Duke of the Beast and the Vicarious Bride - Chapter 1 - I.

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※ This work contains depictions of coercive relationships, explicit language, and other graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

`I.`

Twenty-three-year-old Fiona was butchering a great pork leg.

“Pardon? What is it you’re asking me to do?”

The heavy thud of the cleaver striking the worn wooden board made it difficult to catch the other’s words. Pausing for a moment, she wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm and roughly cleaned her blood-stained left hand on her apron.

“Well, you see. It is the Count’s message, inquiring whether you might consent to the marriage proposal in Mademoiselle Joséphine’s stead…”

The sight of the blood pooling on the board and floor, and the woman wielding the axe-like butcher’s knife with such ease, was enough to make the messenger from the House of Troyes blanch and his voice falter.

“So you are telling me. That I am to marry in her place?”

“No, I… I am merely relaying the Count’s words. Do calm yourself. And p-put down the knife before you speak.”

Seeing the servant’s overly pale face, Fiona felt a flicker of embarrassment. What did I do to frighten him so? Her tone had indeed never been particularly gentle, but she had not been angry, merely asking for confirmation in disbelief. For the request was so utterly nonsensical. To be asked to marry at all would be shocking enough, but in Joséphine’s stead? How could such a thing be proper?

“In Joséphine’s stead? That makes no sense. Has the Count’s mind begun to wander of late? Has he forgotten who I am?”

At Fiona’s blunt and irreverent words, the aging servant, who had been fidgeting nervously on his own, explained with a guilty look that she was to hear the full details at the Count’s residence, and quickly fled the slaughterhouse. His hand clamped over his nose, he seemed desperate to stay not a moment longer.

Honestly. Anyone would think it was some noble lord standing there, the way he carries on.

Fiona spat onto the spot where the servant had stood, then folded her arms and fell into thought. But try as she might to rack her brains—a thing she rarely had call to do—the pieces simply would not fit.

Of course, if asked whether there was no connection between herself and the Count, she could not readily deny it. She was, after all, the illegitimate child of Armand Troyes, the current Count of Troyes. The trouble was that she was not a bastard daughter discreetly raised with some semblance of respectability, but a bloodline openly cast aside.

Her mother, Anaïs Till, had been a maid in the Count’s household. A woman with beautiful red hair, she had been toyed with by the young Count’s fleeting desire, fallen pregnant, and been turned out. It was a story so common, so sordid and sickening, that one could scarcely call it a tragedy.

Fiona had grown up as nothing more than a family disgrace, a bit of filth that sullied the Count’s reputation, all due to her mother’s lowly birth. And now, after all this time, he wished to see her? Until now, the Count had all but ignored her existence. In the Vieren Empire, where she lived, it was perfectly acceptable for a noble to ignore a bastard child. And as if to set a fine example of this custom, the Count had never once concerned himself with the plight of mother and daughter.

Well, he had come to see her a few times after her mother vanished. But it was less a matter of paternal affection and more the act of a man briefly checking on some mess he had made in his youth, still lying in the street. From a distance, he would watch her, toss a pittance as if in charity, and turn his back, his own legitimate son—born the same year as Fiona—trailing behind him like a goldfish. It was always thus.

At the memory of that little brat looking back at her with sly, sneering eyes, Fiona shook her head vigorously, casting off the unpleasant thought.

The Count had left the mother and daughter to rot in some village on his lands, without so much as a glance. He cared not whether Fiona became a shepherdess or a pig butcher. And now, out of the blue, came this command to marry. Fiona was learning first-hand that when something was too absurd, even anger failed to come.