Chapter 34
A few days after that…
Tonight, in fact.
“Ah, forget about right or wrong, I’m just not going to do it.”
With the Duke’s orders on my shoulders, I was brazenly standing up to poor, innocent Claude.
“I already said I was sorry.”
“Is that the face of someone who’s sorry? You look like you’re about to punch me instead.”
Of course, this was an act that was much more stressful on my heart than I’d expected.
But whether I died at the Duke’s hands or was stabbed to death by Claude’s vicious glare, the fact that my life was like a candle in the wind didn’t change.
Besides, this dead-end situation gave me a kind of reckless courage.
My life was already a spectacular failure, so I might as well stick it out on the safer side. If, by any chance, Claude lost his temper and really finished me off out of anger…
Well, wouldn’t that be a meaningful enough end to my life, in its own way?
My thoughts, paralyzed by fear, went as far as that sort of twisted logic.
If there’s one thing I learned from watching my parents, siblings, and even neighbors die one after another when I was barely more than a child, it’s that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person.
For some, a life where you have no choice but to go on living can be an even more gruesome hell.
This situation was no different. In my quietly deranged state of mind, I thought,
Wouldn’t it be better to just die at Claude’s hands in a fit of rage than to see him marry some noble lady, live happily ever after, and forget all about a lowly maid like me?
If his skills were as good as they said, maybe he’d finish me off so quickly I wouldn’t even realize…
“That’s not it.”
What stopped my thoughts from careening off in the wrong direction was Claude’s thoroughly annoyed voice.
“How could I hit you? I may have acted rough, but… I’ve never once struck you, have I?”
With eyes full of guilt, he said that, his crimson gaze fixed on me.
And it was true. Not just in the three years since things started between us. Even before that, Claude had never hit me. Especially after we got involved, he never raised a hand, no matter how much I got on his nerves with my cheekiness. He might’ve said all sorts of irritating things, but he’d always let me climb right up over his head and never cared.
Even as I wondered if it might be better to die at the Duke’s hands or at his, somewhere deep down, I always believed Claude would never truly hurt me. It was thanks to that trust that I could act up in front of him like a wild colt on poison, just as I was doing now.
“Anyway, I don’t want to do this anymore today. Go back.”
Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to accept him when he was looking at me with such wretched, pained eyes. After all, I had my own plans, too.
“I said go already, will you?”
Ever since the Duke’s secret summons, I’d been deliberately pushing Claude away.
To put it more specifically… I was planning to train him.
……
Whether that was possible or not, I didn’t know yet, but seeing how downcast and deflated he looked, it didn’t seem entirely out of the question.
“If I leave… can it come back?”
The longer this little test, if you could even call it that, dragged on for one, two, three, four days, the more I wondered just how far Claude would go in putting up with me.
It was the same now. Even with my utterly rude cold shoulder, instead of getting angry, Claude just threw out another question I couldn’t make sense of.
“Come back? What do you mean, come back?”
“I mean, if I leave now, will you have the urge to do it again tomorrow?”
“…Well, I wouldn’t know that either.”
His pitifully desperate question almost made my heart waver, but I managed to hold out.
“Anyway, just go for today. Please.”
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