Chapter 67
An old blacksmith he once worked for had once joked: the wisest thing a married man could do was to quietly obey his wife.
That wasn’t a difficult thing for him to do. In fact, obeying Beatrice felt like the easiest thing in the world. At some point, he had become so utterly subservient at her feet that if she told him to crawl on all fours, he would crawl, and if she told him to lick the soles of her shoes, he might do just that.
He wasn’t very talkative to begin with, but in front of his wife, his words dwindled even further. Rather than risk offending her with his clumsy way of speaking, it was better to remain silent.
Thus, with his own hands and feet bound and a gag over his mouth, Caesar quietly suffered from not being able to receive more of Beatrice’s affection.
If only he could live like this forever in this quiet estate, a perfect paradise cut off from the outside world, he felt he wouldn’t wish for anything more. A place where only he could see her, and she, only him. A life where they lived solely for each other.
But while his new status had made marriage to Beatrice possible, it also became an obstacle that meant he couldn’t stay holed up in the estate forever.
Receiving the New Year’s banquet invitation from the Imperial Court unsettled Caesar for no clear reason. His instincts were sharply provoked by an ominous feeling.
Compared to the borderland estate, the capital was excessively crowded. And the number of eyes watching them would increase. More specifically, the eyes of the men watching Beatrice.
In the end, Caesar’s concern wasn’t unfounded. The moment they arrived in the capital and he saw a change in his wife’s demeanor, he sensed that what he had feared was beginning to unfold.
***
“You’ve arrived, Milord.”
That day too, Caesar Valentin arrived at the mansion precisely at the time he had sent word he would.
As a former mercenary who worked on commission, punctuality had always been one of his few strict principles.
So it was only natural that once he had a wife waiting for him to return home, he began to treat notifying her of his expected time and arriving at that exact moment as something more important than his life.
Just imagining that Beatrice was waiting to greet him made it impossible to delay, not even for a moment. Even if it meant cutting short whatever business he was attending to, he had to be home on time. He never wanted to keep his wife waiting even for a minute.
And so, even with today’s unpredictable schedule, he forced things to a close and hurried home.
Escaping the capital’s nobles, who insisted he have ‘just one more drink’ at the banquet following the meetings, was truly a trial.
His first day in the capital had brought no chance for quiet time with his wife, only tedious talk of annual budgets from the Emperor. It wasn’t a fulfilling day, but as soon as he saw the warm lights glowing from the mansion, those feelings melted away like snow.
And thinking of the smiling face of his wife waiting to greet him made even this distasteful visit to the capital feel just a bit more bearable.
But unexpectedly, that evening, Caesar was unable to see the wife he had so longed for.
“Where is my wife?”
The butler, greeting him politely, was of no interest. Even as he removed his coat, Caesar’s sharp eyes scanned the surroundings, looking for only one person—his wife.
At first, it had felt incredibly awkward to imagine someone as noble as Beatrice waiting to greet him, and he had tried to dissuade her many times. But when she insisted, saying it was the one thing she refused to compromise on, he could only relent.
Eventually, he figured she’d tire of it and stop on her own. But before he knew it, a year had passed.
This thing he had never dared to expect, never even imagined before marriage, had become completely natural—and now, something he himself wanted.
Caesar could no longer imagine returning home without Beatrice there to greet him. In just ten months, he had become so utterly ruined. It was Beatrice’s doing, her taming. Not that he minded her taming at all.
“I heard she went to the Estern manor earlier today. Has she not returned yet?”
Because in his mind, the possibility that she was home but hadn’t come to see him didn’t exist.
If Beatrice wasn’t before his eyes right now, it could only mean she wasn’t in the mansion.
If she was still at the ducal manor, he was ready to head back out and bring her home.
When she saw him come for her, she would, as always, smile like a flower in bloom.
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