Chapter 9
Calyx spoke, gesturing slowly toward their surroundings.
It felt as if something interesting was about to happen. Passersby, who possessed an uncanny nose for such things, were already slinking closer, casting subtle sidelong glances.
Lottie knew she could simply feign ignorance and turn away right now.
It wasn’t as if the rules of the game were law. Unless Her Majesty the Queen had gone senile from the burdens of state and decided to participate in the drawing herself, no one would be condemned for not following the rules.
Even if today’s events grew legs and reached the ears of her Great-Aunt, a few scoldings would be the end of it.
“Isn’t that right? The nameless gentleman standing next to you.”
Gentleman Number 25 directed his question toward Andrew, as if he had seen right through her brazen intentions.
Andrew was a kind man. He worried for Lottie’s honor, which she herself didn’t even care about, as if it were his own.
“Please contact me later through Viscountess Dunchest. I will be waiting.”
“Wa-Wait…!”
Before Lottie could grab him, Andrew unlinked his arm and stepped back. Even as he turned away, his eyes held only concern for her, not a hint of resentment.
Soon, Andrew became a small dot in the distance and vanished.
That lonely retreating figure set fire to Lottie’s guilt, reminding her that all of this was due to her own foolishness. The guilt blazed so fiercely she couldn’t even bring herself to run after him.
‘I’m… truly a hopeless piece of trash.’
“It seems I’m always stuck playing the villain in these romances,” Calyx remarked.
Whether he was oblivious to the depths of her misery or not, his words grated on her.
The way he spoke with a click of his tongue—as if it were someone else’s business, which, well, it was—scraped against Lottie’s nerves.
Who exactly was responsible for this situation in the first place?!
She took a deep breath, turning around with the intent to unleash a torrent of words, only to find herself face-to-face with reddish-brown eyes that were level with hers as he leaned down slightly.
“You didn’t even try to find your lost glove. Weren’t you curious about what happened to it?”
He was far too close.
It had been a long time since she had looked at a man’s face from such proximity. Moreover, the face beneath the hat’s brim was so marvelous it made her reflexively avert her eyes, and perhaps because of that, her breath hitched….
Ah. Come to think of it, she had frozen right after inhaling a massive lungful of air.
“Besides the glove, there is something the Young Lady and I need to exchange—”
“Pffftttttt….”
Unable to hold her breath any longer, Lottie ended up exhaling right into Calyx’s face.
While she didn’t make as unsightly a spectacle of herself as she had feared, the sight of his eyelashes fluttering in the thin stream of her breath was humiliating in its own right.
“—I believe we have a few things to exchange.”
The sentence he had paused while receiving the sudden baptism of her breath managed to conclude.
Perhaps worried about receiving another such baptism, Calyx had already stepped back about a pace from Lottie.
Lottie, also wanting no more of this shame, moved away from him while covering her mouth. Her cheeks twitched as she tried to steady her panting breath behind her hand.
“Ex-whew-exchange, whew, what?! What exactly?!”
“Let’s finish catching our breath before we talk. Right now, you look like…”
“…?”
“A bull just before it charges a matador. Especially because of that hair color.”
There were sunset hues, ripe orange tones, and all sorts of vermillion flowers, yet he chose a bull.
If she hadn’t dragged up the memory of what kind of man stood before her, Lottie would have certainly lived up to his expectations and gored the matador named Calyx Valdea.
“…As far as I know, I have nothing to exchange with you.”
“The glove forgotten by its owner cries in my drawer every night, you know?”
“Then its new owner should take good care of it. I trust that is a sufficient answer. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Now, now.”
A long arm barred the path of Lottie as she tried to turn away after snapping her piece.
Beneath the hat, his reddish-brown eyes gleamed meaningfully at her.
“If you keep trying to run away like this, I can’t help but think you already know what I’m going to ask.”
“…!”
“Isn’t that right? The wronged Miss Charlotte Evanshire, who is misunderstood to have been forcibly dragged into a secret room by a debauched man, when she actually walked in on her own two feet.”
The topic she wanted to avoid most was dumped right in front of her face. Along with a name she had never given him.
A romance starring the only daughter of Count Ix and the Crown Prince, with a deposed prince as the villain, was already public gossip in the capital’s high society. So, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to find out Lottie’s name.
However, his blatant mention of that name carried a much graver implication to Lottie.
Just as I know the name Charlotte Evanshire, don’t you also know my true identity?
“I’m late with my greetings. I am Calyx Valdea.”
So don’t act up like a senseless bull and quietly answer what I ask before you get a blade in your back.
The ill will she had briefly forgotten due to the ridiculous happening flared up again.
Lottie silently glared at the man who was smiling smoothly as if he had never said such a thing. At her gaze, which showed no sign of softening, Calyx let out a short laugh.
