Chapter 6
*’Honestly, she’s impossible to predict.’*
Sometimes she acted as if she were backed into a dead end. Other times, she was impertinent enough to far exceed any tolerable limit. And then at times like this, she acted like a small, timid creature wanting to hide in a corner.
Any one of these dispositions, taken separately, could pass for a different person—yet all of them applied to that woman.
“Was your hearing injured?”
The heavy silence cracked.
Valderion made no attempt to hide his curiosity. From the start, he felt little need to conceal his doubts before this degraded creature.
By the time his voice groped through the air and reached the other side, Lirete’s hands paused for a moment.
Her gestures, half-hearted at best though still diligently moving, were terribly clumsy. Valderion was well aware that her damaged fingers had now increased from two to three.
“……”
Lirete had clearly heard the question. Hadn’t she even shown a momentary flinch?
Yet, as if she had heard nothing at all, she resumed her clumsy hand movements and continued eating. Valderion let out a dry laugh at her attitude of ignoring him as if he didn’t exist.
“It’s obvious even without looking, but I’ll ask just in case.”
“……”
“Was Dailun the cause?”
Lirete stopped moving once again.
Again, no answer came.
Ignoring him once was enough. More than that, having let it slide once already meant Valderion had shown considerable generosity.
But the woman, who in some ways unhesitatingly displayed a coltish stubbornness, continued to act rudely as if she hadn’t noticed.
Valderion struck the glass hard with the knife in his hand.
*Clang—*
Because the liquid was already empty, the resonance of the sound echoing inside was strong.
Lirete’s pale-hued eyes fluttered. He twitched an eyebrow as if urging an answer. But her red lips showed no sign of opening, as if held by a latch. Instead, she faintly furrowed the corners of her eyes, expressing displeasure. It was nearly a reaction of revulsion.
It wasn’t difficult to detect the deep-seated disgust embedded within.
At her attitude, which finally grated on his nerves, Valderion adjusted his grip on the knife. Then, as if striking wildly, he began tapping the glass at a steady rhythm.
Her small, thin body—so much so that she seemed less dressed than *consumed* by her clothes—flinch with each tap, like kindling before a torch spraying sparks.
“Stop……”
Lirete murmured quietly, but the friction sounds were louder.
Unable to endure any longer, she abruptly rose from her seat.
Her delicate features were twisted here and there.
“Sit down.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why do you always make things difficult?”
When Valderion struck the glass for the last time, it—already cracked from before—completely collapsed.
He swept the debris away with the flat of the knife blade and pushed it to the floor. The glass fragments sparkled like sunlit sand as they fell.
“What’s so hard about giving one answer?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“I can at least see that Dailun has taught you terrible habits.”
Ignoring his reproach, Lirete walked toward the bed. Valderion folded his arms and muttered toward her back, which looked as if it might blow away with a single gust of wind.
“Think carefully. Do you really think acting so arrogantly, with no sense of your place, will benefit you?”
“……”
“If you keep acting like a beast that won’t listen, I might actually treat you like one.”
After a moment’s silence, Lirete’s shoulder line trembled slightly.
*Is she crying?*
Valderion couldn’t tell whether he felt anticipation or annoyance at the thought of the woman crying.
After a while, Lirete, who had only shown the back of her head, turned her face slightly.
Her exposed eye area was dry.
She hadn’t cried. Instead, one corner of her mouth curled in a twisted manner.
“Why are you smiling?”
He found himself asking, as if entranced.
Lirete returned to a blank, expressionless face, as if she had never smiled at all, and glanced down briefly.
“Because even now, you don’t seem to treat me like a person.”
“……”
“Locking me in a room, forbidding me from going out, forcing me to eat meals against my will…… can that be called treatment befitting a human being?”
“Given that you can’t even understand a simple warning, I’d say my decision wasn’t such a bad one.”
After several conversations, she had come to understand the man’s temperament somewhat.
He had a talent for dragging out and extending the tail end of every argument, utterly exhausting one’s energy.
At a time when all sorts of thoughts were already drifting through her head like a tension headache, a war of words with him was already wearing her out.
“I have no appetite. So please understand that I want to stop eating.”
As if to make it clear that even offering such words was a mercy on her part, Lirete firmly turned her back.
Valderion stared at her retreating figure, moving step by step away from him, then stomped on something with his foot.
It was the chain of the shackle fastened around Lirete’s ankle.
He ruthlessly dragged it toward himself. Naturally, Lirete—whose ankle was connected to the chain—lost her balance and stumbled.
