A Night I Couldn’t Be Honest - Chapter 4.4

“…It’s just that the surroundings feel a bit unfamiliar. Everything is busy.”

She couldn’t show him what was actually going on inside her head, so she borrowed the city moving busily behind the Marquis as the fastest excuse available. He glanced back at it at her words and broke into a quiet laugh, straightening his posture.

The strikingly handsome features she had never quite gotten used to drew back from hers, and Azelin carefully let out the breath she’d been holding.

She thought she heard the laugh above her deepen for just a moment, so she glanced up, but his eyes were too warm and gentle looking down at her, and they made her feel so embarrassed she had to snap her gaze away immediately.

“I feel the same way. The villa’s grounds and the city are so different in mood, aren’t they? Out there it had that unhurried, resort feeling, “

“This place is a bit more intense and brimming with vitality.”

To answer the Marquis, she took a fresh look at the area around her, and it struck her with a start that this city reminded her somewhat of her hometown. Not the appearance, but the atmosphere.

This too was a place administered directly by the imperial court rather than by some established noble house, a newer development, being actively built up.

A city developing around tourism and commerce wouldn’t have the musty but deeply rooted, stable tranquility of older territories run by their noble families for generations.

But with its freshness, it had the kind of diligent vitality that suited the word ‘beginning.’ The absence of a presiding noble meant commoners competed more fiercely to survive, and the energy of it showed.

Just a little way from the holiday resort area where the villa was, and the relaxed, refined noble atmosphere vanished without a trace.

For someone like Rozalia who would have spent her whole life in the Imperial Palace, this would genuinely seem new, so Azelin’s observation was perfectly good acting.

But in truth, it was more familiar to Azelin than she could say.

‘I spent months moving briskly through places just like this…’

Even after entering the Imperial Palace with Rozalia, she had thought of herself as busy, but it was nothing like the pure, direct labor of ordinary people living their lives in places like this.

Azelin felt a dizzying sensation, as if she were waking from a long, strange dream.

All the happiness Rozalia had given her that was beyond anything she had a right to expect, maybe it had all been an illusion. Maybe her father and brother would appear from somewhere and drag her back to that miserable hotel.

“Rozalia?”

“Ah.”

Which was why, without thinking, she grabbed the Marquis’s arm. She had been dragged around and caught by his hand many times when he insisted and reached for hers, but this was the first time Azelin had reached for him first.

Startled at herself, she gaped, and still couldn’t release her grip on his coat.

Maybe because he was the one who had helped her take that first step. Holding onto him like a lifeline, she had the irrational but strangely convincing feeling that none of the fears from her past could track her down.

“So this means… “

“So you’ve finally decided to give me a chance? How wonderful.”

Before flustered Azelin could say anything to explain, the Marquis’s hand covered hers. He rearranged her awkward, desperate grip with gentle care, then held their interlaced fingers up in front of her face and swung them slightly as if making a point.

The color flooded Azelin’s face all at once. The trembling had pushed out her fear in an instant and left her burning.

“I-I didn’t mean ‘hold my hand.’ Don’t.”

“Ha, are you awkward about it? So am I. But I think right now this actually looks natural, don’t you think so?”

The marquis pointed out a couple passing in the distance. Whether they were on their way back from the market or not, they looked affectionate and warm as they walked side by side, hand in hand, even while she held a heavy bag of groceries in one hand.

“When else would we get the chance? When we go back to who we really are, there’s so much to weigh and so many rules to keep. Sometimes it’s fine to be free like this, isn’t it?”

“…..”

He was probably using a metaphor for their date on their incognito city stroll, but the words “who we really are” landed in Azelin’s ears with a particular sting.

He was right. Only three days remained. The week they had been given here would end, and then this would become a memory no one in the world would share except her.