Chapter 17
As if handing her the upper hand, Lucy’s crying stopped and a hiccup escaped her.
Looking down at her staring up at him with wide, childlike eyes, Laegar felt a strange tightness in his chest.
Entranced by the uncharacteristically flustered expression on his face, she forgot even the sorrow of being ostracized and softly burrowed into his embrace.
Laegar, too, felt something like a tingling current flow through his chest where she burrowed in and let out a low groan.
The groan was slowly swallowed down inside his swelling throat.
* * *
Laegar shut down the salon where the young ladies had gathered and expelled them from the Grand Ducal Castle.
His plan to ease Lucy’s boredom by letting her mingle with peers her own age had failed.
His undoing was not knowing the wickedness of girls that age.
So Laegar went so far as to summon every noble within and near the Grand Duchy, regardless of age. He judged it better to set up an unspecified mass as an entourage for her amusement.
Thus, before long, a bustling masquerade ball was held inside the Grand Ducal Castle.
Rumors again spread that this banquet, too, was held to entertain the Great Emperor’s mistress of unknown identity, but the nobles paid no mind and rushed in eagerly.
If not for this opportunity, who knew when they might ever get an audience with the great emperor called the ‘God of War of the Continent’?
The very fact that he had come all the way north to redeploy border troops was, to the nobles, a miracle in itself.
In any case, they were confident they would recognize the Great Emperor at a glance—exceptionally towering and beautiful even behind a mask.
So every attendee at the ball diligently searched for Laegar, but no one succeeded.
That was because he was holed up in a private chamber that overlooked the banquet hall at a single glance yet remained hidden from others’ eyes.
Alfredo, standing before him as he reclined languidly in an armchair, poured a blood-red wine.
Even then, Laegar’s eyes were persistently gliding, fixed to a single spot.
At the end of that gaze was Lucy.
Wearing a pale blue satin dress embroidered with silver thread and a fox mask adorned with sapphires and diamonds, she was mingling with people rather well.
A chandelier like molten diamond bells, a fireplace with logs ablaze, a three-story fountain carved with archdemons, orchestral music, and nobles in splendid attire.
A hall so dazzling one wouldn’t know where to rest their eyes spread before him, yet Laegar’s gaze only followed Lucy’s laughter, her gestures, her figure.
Some nobles anticipated that perhaps the Great Emperor, now in his second month of residence in the Grand Duchy, might finally begin receiving audiences from the northern lords in order.
But the truth matched the first suspicion—that ‘wasn’t all this for his lover?’
Laegar expected that if the nobles couldn’t identify Lucy, they wouldn’t torment her so wickedly, and would play with her equally and pleasantly, even if just for one night.
Even if not, as long as she—bored from being unable to go outside—simply enjoyed herself, that was enough.
He watched Lucy with the heart of a father who had sent his only daughter out to the water’s edge.
His long fingers, knuckles prominent with a vague anxiety he himself didn’t understand, tapped against the wine glass. Each time, the red wine inside rippled.
Lucy was constantly asked to dance and danced one after another, her cheeks flushed pink. Whenever she cooled off with a cocktail, countless gentlemen approached her.
The magnificent masks caught her eye—a blazing silver fox, an elk with splendid antlers, a golden lion with a flowing mane.
Such a boisterous banquet felt terribly awkward, yet seeing how she was enjoying it nonetheless, had she secretly yearned for something like this in the past as well?
‘Tonight, most beautiful lady, would you please grant me your name?’
‘Could you not spare even a moment for me alone to admire the young lady’s beauty?’
Countless gentlemen pleaded with her to reveal her name, to show just a glimpse of the face beneath her mask.
They themselves were desperate to first disclose their own families and faces to her.
But Lucy, exactly as Alfredo had firmly pre-instructed her, never gave away her name.
Would everything go to ruin like the salon gathering if she told them her name?
Then the fun would end, and nasty incidents might occur. All these humans here were supposedly awful, every last one.
She didn’t quite understand it herself, but she liked the lively atmosphere—the mingling of laughter, the provocative strains of dance music, the crackling of the fire.
‘Just once….’
Lucy suddenly realized that she had wanted, just once, to belong to such an enjoyable space.
‘Did I hate being lonely?’
Why?
Questions arose one after another.
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