“You’re quite bold, even knowing who I am. Still.”
The way he emphasized the word ‘still’ didn’t make his expression look particularly unpleasant.
“So… what was the method and reason for you being able to enter the secret room that day?”
“…What happens if I don’t answer?”
Taking courage from that, Lottie decided to be a bit bolder. It was to buy time to come up with a plausible excuse for how she had entered the secret room.
‘She’s trying to buy time.’
That intention was as clear as still water to Calyx. Feeling a slight whim to play along, he extended the arm that had been blocking her path toward her.
“I’ll have to ask for a date. Until I get an answer.”
“A de… what?”
“Have you forgotten? The rules of the event.”
If she could, Lottie wanted to go back to the past and chop off the gallant hand that had drawn the numbered ticket.
“What on earth does this numbered ticket have to do with getting an answer to your question? I’ll just tell you now. The reason I was able to enter the secret room then was—”
“No. I’ve changed my mind. Come to think of it, doesn’t the Young Lady have something else to pay me besides an answer?”
“There’s more?! What is it this time?!”
“Didn’t I save the Young Lady from nearly being falsely accused? If not for me, you would have been the helpless protagonist of a secret garden tryst.”
He was the man who had waved her glove in front of everyone under the guise of clearing her of the false charge of having an affair with Padrick. He had looked so strangely proud of it that Lottie had even forgotten to protest.
Fine, let’s hear what he has to say.
“Sigh… fine. Thank you very much. If you want a reward, what should I give you?”
“A date.”
…She shouldn’t have listened.
Lottie swallowed the curses that rose to the tip of her tongue. This time, she glared at him with all her might, as if daring him to kill her, but Calyx only kept beaming as if he were enjoying himself.
“Come on.”
“…”
“My arm is hurting.”
If not for his broad shoulders, tall stature, and strangely decadent features, it was a smile that would have looked perfectly like a young boy’s.
‘Is this man… really that mad murderer…?’
Her confusion didn’t last long. People are not to be trusted. Especially those with blue blood standing at the center of power.
“…”
She would follow him, but she absolutely did not want to take that man’s arm.
So, instead of approaching Calyx, Lottie whipped her body around and marched forward as if telling him to follow.
Her intentions were transparent as glass this time as well.
Knowing this, Calyx suppressed a faint smile and followed behind her.
An hour later.
Lottie fell into confusion once again as she felt the presence of Calyx, who was silently following exactly three steps behind her.
‘The Calyx Valdea I know isn’t the type of human to listen to others so obediently.’
It would have been normal for him to get annoyed at someone who was just walking with their back turned without a word.
Yet, despite not being Andrew Thompson, this man followed like a well-behaved puppy without a single word of complaint or trying to grab her as she walked ahead.
‘A well-behaved puppy.’
Even though it was her own thought, it was a ridiculous comparison.
Since she had already replayed the scene of him, who had usurped the throne, firing a bullet into the chest of his cousin’s wife—herself—until it was worn out, she decided to trace back memories from before that.
Before he was a tyrant, her memory of Calyx Valdea, who was her relative by marriage, was…
‘The worst.’
Even that expression was too generous; it was a total mess.
Lottie had first met Calyx several months after her engagement to Padrick, who was the Crown Prince at the time.
Due to some reason she couldn’t quite remember now, Calyx’s movements had not been free back then.
When she first met the man who was her husband’s cousin—her brother-in-law—Lottie felt a shock greater than when she had first witnessed a massive steam engine at the World’s Fair.
She was astonished that a person could be so exquisitely formed.
A clean, bright forehead beneath neatly combed blonde hair, a consistently relaxed mouth, and a smooth, firm jawline—all harmonized into perfect proportions.
It was so distant and marvelous that she felt tears welling up involuntarily.
Upon meeting the woman who was a new family member and the future mother of Matila, Calyx kissed his cousin’s wife with the same cold smile on his face.
Lottie’s crazy brother-in-law was kicked out again within less than a day of being allowed back into the royal palace.
It was about three years after that when she saw Calyx for the second time. She had likely gone to visit him on his sickbed after hearing news that his health was poor.
She remembered the mansion where Calyx was living in seclusion being cold, without a single spark of warmth.
Even the scream, so loud it drowned out the creaking of the stairs as she went up to the second-floor bedroom.
She had entered the source of that beast-like howling. The man who had shown her that beauty was another name for precision had vanished without a trace.
Overwhelmed by a sense of desolation, Lottie had been unable to even enter the bedroom where the patient was raging and had fled just like that.
After enough time had passed to forget that incident, terrifying news arrived that he had beaten several of his vassals to death.
After their third meeting, she was never able to see him again. Because he had made it that way with his own hands.
