Looking for the Villainess’s Contract Husband
Chapter 21
After finishing my meal, I stopped by the Director’s office, carefully wrote down the alias ‘Ella,’ and stepped outside.
I was told that after eating, the children played hide-and-seek in the small woods behind the orphanage for digestion and exercise.
Fortunately, it was a game I had played occasionally with Mom back in the tower, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the rules.
“Why doesn’t Ella be ‘it’ today?”
“Yeah! Since it’s her first day!”
“We were all ‘it’ on our first day too!”
The children didn’t even wait for my answer, giggling as they scattered into the woods.
The boy I had noticed earlier was among them.
‘Well, works for me.’
Being ‘it’ meant I could wander around everywhere without raising suspicion.
It was the perfect game to seize an opportunity to talk to that boy alone.
“Ella, will you be all right?”
“Yes. I’ll be ‘it’.”
I gave a shrug to the worried teacher and leaned against a tree trunk to count.
After counting to a hundred, I set off to find the children.
It took less than ten minutes to find everyone except for the boy who seemed to be their leader.
‘I suppose they are just kids…’
Even though it was my first time here, the woods weren’t that large, and the children were clumsy at hiding. There was even a child who thought that if he couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see him.
“Is there only one left? I’ll be back!”
I brought the children I’d found back to the teacher and headed back into the woods.
Was it because he was the leader? While I was finding all the other children, I hadn’t seen a single hair of that boy.
“Hey. It’s almost time to go back, where are you?”
I was getting a bit anxious because if it got any later, the teacher would come looking for both of us, and I didn’t know when I’d get another chance to talk to him alone.
It was while I was searching for him, raising my voice just enough so it wouldn’t carry outside the woods.
Thump!
“…!”
The moment I stepped on a pile of leaves, the ground suddenly gave way and my body plummeted downward.
Just before falling into a pit—one about twice the height of an adult and completely out of place in this scenery—I managed to reach out and grab the edge of the ground, narrowly avoiding the fall.
“Ugh…”
My shoulders ached as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.
My palms stung, likely scraped by the dirt, making me knit my brows.
Just then, an unfamiliar voice pierced my ears.
“…You have better reflexes than you look.”
Rustle—
From the tree I had just passed, the boy I had been searching for so desperately revealed himself.
Landing lightly on the ground, he walked over to the edge of the pit.
As he looked down at me, his eyes held a strange amount of wariness and hostility.
‘What in the…’
I couldn’t understand it.
I had never left the North since the day I was born.
Or rather, it would be more accurate to say I couldn’t leave.
So it was highly unlikely that I had earned someone’s grudge during a time I couldn’t remember.
‘It’s too strange to think of it as just simple hazing.’
His gaze wasn’t something that could be dismissed as the childish territoriality of a mere boy.
That look was…
“You’re not an orphan, are you?”
Then, the boy lowered himself into a crouch by the pit, his lips twisting into a smirk.
Unlike when he was looking at the younger sibling sitting next to him during mealtime, his eyes were now sharp and edged.
‘What?’
The moment I heard the boy’s words, my heart dropped with a heavy thud.
It was a greater shock than the sudden near-fall into the pit moments ago.
‘How did he…’
“You have a look on your face that says, ‘How did he know?’”
The boy sneered without even trying to hide it, as if my inner thoughts were plain to see.
He glanced down and gave a light tap to my hand, which was barely hanging onto the edge of the pit.
“…!”
In that instant, my already precarious grip slipped against the dirt, and my body slid further down.
My heart lurched, just like when Mom used to play with me by lifting me high and letting me drop.
‘This brat…’
I grit my teeth to keep from groaning at the pain of grit embedding itself into the wounds on my palms.
When I looked up and glared at him, he spoke coldly.
“Does it make sense for a kid who supposedly struggled on the streets to not have a single callus on her hands? They’re so soft that look, you’re bleeding just from a little scrape like this.”
“…!”
My shoulders flinched at those words. I bit my lip and swallowed a groan.
‘I messed up.’
I had only cared about my outward appearance; I hadn’t realized there would be a child who looked at such minute details.
Besides, I was only ‘pretending’ to be an orphan, and I had never actually wandered the streets.
‘I didn’t have much time, but I should have looked into things more before coming.’
Because the other children were quite innocent, I had inadvertently and prematurely generalized that this was normal for an average ‘child.’
On the contrary, this place was full of children who had to struggle every single day on the streets just to survive; I should have known there would be at least one or two with extraordinary intuition.
Just because I had recalled a few memories of a past life didn’t mean the massive void in my current life had been filled. I had been far too arrogant.
While I was wallowing in regret, the boy continued speaking.
He rested his chin on one hand and tilted his head to the side.
“And in the dining hall, too. You said you asked the teachers to let you in because you were hungry? A kid like that doesn’t just pick at her food like you did. That’s the attitude of someone who’s used to eating their fill somewhere else.”
“….”
“Who exactly are you? This place is overflowing with kids who are desperate, even if you aren’t. I’m the same.”
The boy spat out the words through gritted teeth.
Was it just my imagination that I felt a momentary sense of dissonance from him as he said that?
