A Night I Couldn’t Be Honest - Chapter 4.5

So, since it was a dream that would vanish anyway, could she act however she wanted for the time that was left? Wasn’t that all right?

The tired old fragments of her past that still surfaced sometimes to catch her ankle, the complicated feelings born of the Princess’s orders, inside this mirage that would dissolve when they reached its end, there was no need to fear them or wrestle with them.

Since it would be a dream only Azelin remembered, a phantom that would disappear.

“That said, if you truly hate it, I’ll stop. Your disliking me is the one thing I can’t bear in this world.”

“…I don’t hate you.”

Trusting in the veil of the illusion, Azelin acted with full intention now, and let the faintest pressure strengthen her grip on the hand he was already holding.

In the Marquis’s mind, the woman wearing Rozalia’s illusion was neither a housecaught cat nor a street cat. She was more like a cat that had been abandoned.

A stray cat was guarded and hungry for affection at once, longing for a familiar touch, too quick to offer her company. Yet the moment you tried to bring her home, she turned frightened of the gentle attention and in the end chose to stay out on the street.

Any number of people had come rushing at the Marquis with feeling, regardless of age or gender, more than he could get tired of counting. Some wanted power through him; some wanted money, and others quite blatantly wanted his body.

But this person resembling an abandoned cat didn’t fit any of those categories.

‘I want to know her name.’

He looked at their interlaced hands and found himself curious about the name he still hadn’t learned.

The first thing he’d noticed was her scent.

Then her eyes.

And now her voice, carrying a feeling no one had bothered to disguise.

Illusion magic, to someone who could handle mana, was a form of magic that only needed a single small contradiction to pry open, not difficult to slip out of. So the gift in front of him, which had looked entirely like Rozalia at first, had been losing its illusion one layer at a time as he identified one true thing about her after another. Of course, to everyone else she would still appear as the Princess, but not to him.

Which made it all the more enjoyable. At the moment she believed she had everyone including herself completely fooled, he alone could indulge in the secret. There was a particular pleasure in the transgression of that.

“So, it not being hate means I’m allowed to have hope?”

“T-that’s not, it’s not quite …”

She stuttered and tipped on her words awkwardly at the end. Face red with embarrassment, she made a briefly pained expression, then hurriedly composed herself.

The raw, unprocessed feeling, which even its owner clearly couldn’t manage properly, looked as though all of this was entirely new to her. The inexperience was such a mess it was delightful to witness.

Scent, eyes, voice.

He had no desire to abruptly knock down something this unpredictable and full of tension, but the impulse to push her right to the limit and leave her unable to retreat rose unprompted alongside it.

“Oh dear, well, I’ll have to try harder from now on, then.”

Like a street cat that would inch close and push its head out as long as you held still with your hand outstretched, one that had no intention of taking off the disguise and yet didn’t release the hand it had grabbe… How should he describe this audacity?

Courage? Or reckless bravado?

Either way, ever since the Marquis had received this unexpected gift, he had sunk pleasantly into the rare enjoyment of unwrapping it, and he had no complaints.

‘Is it the novelty of doing something I never normally do that gives this sense of release?’

He had never been caught so completely off guard in his life, maybe he was slightly unhinged by it. The Marquis, who had spent his whole existence suppressing every impulse under constant surveillance, was rather sensitive to things that didn’t go according to his plans or intentions. Everything uncontrollable was dangerous.

What he had to guard against most of all was losing control of himself. The world to him was a collection of the dim and the lacking, and precisely because of that, his power was dangerously out of proportion with the society he lived in.