Duke of the Beast and the Vicarious Bride - Chapter 5

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

The seasons turned, and Anaïs did not return. Only then did the people accept the truth: the poor unwed mother who had once earned their sympathy had, in the end, abandoned her daughter and fled.

And so Fiona was left alone in the small storeroom above the butcher’s shop.

In the year of Fiona’s birth, Anaïs, cast out from the Count’s manor, had taken refuge here at the butcher’s while heavily pregnant. Because of that old connection, she had stayed on ever since, doing odd jobs and raising Fiona. Now she has vanished without a trace.

Fiona was not the only one left in a difficult position by her absence. The butcher and his wife, who had taken pity on the homeless woman, now found themselves suddenly burdened with her child, much to their dismay.

Even at her young age, Fiona understood instinctively. Now that her mother was gone, if these people also abandoned her, she would be truly alone.

From that day, Fiona took it upon herself to do all the odd jobs her mother had done. She worked diligently to avoid being cast out, and laboured with her hands to earn her keep. As she had hoped, the butcher did not cast aside a useful pair of hands.

By the time she was ten, her fingers had grown deft, and she naturally learned the butcher’s trade. It began with small animals: chickens and rabbits. On the night she first wrung a chicken’s neck and plucked its feathers, Fiona lay on her old straw-stuffed bed and wept silently.

Slaughter was a trade one could not, even with lies, call pleasant. The work of ending a living creature’s breath, stripping its hide, and carving its flesh was grim and gruelling enough that even grown men shrank from it. The squeals of piglets fighting for their lives, the gentle eyes of calves watching their mothers led to the slaughter—these haunted her each night and caused her pain.

But there was no help for it. In her heart, she might beg forgiveness from those poor souls, but for Fiona, who had no adult to care for her, the only way to survive was to earn her keep.

Thus she endured as an extra mouth at the butcher’s, day by day, for five years. Then, just after she turned thirteen, someone suddenly appeared before her. Until that moment, Fiona had never given up hope that her mother would one day return.

But the figure who appeared before her was not Anaïs. It was a little girl, filthy as if she had been rolling in a compost heap, and around her neck hung her mother’s locket.

“Anaïs disappeared five years ago, didn’t she?”

“This one looks to be about five years old, tsk, tsk… A leopard cannot change its spots, it seems. She must have gone off and spawned another fatherless brat somewhere.”

The villagers all whispered thus. Whether the child truly was her mother’s daughter, how she had come to this place alone, where her mother had gone and left her—there was no way of knowing any of it.

Fiona quietly regarded the doll-like girl standing before her, her mother’s locket around her neck, her face expressionless.

“Are you truly my sister? Did our mother… give birth to you?”

No answer came. The child was too young, and for some reason, seemed incapable of uttering even a simple word. The only link between Anaïs and this child was the locket. Yet Fiona resolved to accept her as her sister nonetheless.

She named the child Rose. The reason was simple: it was the flower her mother had loved second-best. The first, of course, was the peony after which Fiona herself was named.

But the adults opposed her decision, calling it foolish.

“How do you expect to feed another mouth when you can barely put food in your own belly?”

“She may not even be your mother’s child, Fiona. I don’t know how she came by that locket, but doesn’t it feel wrong to you?”

Even the butcher and his wife gently suggested that perhaps Rose should be sent elsewhere.

Yet Fiona would not yield. She simply could not.

From the moment she first saw Rose, a fierce determination had taken root in her heart. A sense of responsibility, that no matter what happened, she must protect this child.

It would be a lie to say she held no resentment towards the mother who had abandoned her. Yet Fiona could not bring herself to forsake her mother’s last legacy, this little girl who might, perhaps, carry Anaïs’s blood.