While I was lost in thought, the boy stood up and straightened his posture, as if he didn’t even care to hear my answer.
He looked down at me with eyes as cold as a Northern blizzard and said,
“So, if you came here with some other motive, leave this place tonight. Swear that you’ll leave. If you do, I’ll pull you out of there and I won’t say a word to the teachers.”
The boy’s words were certainly reasonable.
I was strictly someone who had come to stay for a while despite having a living mother, whereas for the other children, this place was their only home and their final sanctuary.
It wasn’t right for me, who would stay and then vanish like a passing breeze, to take away a share meant for a permanent resident.
But ridiculously, the moment I heard the boy’s words, something surged inside me.
Emotions I hadn’t even known I possessed filled my throat as if they were about to burst out.
‘Do you think…’
Do you think I’m not desperate either?
Whether it was because of the pain from the wound or because I was frustrated, tears welled up and blurred my vision. I bit my lip and forced my eyes wide.
Of course, I didn’t have to scramble to be adopted like those children.
To that boy, it might have felt like the complaints of someone who had everything.
But even if the direction we were looking was different, I was just as desperate.
‘At least you can live if you want to.’
‘Laviella’ must die.
It was nothing less than a sentence.
I would have tried everything to find a way to live with Mom if the novel had just described it as ‘dying after wasting away from an unknown illness.’
But if a way to survive didn’t even exist from the start.
If it was a life with a predetermined end.
Can you really guarantee that you wouldn’t act just like me?
‘Your circumstances are none of my business.’
The time I had left was too precious to spend in despair.
Even if I had to leave that boy trapped in a pit forever, I would save my mother.
‘But I can’t say things like that to him. He wouldn’t believe me anyway.’
So, this was the best option for now.
I suppressed the anger filling my throat.
Fixing my gaze clearly on the boy, I parted my lips.
“I’ll help you.”
The boy’s eyes widened at those words.
Whether it was a reaction he hadn’t expected at all, he let out a dazed sound with a face clearly marked by bewilderment.
“…What?”
“You said you were desperate. I’ll help you so that you can get adopted.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t lie. I can swear it on my mother.”
If the boy would cooperate so that I could hide from the Marquis’s eyes, I had no intention of making an enemy of him.
Apart from my personal distaste, I had been taught to properly repay a favor.
Hearing my words, the boy fell silent with a confused expression.
Seeing his eyes waver, did the proposal feel quite tempting?
I couldn’t know the truth, but what mattered was that the boy’s guard, which had been hostile the whole time, had blurred even for a moment.
I continued, as if pouring oil on the fire of his confusion.
“I don’t know what you’re planning to do, but the teachers won’t just not look for me at all, right? If I manage to escape and tell the teachers everything you did, it won’t look good for you, will it?”
The ones who decided on an adoption were ultimately the prospective parents, the orphanage teachers, and the Director.
If an adopted child caused trouble, it became the orphanage’s responsibility to some extent, so the orphanage also tended to screen various aspects of the children before introducing them to prospective parents.
…I remembered Odile, who had brought me near this place, telling me that.
‘If he’s desperate to be adopted, he can’t help but care about his reputation among the teachers.’
And as if that prediction hit the mark, the boy’s eyes gradually grew fierce as I spoke.
Before his hostility could grow too large, I quickly added,
“If you pull me out of here and keep it a secret that I’m not an orphan, I won’t say anything either. So stop doing things like this.”
“….”
“I, ugh… I think I’m really about to fall? Honestly, I’m at my limit.”
It wasn’t an empty threat. The fingertips holding onto the edge of the pit were now visibly trembling.
The tremor that started from my fingertips spread up my arms, making my shoulders shake.
Then, the boy, who had been silent with wavering eyes, bit his lip hard.
As calmness settled into his previously confused eyes, a sense of unease suddenly washed over me.
And that unease, without fail, became reality.
“…I don’t trust people who say they don’t lie.”
The boy’s face as he said that somehow looked as if he had been hurt.
With a cold expression, he turned around and took a step away.
Seeing that back, a sigh escaped through my teeth of its own accord. I felt a bit despairing.
I stole a glance down at the bottom of the pit.
Perhaps because I was afraid, it looked even deeper than before.
‘It looks pretty deep… What if I break something.’
The image of the Duchy’s doctor boasting about his expensive medicinal herbs was still vivid in my mind.
‘If I go back with even worse injuries, he might scream.’
Maybe it would be better to use the strength I was using to hold onto the edge of the dirt to try the break-fall technique Paul had mentioned in passing.
Just as I was about to close my eyes tight and let go of my hands with that thought.
Rustle—
The bushes in the direction the boy was heading suddenly shook violently.
His shoulders flinched as he stopped in his tracks.
“Wh-what is it…!”
At the same time his wary voice rang out, someone popped out from between the bushes.
It was neither an orphanage teacher nor a child.
“Hm?”
A voice that was somehow familiar tickled my ears.
My eyes widened at the sight of the person appearing behind the boy’s shoulder.
The other boy who had appeared so suddenly, Lucian, gave a slight, troubled smile.
“…I wonder what’s going on here.”
Why are you coming out from there…?
