Hiya– It’s Me, The Runaway Female Lead - Chapter 16 - III.

III.

The bigger problem was that night didn’t end with just that night.

Did the bright moonlight cast some kind of spell?

From that night on, there was an even stranger shift in my feelings toward Claude.

Or rather than a change, maybe it was finally admitting the truth I had denied for so long.

As if I was finally confronting a fear I’d tried so hard to ignore, I began to draw out and examine the feelings I’d kept tightly hidden away.

A young master who tormented his maid to death, and a maid who was endlessly tormented by her master… That was surely how others saw us.

In other words, the odds of anything like affection growing between us were about as likely as snow in midsummer.

But that near-impossible thing ended up happening. The feelings began not with the master, but in the heart of the maid who was being tormented. A tiny sprout of longing took root.

Even I didn’t know when that seed had first been planted. That, too, was a secret only time could know.

Maybe it was simply that the years I’d spent devoting all my attention to him had been too long.

Or maybe this was what people called ‘affection born of hatred’.

Whatever the reason, at some point, all those layers of Claude that had piled up inside me made me this way, and I could only grudgingly admit that I liked him.

Perhaps my subconscious had already figured it out. The way Claude’s reckless behavior was, in fact, always slightly calculating, as if aware of being watched.

Or the contradiction of how, even when he grabbed me by the scruff or shoved me in the middle of an argument, his fingers were always careful not to actually hurt me.

Looking back, even the way he endlessly bossed me around was, in its own way, a form of protection.

Just by being the only one able to put up with his antics, I was excused from all the other menial chores a maid would normally have to do.

And the reason I could still be treated as the young master’s personal maid was because he made a point of being even more of a troublemaker around me.

I also knew this: how his expression would soften whenever everyone else was gone and only the two of us remained.

How, when I glanced at the desserts during his mealtimes, they would miraculously end up in my hands by that very afternoon, and how often that ‘coincidence’ repeated itself.

Maybe it was those little experiences. That, despite pretending indifference, I was always more attuned to the young master’s affairs than anyone else, and that’s why I’d stubbornly hung on all this time.

Claude acted like nothing could faze him, but in my eyes, he always looked as precarious as a candle in the wind.

Even on his rare days off, watching him stretched out, listless and bored, made me so anxious I couldn’t stand it. Maybe it was only when he perked up enough to tease me that I felt any drive to keep going.

He said I was the strange one, but really, the truly strange person was Claude Clausewitz himself.

Or maybe, in the end, the strangest one was me for falling for someone like him.

* * *

“Ayla.”

Well. It was all fine.

Isn’t that just how life goes?

Falling for a headache of a young master practically overnight, having to serve the man I’d realized I liked—

Once I accepted that ‘it just do be like that’, it was all more bearable.

But if there was one unexpected snag, it was…

“Ayla Bell.”

“……”

Once I realized my feelings, I could no longer act the same way around him.

Things like his gaze or even just the way he called my name, which had never bothered me before, suddenly made me so self-conscious I thought I’d lose my mind.

I couldn’t even look him in the eye, let alone snap back at him like I used to.

Naturally, Claude started watching me like I was up to something. And, to be fair, I was.

“Something’s definitely off.”

We’d never kept our distance before, so there’s no way he would recognize this as embarrassment.

I tried my best to ignore his gaze and quietly set the table.

Of course, he just kept pushing for a reaction.

“What’s this… Did you poison the food or something?”

The best thing to do with comments not worth answering was to ignore them.

“If you’re going to do it, make it as strong as possible. I’d really prefer something fatal, if you can manage it.”

He’d been trained so that he wouldn’t die even from most poisons, so what was all this about wanting a quick death? I pretended not to hear and set down the last piece of cutlery.