Chapter 00
I Became the Monster Duke’s Second Wife
Prologue
Brilliant sunlight poured down beneath an ornate window adorned with multicolored stained glass.
Inside a vast banquet hall large enough to comfortably hold hundreds of people, an extraordinarily long dining table stretched so far that it was difficult to see the person sitting across from you. Seated there were Duke Alberton and his wife, along with their two daughters, Marianne and Grace.
“……Grace, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Duke Alberton, who had been eating in silence, suddenly addressed his second daughter.
Unlike her sister Marianne, who sat pressed close to their parents at the head of the table, Grace had been quietly dining at the farthest seat. At his voice, she turned her gaze toward him.
“Yes. Please go ahead, Father.”
“A marriage proposal has come in for you. One arranged by His Majesty the Emperor himself.”
Grace quietly stared at her father, Duke Alberton, who was speaking to her in a gentle voice she had never heard before in her life.
She was twenty years old. This was the first marriage proposal she had ever received—and it had been arranged by the Emperor himself. It was a situation that would normally shock anyone, yet she replied as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.
“…I see. Who is the gentleman?”
At Grace’s reaction—indifferent to the point of numbness—Duke Alberton briefly frowned, then quickly softened his expression into a warm smile.
“He is Duke Arthur Felix, the Emperor’s cousin.”
“…Oh my!”
“My goodness. You mean Duke Felix—the greatest knight in the Empire, and the owner of the largest territory in all of Felix lands?”
“Grace, this couldn’t be a better opportunity for you!”
As if they had been waiting for this moment, the Duchess of Alberton and Marianne reacted with exaggerated excitement.
Their flushed faces and thrilled voices, looking at her as though there could be no greater blessing than this, made Grace let out a cold, silent scoff in her heart.
A blessing, you say.
Even if that duke—who possessed everything one could envy—was cursed with the rumor that every woman tied to him either dies or goes mad? Even if he was known as the cursed monster duke? Could such a marriage truly be called a blessing?
Grace gazed expressionlessly at the faces of her family, all watching her expectantly.
With smiles they had never once shown her before, they were urging her to accept a political marriage.
Back then, I didn’t know. I foolishly thought I was allowed to refuse.
Yes—back then, she still believed they considered her family.
Even up until the moment she drank the poison they sent her—just two days after she rejected the marriage and fled to a convent—she believed that.
But now, having returned to life, she understood everything.
The reason the Alberton family had not abandoned their “ordinary” daughter and raised her as family was because she had the potential to bear a child with magical abilities.
They had kept her solely to use her as a tool—to form marital ties with nobles and royalty who coveted magical bloodlines for their heirs.
And yet, a daughter worth no more than that had dared to refuse a political marriage.
Once her value was gone, there was no reason left to keep her alive.
Besides, if she died, they would no longer need to worry about being punished for rejecting the Emperor’s arrangement.
A political marriage—or death.
Standing once again at that crossroads after a miraculous return, Grace smiled calmly and answered.
“Yes. It truly is a happy occasion for me.”
“Then… may I take that to mean you’re accepting the proposal?”
Duke Alberton asked eagerly, his face lighting up.
Grace lifted the corners of her lips into a soft, gentle smile and replied,
“Yes. I will marry him.”
Her cheeks slowly tinged red as she smiled sweetly.
A maidenlike smile bloomed on the face that had always been forced into a doll-like blankness under her family’s contempt—a smile filled only with joy.
It was a smile that only someone who had finally escaped the fate of death, and begun a second life, could wear.
