Roxana
Chapter 53
Chapter 53
The Way to Protect the Female Lead’s Older Brother
Chapter 53
Fontaine blurted out the question without thinking, only to grimace and snap his mouth shut immediately.
He had realized on his own just how foolish a question it was.
Roxana tilted her head slightly, looking at him as if asking whether he truly didn’t know.
Damn it. No wonder the surroundings had felt so eerily quiet.
He felt like an idiot for thinking this silence was merely the nature of a forest on a snowy day.
“Must be nice having the leisure to come out and feed a pet. You could easily procure food for your poison butterflies back at the mansion.”
Irritated, Fontaine spoke in a provocative tone, venting his frustration on the person right in front of him.
“My poison butterflies are picky eaters. They said they were tired of their usual meals, so I came out for a change of pace, but…”
Yet Roxana didn’t bat an eye; instead, a smile formed on her face.
“Why are you so angry?”
Roxana stepped toward Fontaine without making a single sound.
Whether because of her soundless footsteps or her unrealistically breathtaking face, she gave off an overwhelming aura of being something not quite human.
Watching Roxana approach him, Fontaine nearly flinched and took a step back on pure reflex.
He had traveled all over on family business and met countless people, but he had never seen a woman quite like Roxana.
In truth, Roxana’s beauty was on a level where comparison with anyone else was entirely out of the question.
Her looks had left people speechless ever since she was young, but as an adult, Roxana was, in a sense, downright terrifying.
By now, one might expect to have grown used to her, but before a beauty that grew more dazzling by the day, the very word ‘adaptation’ lost all meaning.
Even Fontaine couldn’t help the chill running down the back of his neck whenever he laid eyes on Roxana.
Her beauty held such terrifying, destructive power.
No, but could such a thing truly be described by the word ‘beautiful’?
To Fontaine’s mind, the woman standing before him was already a calamity in human form.
Having closed the distance until she stood barely a step away, Roxana looked up at him with a faint smile.
“Come to think of it, you looked displeased from the moment you arrived in the forest. What made you so upset?”
Her sweet voice, drifting from mere inches away, felt as though it were coiling around his entire body.
Her upward gaze at such close proximity took his breath away.
Anyone, not just Fontaine, would have reacted the same way standing before Roxana.
Suddenly, Roxana let out a soft “Ah,” as if realizing something.
“Father scolded you again, didn’t he?”
At that moment, Fontaine’s face hardened stiffly.
“Shut up.”
He barked harshly. At any other time, he wouldn’t have reacted so sharply, but right now his mood was foul beyond measure.
Yet Roxana did not shrink back in the slightest from Fontaine’s hostile demeanor.
“Father is truly too harsh… Who works as hard for the family as Fontaine oppa does?”
Her sympathetic whisper carried a captivating pull.
As a hazy light settled in her crimson eyes, an air of delicate sorrow enveloped her, making one feel an urge to comfort her right away.
“I heard about what happened this time too. Deon snatched all the credit at the very end, didn’t he? How typical of that vile Deon.”
Fontaine’s hostility began to gradually soften.
Originally, Fontaine and Roxana were never close enough to converse like this.
So when Roxana suddenly started closing the distance between them one day, he had felt wary of her.
Yet that wariness had faded considerably compared to the beginning.
“Father is getting on in years, so it seems his discernment isn’t what it used to be. Just the other day, I told him the opportunities he gives to Fontaine oppa and Deon aren’t fair, and he got angry at me.”
Roxana was the person in Agriche who understood Fontaine best.
Whenever she criticized Lant’s foolishness and Deon’s cowardice before him like this, his boiling rage felt somewhat soothed.
Listening to her sweet, gentle whispering, the inferiority complex he harbored toward Deon even seemed to dilute a little.
“There’s no one in Agriche who doesn’t know how blatantly Father favors Deon. But he doesn’t deserve to be the successor.”
Moreover, the two of them had something in common.
Namely, that they both despised Deon to the core.
It was well known that during the mission Deon and Roxana had been assigned together for the first time last year, their discord had escalated into infighting.
It was bad enough that Lant had never given them a task where their paths might cross ever since.
That was also why Fontaine didn’t guard himself too heavily against Roxana.
In his eyes, Roxana was merely a naive girl who had yet to master her emotions.
“Surely none of our siblings would want to follow Deon. Who would want to become a dog licking a tyrant’s boots, never knowing when they might be kicked to death?”
In any case, the hostility Roxana displayed toward Deon was so vivid it felt tangible.
