a woman who had “seen what she shouldn’t have seen.”
“……I am.”
Knowing the implications at the very bottom of the question, Lottie chose her words carefully.
However, contrary to her cowering heart, her mouth had already uttered the subject “I,” placing herself on equal footing with her opponent.
It was a signal that Lottie’s emotions had shifted from fear to a faint spark of anger.
- What if I let you go alive, and then you run to that fellow and confess everything you saw and heard?
Just like back then, this man was arrogant.
Then and now, he firmly believed without a doubt that he held the power of life and death over his opponent.
“Why must I be the one to answer that question first?”
Her counter-question was calm, making it all the more bold. The man sitting across from her faltered.
Though the memory was nearly ten years old, Lottie was certain. At this royal palace ball where Lottie had promised to marry her ex-husband, there was no place for the deposed Crown Prince, Calix Valdea.
It was only months after Lottie had become engaged to the Crown Prince that he, stripped even of his royal surname, had left the estate where he was living in seclusion and returned to the palace.
Therefore, the man before her eyes right now was also nothing more than a field mouse who had sneaked in while the Royal Palace was distracted by pleasure.
“You, who are asking who I am—who are you?”
Unlike Calix’s question, which held many meanings, Lottie’s question contained only one.
‘Both you and I have something to hide.’
So she prayed inwardly that her blatantly shameless intention—to go their separate ways without getting tiredly involved—was well-conveyed to him.
He probably understood immediately. He was the clever Crown Prince who had once received all the education necessary to become a king.
“Are you…… asking me who I am right now?”
But through the question that followed, Lottie realized that all the education to become a king had no connection whatsoever to his way of communication.
“Who am I? Even after seeing this face?”
His sharp gaze, which had been glaring at her, was gradually softening. He seemed hollow, and perhaps a bit dumbfounded.
As he let down the guard he had been wearing like a second skin, what followed was an absurd, hollow laugh.
“Ah, I see. Your attitude has been strangely offensive for a while now, considering you supposedly knew my identity.”
When did I ever…… No. No! That’s not it!
The only reason she could only cry out those fierce words internally was that the expression on the man’s face, as he made his own assumptions and reached his own conclusions, looked strangely bright.
There was a greater sense of liberation on Calix Valdea’s face than when the room shrouded in darkness had been brightened by the moonlight.
Because she couldn’t shake that feeling, Lottie couldn’t bring herself to rashly shatter Calix’s delusion.
“If I reveal my name, will the young lady, who is remarkably bold, also tell me hers?”
He seemed so effortlessly happy again that Lottie missed the timing to explain once more. A strange light flickered in Calix’s eyes as if he didn’t care either way.
His eyes were a beautiful reddish-brown.
“My name is……”
His next words were swallowed by the door being ruthlessly flung open.
Desperately wishing that this place would finally relinquish its overly grand title of a secret space known only to the Royal Family, Lottie looked back at the open door.
To her surprise, the person standing at the door was someone more suited to the name of this place than anyone else.
“What are you doing here right now……!”
Crown Prince Patrick’s startled voice could go no further because of the man standing behind Lottie.
Lottie was too frozen to see, but Calix was displaying an outrageous form of etiquette, greeting his cousin whom he hadn’t seen in over ten years with a flick of his hand.
“How are you…… here……”
“…….”
“Young lady, surely that man hasn’t done anything untoward……”
Patrick, looking back and forth between Calix and Lottie, asked her. Lottie didn’t answer.
Her ears were ringing, and she couldn’t hear the rest of his words clearly. Following that, Isabel’s cry calling for Lottie drew near.
Isabel embraced her grand-niece who had vanished without a word, and several gentlemen and ladies swarmed in behind her.
Amidst their secret whispers, she heard words she didn’t want to hear.
“Look at her hair. It’s exactly like the feather that fell in the garden……”
