Tamed Monster - Chapter 33

Inside the carriage returning to the Duke’s castle, Sylvia asked her husband,

“What did you give the Crown Prince?”

Suddenly, the Crown Prince’s usual sullen attitude had shifted into an oddly familiar friendliness, which unsettled her.

In fact, she felt even more uneasy than when he was rude to her husband.

The Crown Prince was an instinctively suspicious man. Though he’d never done anything directly harmful to her, there were times she felt uncomfortable—his gaze sometimes had the raw predatory instinct of a beast.

“Do you really want to know?”

Her husband, staring blankly out the window, simply moved his lips without shifting his distant gaze. Sylvia hesitated.

In his calm, monotonous tone, she sensed an inexplicable foreboding. Somehow, she felt she shouldn’t hear the answer.

“…No.”

She gave up quickly. Hearing this, Lancart reached out and gently stroked her hair—a light, ordinary touch that startled Sylvia. It was the first time he’d ever initiated such intimacy, and he looked almost indifferent, as if unaware of his own action.

“Ah… I want to go home.”

He spoke, thinking of the swamp, while Sylvia nodded, recalling the Duke’s castle as “home”.

Soon, the Duke and Duchess arrived at the castle, only to be met, quite unfortunately, by Rossa standing guard at the gate like a sentinel.

“Ah, damn.”

The Duke cursed, and Sylvia bit her lip nervously, fixing her hair as if to smooth any disarray from his earlier touch. That meant she had been savoring that moment in her mind throughout the carriage ride, touched by the fact that he had caressed her hair.

“Lancart, my son!”

Just like the day he returned from the swamp, Rossa shouted her son’s name as if in anguish.

Lancart’s eyebrows furrowed fiercely. He flung open the carriage door and strode toward Rossa, towering over her with an imposing glare. Having neglected discipline for a while, his heart brimmed with the urge to kill the insolent, immature woman.

“What exactly is it?”

Suppressing the “you” from his speech to sound less rude, he nevertheless snarled. Rossa’s eyes welled with tears as if wounded, and the monster barely restrained the curse and yawn bubbling inside him.

“Hmm?”

“Lancart. I came out worried to greet you since you were to meet the Crown Prince… How can you speak to me like that?”

Lancart and the Crown Prince had always had a good relationship. Yet recently, troubling rumors circulated in the palace—whispers that the Crown Prince was pushing the foolish Duke Alexander from his inner circle and seeking a new right-hand man.

Rossa firmly believed those ruined plans.

“How did I speak?”

“I understand you want to be close to your mother, but you weren’t like this before. You used to respect and obey your mother well, so what’s with this coldness? Why are you colder to me than to that one?”

Rossa motioned toward Sylvia, who was just getting down from the carriage with the help of a coachman. Lancart glanced at “that one”, then looked away. When he gave a mischievous grin, Rossa’s expression twisted in confusion upon seeing her son’s smirk.

“Why are you smirking—”

“Mother, have I ever respected you?”

Even the real Lancart probably never had. Kuinan was sure of this. No one could truly respect a woman so vulgar and rude, whose feelings flared erratically between narcissism and self-loathing, splattering emotions wildly everywhere.

At best, he might have refrained from hating his mother for giving birth to him.

“Get a grip. Even before I lost my memory, I never respected you. Maybe I pitied you, but that’s it.”

Lancart seemed to have said this at some point before he died. He hated his wife but pitied his mother. Yet his expression twisted as if recalling something disgusting. Much of his bitterness probably stemmed from having such a flawed mother.

“What…”

“Shocked? Then I’ll be even more disappointed.”

She was genuinely repulsive. Her very scent was nauseating. Why was she so obsessed with her son, constantly sucking the Emperor’s c**k, and catching his son’s timid wife like a rat?