Chapter 4.1
Moonlight slipped down through the clouds and slid briefly across the white hair of a man standing by the window. Beneath that pale, clean hair, cold-looking even in color, eyes glinted in the dark with a sly light.
They seemed almost amused one moment, and the next flashed briefly with the cruelty of a predator fixing on prey.
“What would you like me to do?”
The shadow, a man dressed in black waiting by the door, addressed him.
The man kept his gaze out the window, tapping his fingers against his forearm. His lips curved with a meaningful smile as he stood against the wall with his arms folded.
“I have a feeling I already know her destination without following her, but I suppose meeting her halfway is good manners.”
“Should we just follow?”
“Yes. And while you’re at it, find out who’s new in that person’s circle. Female, most likely. Not from a powerful family with strong backing. She’d be a card that’s easy to discard.”
He would be able to pinpoint her more accurately with a face, unfortunately, he hadn’t confirmed that much yet. But neither the man giving the order nor the shadow listening to it was particularly worried. Anyone who would fail at a task over something so small wouldn’t have stayed in his service to begin with.
The shadow’s presence vanished from the room in an instant. Left alone, the man turned and directed his attention toward the room in which someone was surely on edge and anxiously waiting.
“More interesting than I expected.”
He traced his own lips, surprised to find the corners had lifted without his intending it, and murmured the thought. It had been quite a while since he had laughed so easily, without thinking.
Lucerian Iberos, the Marquis of Calveron, savored the sensation of ‘enjoyment’ he’d almost forgotten, and closed his eyes slowly and opened them again.
He had thought something was odd from the start.
When the proposals he’d sent so many times that even he was tired of them were accepted, contrary to all expectations, from that point on, the Marquis had suspected Rozalia was up to something.
Every marriage proposal he had sent to her had been a kind of performance staged for his parents’ benefit.
A symbol of sorts, proof that he, like any ordinary person, was capable of forming a bond with others and feeling something called love.
That was why he had deliberately chosen Rozalia as his target.
She was practically the only connection that had lasted from his childhood into the present, and she was someone his parents couldn’t investigate and push around at will.
Of course, another part of the reason was that since the connection they shared had been an absolute disaster for both of them from the very start, there was no conceivable way a proposal like that would ever be accepted. The small inconvenience of Rozalia’s annoyance each time a letter arrived was the only real drawback, in every other way, the Princess of the empire was a perfectly satisfactory choice of person to propose to.
So how many times had he been coldly rejected with every insult Rozalia could produce?
At first, the Emperor and the ducal couple had looked on warily, wondering if the whole thing was a scheme the two of them had prepared. But at some point they had abruptly begun pushing the proposal with genuine enthusiasm, apparently deciding the two were well-suited for each other and the right people to keep one another in check.
“I was sure that temper would never give in. I miscalculated.”
It seemed his parents had been quite serious about it this time. The fact that even Rozalia hadn’t managed to refuse indicated they had promised the Emperor something worth yielding for.
He wasn’t sure whether to admire Rosalia for the audacity to stage a scheme like this even knowing what was at stake, the Marquis smiled to himself.
From the moment he walked into the garden, he had known the person sitting there so imperiously was not the Princess.
Unlike the Marquis, who spent most of his time concealing his identity while roaming the border territories, word of Rozalia’s beauty had spread across the continent, not just the empire. Which meant that no matter how long it had been, he already knew what the Princess looked like. Rozalia would have anticipated this, it was exactly why she’d used a magic-imbued tool to project an illusion over the substitute in the first place.
All the visual information had been perfectly disguised, it was true.
“I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting.”
A perfectly ordinary greeting that anyone might give, and the person wearing Rozalia’s face had answered it with a flat, fresh expression.
“… That’s fine. We are only here out of obligation anyway.”
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