‘…wh?’
Katarina’s heart skipped a beat and she hurriedly looked around the bed. Fortunately, his luggage was still there. It seemed he had gone outside for a while.
Where would he have gone this early in the morning?
Wondering if she might find him in the yard, Katarina went outside. However, it was the postman who was waiting for Katarina outside, not Cloud.
“Something for me?”
“Yes, ya. For you.”
The delivery man tossed the letter and frantically cut into the alley round the corner, grumbling why he was the unlucky one forced to send letters in the slums.
Katarina tilted her head and read the letter tossed by the postman. And as she read the letter, her expression stiffened.
“Lonwell.”
A colossus figure in the Kingdom of Alitia.
Her enemy, who had destroyed her peaceful life and brutally murdered her parents.
The letter was from that man.
The content of the letter, in short, was as follows: his birthday was coming soon, and so he needed dancers to entertain his guests.
Katarina crumpled the letter and threw it away.
“Bastard… he doesn’t even remember my parents, does he?”
Well, they certainly weren’t worth remembering for a ‘Tycoon Noble’ like him.
Otherwise how could he have not felt any shame sending her a letter?
Yup, she was going.
She could now do her mother’s dance moves. The timing was just right. He needed entertainment? Yes, she would provide him plenty. The price would be his neck.
Feeling her arms trembling and her fists balled up, she let out a sigh to calm her emotions.
‘This is not the time. I have to start preparing breakfast.’
Cloud will be back soon.
‘…should I talk to Cloud about it?’
The story of her past and revenge.
Originally, she wouldn’t even have had the thought.
‘We are no longer strangers…’
Katarina went back into the house, fanning her sweaty face with a hand.
* * *
“People are driven by desire. I have a desire and I survive to satisfy it. But as a child, I didn’t really have any desires.”
Lonwell was born into a hereditary family of Counts in the Kingdom of Alitia. Just not any ordinary Count family, but a family that had accumulated great wealth through trade.
Because of this, he had no particular grand desires.
He had everything since he was born.
He could eat what he wanted to eat and wear what he wanted to wear.
He had no ambition to raise his family to a higher position.
“It was just like any other boring day. There were many times when I thought that it might be better to die than to continue this boring life. In the midst of all this time when I was going through these psychological phases, I was officially introduced, at the festival, as the successor of the family.”
At a bland festival, he happened to see a parade of dancers.
“I saw a dancer. The moment I saw her dance, I fell in love at first sight.”
Perhaps an Angel had descended.
That thought struck in his head, and Lonwell fell in love with the dancer.
“For the first time, I had something I wanted. I couldn’t stand it. I intervened, stopped the march and immediately proposed to her.”
He was too young back then.
Lonwell chuckled.
“At first I was rejected, but after persevering, she accepted my marriage proposal. That’s how I married her and had a truly happy time, different from what I had so far. But I was the only one who was happy.”
The love of a man who had spent his entire life in nothing but emptiness.
It was not a warm, cozy affection. It was something possessive, twisted to the point of stinking.
“She ran off with the gardener. I don’t know when the two of them met, but… I must have been such a pain that she got tired of me enough to fall for a gardener or something.”
Upon learning the truth, Lonwell was furious.
He immediately sent a pursuit party to capture the two lovers.
“It wasn’t difficult to apprehend them both. I asked her after beating the gardener. Why did she run away from me? What was it that I was lacking? She cried and cried, before replying that she had never once loved me since the beginning.”
She said as if to let out the resentment she had been holding back for so long.
She said she wanted to continue performing as a dancer.
Her marriage with him was forced because of the pressure from his proud parents.
She was fed up with his obsession and twisted love.
“After crying for a long minute, she called out in a thin voice. ‘If you still love me, just let me go.’ What do you think I would have done after hearing that?”
“Shackled and detained?”
“Ha ha, I loved her too much to do that. ‘Can’t we start over?’ I had asked. ‘It can never happen,’ she replied adamantly. Because I loved her, I let her go as she wanted. And I returned to the family and took over as the head of the household.”
It was not a normal succession.
Because the former head of household, his wife, and his concubines were all found poisoned.
“A lot of time had passed since then. Even so, her dancing, her grace was still clear in my mind. I was once again going through phases, dealing with them. And it was when I came to supervise the festival as usual. I saw her there. Standing beside her, was the man who was once our family gardener.”
He had thought that the hurt and anger would have weathered over time. But it hadn’t. It was just a precarious dam that was waiting to crumble down.
“I lost my temper. I was consumed by anger.”
When he came back to his senses, what caught his eyes was a bloody sword in his hand and two cold corpses.
There was a little girl holding a small dagger and shivering while guarding the entrance to the attic where her younger siblings were hunkering.
“I knew it the moment I saw the child. I knew that the child was mine. I inquired into and confirmed she was indeed my child.”
He had killed the woman he loved with his own hands.
It was only because of his own daughter that Lonwell did not kill himself after making such a horrid mistake.
“So, what do you want to say? Calling me all the way here couldn’t be just for a story of first love, or asking for help with a touching father-daughter reunion, aye?”
Cloud leaned back in his chair and spoke nonchalantly.
Lonwell smiled and shook his head.
“We both already know that is impossible. I haven’t forgotten the day she didn’t let go of her knife, trembling but unyielding; she was afraid but still glared into my eyes, with hatred.”
How nice it would have been if she could live like an ordinary woman.
But that was impossible.
Because the child held a great grudge against him.
“Resentment and revenge are the shackles that bind my child. Unless they disappear, my child will not be able to fly.”
Just like her mother, Anneliese, did.
“I don’t want that.”
Katarina was Lonwell’s daughter and the mark left by Anneliese and him.
Lonwell loved his daughter as her father.
He hoped that his daughter would spread her wings and fly high into the sky.
So he asked the hero—
“So I ask you. Please do not stop her from killing me.”
—to turn a blind eye to his child’s desire.
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