The Trash Lady Who Stole the Duke's First Night
Chapter 35
“Accepting your fiancée as your knight. No one will think it strange.”
“…….”
“Even if someone does think it’s strange, wouldn’t it not be so bad to be a trash commander who works his frail woman like a dog as a knight for once? Even if you become trash, as long as you’re brazen about it, who could say anything?”
At the woman’s light, chirping voice, Carlos pressed a hand over his eyes and burst out laughing.
“Ah. A trash commander.”
“Yes. It suits you.”
Carlos chuckled softly, the corners of his lips curving upward as he set down his teacup. The woman, who had chattered so boldly, seemed to be trying painstakingly hard not to lose her refined, noblewoman-like smile.
Though the effect was somewhat diminished by her plump cheeks and a blush so deep it looked ready to burst. His earnest young fiancée, who insisted on earning money with her own strength to the very end, clearly had no intention of acting like a rotten noble lady demanding more money from him. Nor did she intend to act like some cunning temptress out of a scandalous romance novel.
“If you want to become my knight.”
“Yes!”
Just as the man’s silence was becoming overwhelming and making her grow dizzy, his solemn voice broke through, and Elio nodded resolutely.
“You have to stay in this room.”
Elio blinked rapidly, her eyelashes fluttering.
For a moment, she felt like a fool, utterly incapable of comprehending the words she had heard so clearly. What did becoming a knight have to do with staying in this room?
“You. You’re supposed to protect me.”
Carlos stared intently at the woman, who was so slender she would easily fit right into his embrace. Elio tilted her head in sync with the black locks spilling over his brow.
Me…? Protect the Dragon Slayer?
“Then you have to be closest to me.”
He raised a muscular arm, pointing toward a door set in the middle of the right wall.
“That’s my room.”
Elio stared dumbfoundedly at the door on the right wall. The bleak, monochromatic bedroom entered her field of vision once more.
Stunned, Elio’s mouth fell open. At such an absurd remark, her jaw dropped and all ten of her toes curled inward.
“I-Is this the master couple’s bedroom? I could never—”
“No, the escort knight’s quarters.”
“Pardon?”
“Guard me.”
He was a man who uttered the most bizarre things in the calmest of voices.
Elio’s voice rose in a shrill pitch.
“Then Sir Toby should be the one staying in this room! How am I supposed to protect you, my Lord?”
The knight unnies said they would protect me!
“Do you not intend to protect your lord? If we are to traverse battlefields raging with combat and the habitats of monsters together, how can I trust you as my subordinate and leave my back to you?”
Elio parted her lips, stammering.
“Y-Your back is something you should protect yourself, my Lord…?”
“Are you trying to become a knight without even the resolve to protect your lord?”
Did it really require that level of resolve?
The knight unnies had clearly told her she could stay freely at the annex dormitory or in the village, and that she only needed to attend morning training every day!
“I don’t… have that kind of resolve…?”
“Ah. What a pity.”
“…What?”
“Lovely lady.”
Carlos set down his teacup, waved his hand slightly, and smiled.
“Disqualified.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Elio curled into a ball and answered blankly.
“…He said that unless I stay in the escort knight’s room right next to Sir Carlos’s… and protect him, I can’t become his knight….”
Even as the words left her mouth, she couldn’t comprehend what on earth it meant.
“So… with the resolve to protect him, in the room right next to his….”
With a dazed expression, Elio looked off in the distance at Carlos, who was training the knights like a colossal beast.
Among the dozens of knights in this training ground, his unmatched physique stood out unmistakably at first glance.
The resolve… to protect that man…?
Me? Is he teasing me again?
The female knights lounging casually around the shell-shocked Elio fell entirely silent.
Every one of the female knights simply blinked, the cool mountain breeze passing between them several times. In unison, they shifted their gaze toward the commander supervising the knights’ training.
After a brief silence, they turned their gaze back, looking at the center of all the recent buzz stirring Lobitan—the beautiful young lady whom the commander seemed to have entered a contract engagement with.
Turbulent glances darted back and forth. One female knight roughly wiped around her mouth, biting her twitching lips.
“……That’s… right.”
“Pardon? What is? No, I told you that you can speak comfortably with me, Sir. Please just treat me as a junior knight during training hours. But what’s right?”
Does she mean he really was teasing me?
“A recruit knight… stays in the room next to the commander and… uh….”
The female knight’s voice began to tremble. Salah immediately cut in.
“Gets trained and tested on their ability to protect and defend someone.”
She flexed her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s only natural to stay in the room next door. That’s all part of the test. We need to be strong in close-quarters combat, right?”
Elio’s mouth dropped open. Just as she was about to say something in response, another female knight chimed in.
“You might even have to stay in the same room.”
Elio’s eyes widened.
“The same room? Me?”
“Because you never know when an assassin might strike.”
“Indeed. If you’re going to protect the commander from a surprise attack, isn’t the adjacent room insufficient?”
A flurry of words poured out all at once. The female knights’ tone grew increasingly excited, pitching higher and higher.
