Chapter 60
8. Pregnant, and Running Away
Ten uneasy days passed.
Marie remembered little of that night.
She suspected Lady Dietrich had done something to her, but most of her memory had vanished after the fever began to take hold.
What surfaced now and then were only flashes of Russell holding her roughly. She brushed a hand over her cheek, now flushed again, as if the heat still lingered.
‘What on earth was that?’
When she had opened her eyes, she’d found the bed empty. Her body, however, told a different story — scattered with the messy traces of the night before. A strange ache pulsed low in her abdomen, sharper than usual, and clinging to her skin still was the dense scent of that man’s pheromones.
Marie bit down on her lip.
Just before her memory had frayed, the symptoms had clearly mimicked a heat cycle. But if it truly had been a heat…
‘Then my body has returned to normal.’
And Russell had witnessed it.
Not merely witnessed, but he’d been part of it. If there had been anything unusual that night, anything different from what he expected, he would have known.
Marie looked at her reflection in the mirror.
The face staring back at her was riddled with too many thoughts to look anything close to happy.
In truth, she was afraid.
‘Why hasn’t he said anything?’
The ten days since had been awkward, as if they had silently agreed to avoid each other.
And Arwena had not visited the Crown Prince’s residence once since that fevered night.
A quiet, almost stifling peace had settled over them, calm in the most unsettling way.
Marie trembled.
If it truly had been a heat, then she could no longer remain as the Crown Prince’s courtesan.
The contract would be void.
Perhaps he was already preparing for that. For his future with another noblewoman. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t come to her again, leaving the courtesan he had purchased to wilt in silence.
‘Yes, of course. That must be it.’
A bitter smile touched Marie’s lips, cold as frost.
‘Because there’s no way he’d ever love someone like me.’
Marie Alphrose, who had always pushed forward no matter the odds, now encountered a resignation even she could not fight.
The kind that came when facing another person’s heart.
Because no matter how deeply you loved someone, it didn’t mean they would ever love you back.
* * *
Contrary to Marie’s fears, the Alpha who had held her like a beast was tangled in the same confusion.
‘Shameful.’
Russell stared down at his own hands, his expression painfully cold.
‘What am I even supposed to say to Marie?’
His mind circled back to that night.
‘She doesn’t remember it…?’
He’d gone to see her, unsettled by Arwena’s visit. And then, he remembered the thick, intoxicating scent of grapefruit. After that, things became hazy.
The next moment of clarity was grotesquely vivid: Marie, utterly disheveled beneath him, sobbing as his body moved in and out of her, buried deep between her trembling thighs.
A searing, near-blasphemous pleasure had surged through him, raw and all-consuming. The Alpha had shuddered like a beast losing control.
‘Ah… there—yes, there…!’
’What the hell—’
’Harder… please, Your Highness… deeper…!’
’Goddamn it. Marie, what did you do to me.’
’Ah—nngh—!’
’You better remember you begged for this. Understood?’
’Yes… yes, more—!’
Her cries, melting sweetly into the haze of fruit-laced pheromones, had blanketed his mind in darkness. He should have felt guilt, maybe even horror, seeing her torn apart and trembling like that but instead, it had only driven him deeper, a heady wave of gratification drowning out everything else.
‘Shxt, Marie. Lift your hips.’
’It hurts… ngh—!’
’Tightening like that… you want to be devoured, don’t you.’
’Haah… deeper—hotter—!’
He’d moved without pause, driven by something feral, heedless of anything but her and the unbearable need between them. Even when dawn broke, his mind hadn’t returned.
Only later, collapsed beside her in the tangle of the sheets, did clarity begin to return. Russell remembered the way she’d looked — her slender back turned toward him, pale and marked where his hands had been.
‘Marie.’
The image surfaced without mercy. That delicate back, streaked with red. His jaw tightened. He had held her far too roughly, and he knew it.
And there was another reason Russell had not been able to go to Marie right away. The investigations he had long suspected and pursued had finally come to an irrefutable conclusion.
‘We’ve found definitive evidence, Your Highness. Please, look at this.’
There was no room for denial. The true culprit behind the incident from ten years ago had finally been revealed.
‘The Duke of Dietrich had, in fact, passed away three years ago. The so-called ‘Lady’ — she’s been the one conducting the experiments since then.’
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