Chapter 3.1
It was raining that day too.
A cheerful melody drifted through an ornate sitting room. The opulent décor was blinding, demonstrating the owner’s wealth that didn’t bother to be subtle. Azelin set her hands in her lap and tightened them as she faced a scene more disorienting than it was beautiful.
“The agreed amount will reach your family after the wedding. It’s more than one should pay for something as fleeting as beauty, but that’s how much I value and cherish you.”
“…Thank you.”
“In turn, I trust you won’t forget the household obligations and conventions I’ve explained. I’m a busy man, as you can see, and I need an intelligent partner to support me and manage the home.”
The corners of her mouth, held up by sheer force, trembled faintly. She had to keep the hollow laugh from escaping at the word ‘intelligent partner.’
The man discussing marriage with her was someone she had first met here, in this house, today.
The age gap was the kind that would have them mistaken for father and daughter rather than husband and wife.
An engagement decided without the exchange of a single feeling.
It was Azelin’s marriage, and yet not one person had thought to ask for her opinion.
As if buying something in a shop, her fiancé had chosen a beautiful woman who met his requirements and drawn up a contract to pay her family an appropriate price. That was the entirety of this engagement.
“As a businessman, I don’t normally operate at a loss. But to have your beauty, I’ll gladly accept it. They say love is no place for calculation. Ha ha.”
A hand shot out and caught her chin, lifting her face. She endured the terrible sensation crawling across her skin as their eyes met.
His gaze moved over her face thoroughly, then slid down her body with naked greed. That shameless look of desire made her stomach turn.
Love?
The word ‘love’ sounded laughable coming out of his mouth. His eyes held nothing but desire, and every rule he’d rattled off for how a wife should conduct herself was entirely one-sided.
Like a contract for a servant, the position of ‘Baroness’ being offered to Azelin was one of pure submission to his desires, self-will stripped away.
His behavior was inappropriate for a formal first meeting, even if this was an official introduction between a Viscount family’s daughter and her fiancé.
But Azelin couldn’t point that out. As he well knew, she was the one without leverage.
Naturally, whatever minimal courtesy he had mimicked began to become increasingly terse and crude. Just as he’d bought her family easily with money, so had he purchased his own title of Baron and his respectable-seeming family history with the same money, which made none of this surprising.
But Azelin couldn’t easily condemn him for it.
Because she had spent her whole life enjoying things as a matter of course simply by virtue of being born into a noble bloodline. So even if the price of that birthright was now money instead of blood, she had no standing to call it unfair.
The world had changed.
The era when birth and rank were everything had passed. A new world had emerged. Money, tangible capital you could hold in your hands, had become what mattered now. The Emperor’s power still stood firm and the class system still existed, but comfort and wealth were no longer guaranteed simply by being noble.
Those who held power were fierce in their determination, trying to claw together more money and authority in the shifting tide, while commoners who sensed they could finally reach higher scrimped and scraped and made their deals with the powerful.
It was an age of great upheaval.
Inevitably, some who couldn’t keep up with the pace fell behind. Azelin’s father was one of them, and that was where her own tragedy had begun.
Misfortune was swift and merciless. The small, stubborn Brisserne house, unable to adapt, fell so fast that the title of noble became a thing with no force behind it at all.
People stopped waiting patiently for failing rulers. A noble with neither money nor power could no longer expect respect.
The disaster at home didn’t end with the family’s poverty.
“How could such a trivial matter even befit the house of Brisserne?”
When Azelin first brought home wages she’d earned with her own hands, her father raged at her, told her it was undignified, and only chastised her for it.
‘Where exactly does any dignity remain in this house?’
She couldn’t bring herself to defy her father, but she swallowed the frustration.
Even the estate, the last thing the Brisserne household still had, was deteriorating steadily, losing value as no one was left to maintain it. With not a single servant they could afford to hire, her father still refused to lift a hand.
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