“Our commander has suffered so many surprise attacks since he was a baby. He’s got… really severe trauma, you know?”
“Hey. Didn’t he almost get killed… after slaugh—I mean, almost get killed last time too?”
“Don’t worry too much. In any case, our commander has such insane stami—I mean, has zero stamina and is so anxious he can’t sleep a wink, so it’s practically insomnia, you see?”
“Anxious? Sir Carlos? Still, this is completely nonse—”
As she parted her bewildered lips, a resounding impact struck her ears. The eldest female knight slammed her halberd into the ground and bellowed in a gravelly voice:
“If you are a warrior of the North, you should know how to protect a man! Why did you join the great Lobitan if you were going to back out like this? Didn’t you say you wanted to become as strong as the commander desires? I am… I am truly disappointed, my Lady.”
Elio shut her gaping mouth at the rebuke from the oldest unnie, and all the female knights nodded with stern faces as if agreeing with the sentiment of disappointment. Elio, who had been trying to scramble for an excuse, limply let the dagger slip from her hand beneath the heavy atmosphere of the female knights.
❖ ❖ ❖
Base pay and special allowance. Training allowance. Hazard pay.
Combined, the sum was staggering.
To the point she thought: So Schuppenhardt isn’t a millennium-old prestigious swordsmanship family for nothing, is this why even people from Cyprus flock to Lobitan, is this the power of money?
Elio gave up pondering whether it was reasonable for her to protect Carlos, or whether the man was in his right mind, and chose instead to worship money. Perhaps, finding her utterly unreliable, the man might toss a goblin pup next to her while she slept, claiming it was a test. He was entirely the type of man who would do such a thing.
“…Excuse me.”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you going back to your room?”
The man, easily thrice her size, sat brazenly in front of the chick-yellow curtains, holding open a newspaper.
He lifted his gaze to the woman glaring holes into him, bundled up in her bedding like a caterpillar.
“Are you kicking out your lord?”
That cursed ‘lord’…!
Elio glared at her wealthy lord with a sigh, then inquired about the figures that kept unsettling her mind.
“……About me staying here, did Mother and Father say it was all right? What did they say…?”
“No. Both of them are at the villa, so make yourself at home. You won’t run into them.”
At his casual reply, Elio’s eyebrows drooped. Even if she wouldn’t run into them, her heart remained uneasy. Just how displeased with me are they that they haven’t even thought about receiving my greetings yet?
“Is your mother… doing any better with her illness?”
“She’s fine.”
He answered flatly. Elio, pressing firmly against her chest near her heart and gnawing on her lower lip, flashed a momentary smile of relief.
“What a relief. I was worried. Wondering if she was gravely ill…. Is she completely cured?”
“She can’t be cured. There is no medicine.”
“Why is there no medi—”
As Elio hesitated before inquiring further, he told her not to worry about it. Then, as if lost in thought, he lit a cigar and slowly tapped his finger. Clutching the area near her heart, Elio studied Carlos’s somewhat somber expression.
“……I’m practicing healing magic too, so please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
Elio spoke cautiously, rubbing against her chest where her hand rested.
Carlos chuckled dryly.
“You’ll have to plant a flower first.”
“…My Lord. My potential happens to be very high, you know.”
“Sure. Do your best with the flower first.”
Is his mother’s illness not that serious, then? Pouting as she shot a side-eye at the nonchalant man, Elio gazed intently at the pendant belonging to his mother resting against his chest.
Thinking he was an unexpectedly devoted son for not even taking off the necklace when he went to sleep, she smiled faintly—only for her gaze to be stolen by the droplets of water tracing down the freshly bathed man’s damp chest. Water droplets trickled down his sculpted pectorals toward his abdomen, and then her eyes fell upon the newspaper he had spread open.
Defiled….
As the absurd Emperor’s Faction newspaper article claiming she had defiled that man came to mind, heat rushed to her face. Frowning, she pulled the blanket up higher.
D-Defiled, seriously, how ridiculous.
As soon as she received her salary, she would leave without hesitation. She would leave immediately.
“Please settle my salary all at once when I leave in two months.”
“…When you leave?”
Carlos lowered his gaze from the woman’s face, which looked ready to burst, and fixed his eyes on the front-page exposé headlines condemning Marquis Duran.
—The Two Faces of Marquis Duran, Who Preached Pious Abstinence: The Miserable Fate of Fallen Noble Ladies—
Marquis Duran sparks massive shock with a sex life akin to that of a libertine… locking fallen noblewomen who became commoners in his outbuilding as concubines…
The crimes committed by exploiting the fact that, having fallen to commoner status, they were unable to appeal to the Temple, have caused horrifying shock. Young fallen noble ladies driven into the streets, sexually exploited for years in a blind spot of safety…
Tsking at the vague contents that failed to capture even half the truth of the shameless deeds committed by Marquis Duran and other hunters of fallen noblewomen, he took out a cigar and held it between his lips.
His heavy, subdued gaze turned toward the young fallen noble lady sitting inside his wife’s bedroom.