One Hundred Nights with the Devil - Chapter 38

Giving meaning, making excuses, and obsessing that way, he dragged out time until he could find no more excuses and left just a moment ago.

As he moved further away from the closed door, Elena’s voice, which he had carried in his memory, became clearer.

Unlike her kind greeting, he kept regretting that the farewell he had given was not kind at all. Why could he only speak that way? He should have been kind. He should have told her to also dream of her very happy times.

If he had said that he thought he would be ruminating on today, which we spent together, in his dreams from now on, what kind of expression would she have shown him?

“…….”

Since the door to the annex was already locked even if he regretted it, Dieter led his heavy feet toward the second floor where he would lock himself up. And while walking down the hallway of the main castle, he stopped in front of the reception room where Elena had stayed through the night.

Traces of her were visible through the gap in the open door. A bathtub of the same shape as the one in his bedroom. The maid’s uniform she had taken off and her luggage. In front of them was a portrait of a man who looked just like him.

Dieter looked at his biological father, the Late Emperor Lloyd, with gloomy eyes.

* * *

Dieter Conrad had no memory of his biological father looking as young and beautiful as he did in his portrait. Despite being the only biological child and heir, the Emperor had never once treated him as a son.

The only concern of the Emperor, Lloyd—who was cruelly indifferent to his only child—was the Empress, Trisha, the crown princess of a fallen kingdom and Dieter’s biological mother.

And his mother…… what kind of person was she?

Trying to recall her felt like staring into a void. Dieter had never even heard his name called by her. Even so, he had yearned for his mother’s embrace so desperately.

He often used to go to the Empress’s bedroom door. Even though he was terrified by the stories that the vengeful spirits of those murdered by the Emperor appeared at night, he was so starved for affection that he would grope along the dark corridors to find his mother.

The mother he glimpsed through the crack in the door was so beautiful.

And, she looked profoundly miserable.

She would always mutter into the air with glazed eyes. She cursed the empire while calling out someone’s long, rambling name, and begged for death.

His uncle had told him that her rage was directed at Lloyd, her husband, the Emperor, and Dieter’s father.

Dieter thought his uncle was lying. Because books said that a husband and wife love each other to have children. So, he thought it was nonsense that a father would make a mother suffer because he loved her.

But his uncle’s words were the truth.

That night, Dieter heard his mother’s screams and his father’s laughter. It was the sound of a father’s love destroying a mother like a monster.

‘So that was why she always said she wanted to die.’

And by the time he realized that he, too, was his mother’s nightmare—yes. He wanted to die.

The reason he couldn’t die was that his mother had achieved the death she so desired that night.

Seven-year-old Dieter could not bring himself to follow the mother who had fled. He simply prayed and prayed again. That the father who collapsed as if he would follow his dead wife would suffer for a long time. That he would not chase after the mother who had left for her final rest.

Perhaps his wish had been granted. His father spent the next twenty-odd years confined to his bed, then died abruptly. As though he had been waiting for that moment, his uncle stripped Dieter of his title as Crown Prince and, in a show of magnanimity, bestowed upon him Conrad Castle.

A barren land. A wasteland abandoned by the Imperial Family.

The day he first arrived at Conrad Castle, Dieter gazed at the portrait for a long time, just as he was doing now. He realized his own helplessness, imprisoned without being able to offer any resistance.

‘Elena. Did you feel the same way I do in front of this portrait?’

How did it feel to be stripped of freedom and swept away by impulses she never would have wished for? Doing as the Devil commanded in front of this portrait…….