Fortunately, she had already reached the vicinity of the bed, so she didn’t fall completely. But the threat lay elsewhere.
“……!”
The shadow of the man, who had risen from his chair at some point, stretched long at her feet. A chill settled behind her. Lirete hurriedly tried to turn around, but the weight pressing down on her back was faster.
“Hah……!”
She was pressed down so flat that it would not be an exaggeration to say she had been laid on the floor. The man’s shadow overlapped her prone form.
Lirete flinched at the subtle pressure reaching the tightly fastened buttons on her back.
A finger…… no, it felt like a palm.
The man, who had taken his place above her, was pressing somewhere on her back with his palm.
“Get this straight. You’re not the only one who’s uncomfortable.”
His voice, coming directly to her ear, was even lower than when heard from a distance. It had the quality of squeezing all five senses.
As if in evidence, the bundles of Lirete’s nerves stood on end.
It was a palm.
What had been rubbing over her clothes.
But soon it turned into fingers, slowly striding across her back before slipping into the gaps between buttons.
Though it was a trivial contact, in such a pressed-together state—especially with his Name located right beneath where she could feel the movement—she could not maintain her composure.
“So that attitude of yours irritates me too. I told you: know your place properly.”
“Wai-, wait……!”
“You should be trying to figure out what type of woman I like, then mimicking that and jumping into my bed. Do you truly not understand?”
Her blood ran cold.
Lirete also knew what was necessary to remedy these abnormal hands and feet.
The reason the Name was regarded as a curse was precisely because it made the other party of the Name into one’s salvation.
Because only the owner of the Name could help escape this pernicious curse……
“That will…… never happen.”
Yet her heart remained firm.
It was none other than a “Justutia.”
The bloodline of those who had annihilated her family. The proud mace of the Imperial Family.
Even if she had to beg for her life from everyone else, she had no intention of prostrating herself before the Imperial Family or the House of Justutia.
Though she had been broken so wretchedly, the handful of pride she held like sand would never permit it. A low, dry laugh descended on the back of her neck.
“Even if it means dying?”
*Thump.*
Her heart sank dizzily.
She recalled the cold she had experienced on the endlessly white, merciless snowfield—the cold that had frozen solid every bone and nerve in her body. Perhaps because she had faced death there, death remained in Lirete’s mind as a shape of utter loneliness and cruelty.
“Or suffer a pain equivalent to death.”
Valderion had clearly seen the trials Lirete would have to endure in the future. Barely regaining her senses, Lirete, her hands clutching the carpet trembling, spat out in a fragile voice that seemed about to break at any moment.
“Rather than grovel pathetically before you……”
*That would be better.*
Though omitted, it was enough to understand that much.
Valderion looked down at the scrawny, fragile body beneath him, trembling yet still managing to say what needed to be said.
His fingers had already burrowed between the gaps of her buttons and reached the fabric directly above his Name.
He bent his fingertips and rubbed it, as if scratching.
“……!”
For a moment, Lirete thought her heart had stopped.
Such was the sensitivity of her reaction.
It was vastly different from her previous responses, which had been merely trembling. Clearly, she had received a stimulus that touched not her exterior, but somewhere inside her.
Witnessing this noticeable change, Valderion was caught in a subtle current. That a woman who had been holding her head high and arguing with him just moments ago could lose her composure so completely just from him touching his Name.
He felt as if he had personally experienced just how much influence his name—engraved on her suddenly one day—held over her.
It was to such an extent that calling it absolute would not be strange.
Valderion’s fingers finally lifted the fabric. Because of the chemise she wore underneath, her bare skin was not exposed. But the material was so thin that his black name was faintly visible beneath it.
His sturdy fingertip pressed down on that name.
“Don’t, don’t do that……!”
Lirete twitched lightly as she felt a strange electric current shooting through the tips of her hands and feet.
The areas that had been stiff for the past few days, as if using someone else’s limbs, tingled and were slowly regaining sensation.
Valderion ignored her and continued moving his hand.
What touched was only a single point. It could be called a trivial area. Yet the two of them generated an indescribable heat in the air, as if they were passionately entwined.
Soon, the stiffness released.
Her five fingers, having regained their freedom after far too long, groped the air and stretched wide. Lirete used those hands to struggle.
She reached her palm forward to crawl away.
The next moment, Valderion’s outstretched hand pressed it down to the floor.
“I’m not asking you to hold out for long.”
“……”
“Just endure one year.”
