Please Forget Me - Chapter 269

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

His gaze, which had been resting on my hand, slipped downward—following the envelope and loose papers I had dropped to the floor. It lingered there for a moment, then slowly climbed back up to me. The sadness in his eyes said it all.

‘So you know now.’

Which meant everything written in those documents was true.

Rage surged through me.

“You deceived me!”

He was the man I had loved as dearly as my own life, yet now I could feel nothing resembling love. All I could see was a shameless fraud, a man who had preyed on a woman with no memories and toyed with her.

He had been given countless chances to tell me the truth. And he hadn’t. No, perhaps he had never intended to. Perhaps everything he had told me so far, everything he had called the truth, was nothing but a carefully constructed lie.

The man I could no longer trust rose from the bed and started toward me.

Fear struck instantly. I snatched up the revolver that had been sticking out of the bag and aimed it at him.

He didn’t stop. As if my threat meant nothing to him, he continued to get up.

He was naked, just like me.

‘Then… then that means I committed adultery. I slept with another man while my husband was still alive….’

The realization hit, and my body recoiled in horror. At the same time, warm fluid trickled down between my thighs, cruelly reminding me that something even more immoral might have happened.

‘I might be carrying an illegitimate child.’

An illegitimate child fathered by a man who had sworn vows of chastity.

‘M–my God… please. Please don’t let that be true.’

The fear gripping me now had nothing to do with piety. I wasn’t a devout woman. It wasn’t God I feared, it was people.

‘They’ll point at me for the rest of my life and call me a filthy woman.’

I still couldn’t fully believe it, but hadn’t those papers said I wasn’t just any nameless man’s wife? I was a Marchioness. A Marchioness carrying a priest’s child.

The entire world would mock me, tear me apart until the day I died. And the child—born from ‘sin’, burdened with a crime it never committed—would suffer just the same.

‘God… please. Please don’t let there be a child.’

I found myself praying the exact opposite of what I had prayed for before throwing myself onto that bed.

‘I didn’t know. I truly didn’t know what I was doing. So please… let the world not know either.’

…But perhaps the adultery had already been exposed.

The image of my husband—who had chased me all the way to the inn to reclaim me—flashed through my mind. My legs went weak.

At that moment, the man lunged toward me, reaching out urgently.

“Don’t come any closer!”

Click. I came to my senses. I raised the lowered barrel and cocked the hammer.

“If you come, I’ll shoot.”

So he would understand that I wasn’t bluffing.

“Tell me. Who are you? Why did you pretend to be my husband?”

Who had I loved all this time?

The emptiness was unbearable.

My life had always been incomplete but I believed my love was perfect. That belief had been the only anchor holding my unstable life in place.

Yet it had only been a trap. A trap sunk deep into deception.

Can something nurtured by deceit truly be called love?

Having lost my anchor, I began to sway once more and screamed.

“Why did you do this to me?!”

* * *

My love, you’re finally ready to hear the truth.

I won’t back away from telling you now. There will be no more cowardly retreat on my part.

This will be a long story, so please, have a seat. You probably don’t need that gun, but if keeping it in hand makes you feel safer, that’s all right too.

If you’re holding it because you want to kill me, then I ask—just let me finish my story before you do. That’s all I want.

This isn’t about stalling for my life. I meant what I said before: if you truly wish to kill me, I’ll accept it. That promise has always been sincere, so rest assured.

From now on, I’ll tell you everything. This is not an excuse, just an explanation. It’s for you, who can’t remember how we ended up here.

So please, don’t suspect that I’ll twist things to my advantage. Excuses are just the desperate writhing of someone begging for forgiveness. I will apologize, but I won’t ask for your pardon.

To explain how we ended up like this, I have to start from the very beginning—from the moment I was born. Even if you don’t want to hear it, I hope you’ll listen.

I was always the child who disappointed my parents. They hadn’t expected another child, and to make things worse, I was born a boy, not the daughter they’d hoped for.

They already had a perfect heir—my brother, eight years older than me.

There was no need for another son. What they wanted was a daughter.

A daughter couldn’t inherit the family estate, but she could still become the wife of another great house. At the time, my mother’s twin sister had just given birth to the heir of the Mansfield marquisate—Rupert.

Yes, my parents intended to put me in the very place where you now sit.

Terrifying, isn’t it?