Ch#159
159화
He forced down the something boiling in his gut and consciously steadied his voice.
“I will act as if I didn’t hear what you just said.”
He spat the words out in a deliberately stiff tone and turned to change his clothes, but a rustling sound came from behind him.
Turning back, he saw the woman pushing herself up into a sitting position, her hair disheveled.
As she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, the blanket slid off her shoulders, which looked fragile enough to crumble. The nightgown, resized to accommodate her pregnant body, made her look even smaller and younger.
Swaying as she approached him with that delicate, glass-sculpture-like frame, she fixed him with a gaze so pale it was chilling.
“Why?”
Barkas, reaching out to steady her, clenched his fist in midair. He felt as if putting a hand on her too hastily might break her.
“Why do I have to be here?”
The woman spat the words out as if testing his patience.
“I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be with you. Just looking at your face feels like I’m going insane.”
Her voice wavered unsteadily, like a viola string tightened to its absolute limit. Her thin fingers clung to his clothes as if hanging on for dear life.
“So send me somewhere—anywhere! I don’t care if it’s the Imperial Palace or a monastery!”
He lost his patience in an instant and shoved her back onto the bed. Her ragged breath, escaping through cracked lips, poured hotly over his neck. Her blue eyes, pupils dilated, blurred right before his face. He spoke with force, hammering each word into those damp, drowning depths.
“Rave all you want. Nothing is going to change.”
The woman’s face contorted as if she couldn’t understand. For some reason, that expression tore at his insides even more.
Driven by a dark impulse he hadn’t known existed within him, he murmured in a low voice.
“You must spend your entire life within my domain. That was the fate decided the moment you swore with your own lips to be my wife.”
He felt goosebumps rise over her cold skin beneath his touch. A fragile light—a mix of confusion, resentment, and fear—spread across her eyes.
He stared into them for a moment before forcing himself away from her and sitting on the edge of the bed. As he struggled to compose his scattered mind, the woman finally drove a blade into what remained of his soul.
“How… how can you be so fine?”
His back went rigid. Barkas slowly turned to look at her.
The woman, who had been shooting him resentful glares, began to spill out violent sobs.
“Our baby died… how can you be so cold? I—I’m in so much pain…”
She began to claw at her chest like someone experiencing actual physical agony.
Watching her blankly, he asked himself.
Am I fine right now?
Perhaps, he was.
He could not empathize with the pain this woman felt.
Even as their first child could not draw a single breath, he could see nothing but his bleeding wife.
He had even ignored her pleas to let her hold the child. He couldn’t allow it, fearing that if he showed her the lifeless infant, she would let go of everything right then and there.
He truly thought that as long as this woman was safe, the child didn’t matter. Even now, he only hoped she would forget the dead child and escape her sorrow as quickly as possible.
Whether she loathed him more than she did now or not, just as he was about to confess that, a tiny face wrapped in swaddling clothes flashed inside his retinas like a burn mark.
A face smaller than his palm. A face that might have looked half like him and half like her…
Recalling that tiny lump of flesh buried in the earth without ever being held in its mother’s arms, his tongue felt paralyzed, refusing to move.
Overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, he let his arms hang limp.
She was no longer looking at him. He watched her in silence as she trembled with her face buried in her hands, then he stood up.
He felt that if he stayed there any longer, he might give in to whatever she demanded.
Fleeing the bedroom, Barkas locked the door behind him and leaned his leaden body against it.
In his blurring vision, he saw the window pouring in the sunset. Feeling his mind gradually staining red, he pressed down hard on his eyelids, which felt as dry as sandpaper.
It was the end of an exceptionally long and arduous day.
After 그날, Talia began to act more viciously than before.
She wanted Barkas to grow sick of her. She wanted him to throw her away without a shred of guilt.
She had already been thoroughly abandoned by everyone else.
The Emperor’s offer to grant a divorce meant that Senebier had also given up on her. It was clear that by losing the child, she had failed the last bit of expectation held for her.
When she first realized that, she felt a stinging pain, but the shock wasn’t as great as she expected.
She didn’t care about her mother anymore.
Talia no longer thought about a way to live. She didn’t care if she was murdered by Gares’s hand this very moment. Now, she just wanted to be away from this man.
She looked at Barkas with eyes full of agony. He was changing his clothes, which were a mess after being hit by the bowl of porridge she had thrown.
The way he acted so calm, as if nothing had happened, took her breath away. His patience was horrifying. And she, who became an uncontrollable monster in front of him, was even more horrifying.
She muttered in a weary tone.
“Aren’t you sick of this yet?”
Barkas, pulling down a dark blue tunic, turned his head toward her.
No emotion could be read from his face, which bore a faint trace of fatigue. After staring at her with eyes that seemed covered by an opaque film, the man spoke in his characteristically level voice while folding up his sleeves.
“Aren’t you the one who should be sick of these childish tantrums by now?”
Talia let out a hollow laugh.
She felt a wave of futility at the fact that the actions she herself found loathsome were nothing more than tantrums to him.
“Most of the vassals don’t want me as the Grand Duchess anyway. Everyone would be happy if I disappeared.”
“Since when did you care about other people’s happiness?”
With a dry chuckle, Barkas brought the fresh food the maids had prepared back to the bed.
Talia looked down at it with lifeless eyes. Having already thrown three fits today, she didn’t even have the strength left to flip the bowl.
“Do I have to feed you myself?”
Pushed by the voice resonating softly beside her, she finally picked up the spoon.
As she forced a few spoonfuls of food into her mouth, she saw a faint look of relief pass over his face. Just as she consciously looked away from him, she sensed someone outside the door.
“Your Grace, guests from the capital have arrived. You should come out.”
It was the head butler’s voice.
Talia looked up at him, still clutching her spoon. Barkas, looking out the window with a furrowed brow, soon picked up his coat.
“I’ll be there shortly.”
After ringing the bell to call the maids and instructing them not to take their eyes off her for even a second, he left the room.