Fontaine liked that immensely.
“I hope someone who can embrace all of us succeeds Father. If it were Fontaine oppa, you would do wonderful work.”
Furthermore, when Roxana looked at him with longing eyes and uttered such words, he felt as if he truly were an extraordinary man capable of living up to her expectations.
“Damn it. You’re right. If Father hadn’t favored that bastard Deon and given fair opportunities, I wouldn’t have been pushed aside like this.”
Fontaine ground his teeth, his fury toward Lant and Deon flaring up once more.
He possessed outstanding abilities second to none, yet neither of them recognized it—they even treated him like total trash.
“Aren’t you in the same boat, Roxana, not getting proper opportunities? It’s already been a year since you came of age, but you haven’t been assigned a single mission that could produce a noteworthy achievement.”
Of course, the primary reason was that Roxana had ruined the assignment she shared with Deon a year ago.
Since then, Lant had not given Roxana any more work to build merits.
Fontaine thought of Roxana as a pathetic, foolish girl who didn’t even know how to properly wield the weapons she possessed.
Despite being the master of those terrifying poison butterflies, she was incapable of doing anything other than acting as Father’s decorative accessory at best.
Yet thinking about it from another angle, Roxana was the only one who suffered from the dispute with Deon during that mission.
As expected of Lant’s favored child, Deon bore no responsibility for that incident.
And this time, he shamelessly stole Fontaine’s credit again.
“It can’t be helped. Father prefers bringing me along like an ornament.”
At the words Roxana let slip with a faint smile, Fontaine clicked his tongue.
She really is a stupid wench with nothing to her name but a pretty face.
It was baffling how someone with such a spineless personality had achieved good results in every Monthly Evaluation.
Did she throw her body at the evaluators? Well, if you count that as a specialty in its own right, it wasn’t against the rules.
By the time Roxana stood out in the Monthly Evaluations and attended the Grand Banquet, Fontaine, the eldest son, was already an adult.
Thus, being the first to take on family duties and roam outside, he inevitably grew even more indifferent to the affairs of his half-siblings, whom he had cared little for to begin with.
Moreover, he hadn’t attended the Grand Banquet since around that time either.
That was because Fontaine’s abilities were nothing particularly exceptional.
However, he rationalized it to himself by claiming that engaging in serious competition with snot-nosed siblings was beneath him, so he had merely yielded his place.
In any case, that was why Fontaine could not understand why the people of the family praised Roxana so highly.
After coming of age, even when he wasn’t carrying out family tasks, he rarely stayed in the mansion and spent most of his life roaming outside.
This was because he despised seeing Lant constantly comparing him to Deon at every turn.
On top of that, looking at Deon’s emotionless face, which seemed to mock him, made his blood boil without fail.
Consequently, Fontaine had never witnessed with his own eyes that Roxana brutally killed the Young Lord of Blue whom she took as a plaything three years ago, nor that she was the master of lethally potent poison butterflies; he had only heard it secondhand from others.
For that reason, Fontaine believed those rumors were greatly exaggerated.
Still, her pretty face was undeniably useful; seeing her wear such a sorrowful expression stirred a pity in him he hadn’t known he possessed.
“Are you accompanying Father to the 5 Families’ Harmony Conference this time too?”
“It seems so.”
Suddenly, he recalled the day of the 5 Families’ Harmony Conference he had attended last year.
How could he ever forget that farcical spectacle, where the haughty, pretentious fools turned into gaping idiots wherever Roxana passed?
Even thinking about it now, it had been quite a sight to behold.
However, Fontaine had not been granted permission by Lant to attend the Harmony Conference this year.
Instead, the one taking his spot this time was certain to be that detestable Deon, whom he could chew to pieces without satisfying his spite.
“I wanted to attend together this year as well, but we won’t be able to. What a pity.”
Roxana offered a faint smile as she watched Fontaine grit his teeth.
At her whisper, laden with a subtle resonance, Fontaine’s eyes narrowed.
Before long, a sly lust crept into his gaze.
He had felt it since childhood: her beauty alone was truly a waste on a mere wench.
Though half the blood in their veins was the same, they said consanguineous marriages were frequent three or four generations ago anyway.
So if he were to become the next head of the family…
“Just trust me. I won’t ever let Deon inherit the successor’s seat as Father intends.”
Fontaine boasted arrogantly.
His eyes were still lewdly scanning Roxana.
Soon, that same beautiful smile bloomed across Roxana’s face once more.
“Thank you. I knew Fontaine oppa was the only one I could trust and lean on.”