Chapter 4.3
It was, admittedly, proof that his parents had failed, but the fact that he had never let anyone see this in him meant their efforts had been roughly half successful.
His gaze traced the woman beyond the illusion, outlining her. He studied her with unsparing focus, imagining stripping away every last layer of this illusion, and his eyes trembled dangerously, lighting up with intensity.
The small, scattered confusion in her unsteady eyes was the second of the gift’s true things he was now seeing.
Looking at her anxious gaze, the Marquis felt the urge to laugh out loud.
In his world, full of nothing that mattered, even a bitter laugh was a strange thing to feel.
The third day.
Perhaps because the urgency in the letter she must have rushed off had apparently conveyed itself, the reply from the Princess arrived in under a full day. For Azelin, who had managed to endure another day of the Marquis’s relentless affection crashing over her like waves, the wait had felt endless.
‘It would have been easier if I’d just disliked him.’
What if she had never known? It was no use regretting it now.
Azelin, who had already admitted her growing, complicated feelings, that half-longing, half-giddiness of a first love, found it anything but easy to hold steady against his one-sided affection without being swept away. The moment she let her guard down even a little, she would obviously end up wanting to lean on him like a child throwing a fit, as if she were actually the one being loved.
To someone like Azelin, who had come away wounded from the love of her own family, love offered without calculation, someone’s unconditional affection was as irresistible as a perfectly ripe forbidden fruit.
Something she absolutely could not taste, and desperately wanted.
So Azelin locked her door the moment the letter arrived, turning away even the Marquis’s sweet dinner invitation.
She breathed deeply, hands shaking with nerves as she carefully broke the seal.
The letter wasn’t long. But the few sentences in it refused to make sense, she read and re-read it several times.
“Then you should play along pleasantly. I don’t know what he’s scheming, but let him get his hopes up, it’ll be entertaining to watch him be disappointed. If you find him to your taste, you can play with him a bit. He’s got a decent shell, at least?”
At the end of the last line, though the punctuation was a question mark, she could almost hear the Princess’s bright, cackling laughter through the paper.
What kind of answer had she been hoping for when she sent the letter? Honestly, Azelin herself didn’t know her own real wishes.
Had she hoped Rozalia would be flustered by the Marquis’s unexpected sincerity and tell her to come back at once? Or had she hoped she’d be told to refuse him more coldly and cut things off? Maybe she had used the Princess’s orders as an excuse to escape the situation before it got worse.
Because the feeling was just beginning to take root, if she stayed here much longer, it would grow past the point where she could pull it out herself.
But whatever she had actually wanted, it wasn’t this answer.
“Asing me to play along… that’s too cruel.”
Azelin’s arm dropped limply onto the table with a thud, letter still in hand.
To tell someone to play with another person’s genuine feelings this carelessly, she felt wounded on his behalf, and bit her lip.
An old saying surfaced: the one who falls in love first loses.
The Marquis was the only person in the empire who could be considered Rozalia’s equal in every sense, and yet when it came to love, he had become, thoroughly, the lesser party. Just like any ordinary man. Azelin found that a little sad.
The faint guilt that had been accumulating in one corner of her churning heart grew.
* * *
It had already been four days since she’d joined this absurd charade.
Time seemed to pass both slow and fast at once, and the week was already past the halfway mark. It was the first time she was meeting the Marquis after receiving the Princess’s new instructions.
“You look troubled today. Are you worrying about something?”
She had been deep in thought as they walked when he appeared suddenly in front of her, and Azelin startled reflexively and tried to step back. The arm that settled around her waist stopped her from doing so.
Do people in love always act like this? She had recognized her own feelings for him, but his affection was so overwhelming it made hers feel embarrassingly small.
He had apparently been watching her expression and every flicker of her mood the whole time they were walking side by side. She’d believed she was hiding her complicated feelings rather well, and was caught off guard. For a moment she only moved her lips.
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