Chapter 8
The moment his hand lifted the hem of my dress, my body stiffened. At that instant, the memory from the carriage resurfaced.
‘There’s nothing wrong with feeling good, is there?’
Those lips that had roamed over my body, and then—
No, forget it. Just forget it!
The dress came off easily, like shedding a shell. The underskirt beneath it followed just as quickly.
A rough palm brushed past my side and upper arm. Everywhere his skin touched seemed to retain a lingering heat.
Lothar placed the dress and underskirt on the floor.
That left me completely naked. I hadn’t expected to be exposed like this, not even a single thread covering me.
For some reason, my mouth went dry.
“Please wait a moment.”
With a brief whisper, Lothar stood. Soon after, I heard the sound of him soaking a towel in the water on the table.
I shivered slightly in the cool air and hugged my knees.
Don’t think about it. He’s just like an attendant at a bathhouse. My back is hard to reach, so I’m just getting a bit of help…
Damn it. I am thinking about it. Letting him attend to me was a mistake.
Unable to endure even a moment of silence, I opened my mouth. It was a topic Lothar would want to hear anyway.
“The private army you secretly gathered—this time, it was reported by the Margrave of Staufen, right?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“In previous lives, the informant was always someone else.”
The sound of water being wrung from the cloth was oddly suggestive. I swallowed discreetly before exposing Lothar’s long-standing blind spot.
“Tobias.”
“……”
“The commander of the Third Imperial Knight Order, who served you for years. He betrayed you. Every single time.”
I recalled Tobias’s frozen expression this morning when he was forced to hand Lothar over.
By now, he would have reached the imperial palace, desperately begging for forgiveness.
I wondered what kind of reaction I would get. Would he drop the towel in shock?
Then, a low voice answered.
“I thought as much.”
“Huh?”
Since when had he noticed?
“On the way to Lumen Monastery, he kept saying things he normally wouldn’t. Apologizing for failing to serve me properly, saying I must have suffered because of an incompetent subordinate…”
His voice drew closer again, and then a warm, damp cloth touched my back.
“Ah…”
A languid sigh escaped me at the warmth enveloping my skin. Only then did I feel like I could finally breathe.
“Normally, he would have told me to endure just a little longer at the monastery. That as long as I survived, an opportunity would come.”
Lothar began to wipe my back with slow, gentle movements. I had expected his touch to be rough, but it wasn’t at all.
So, from the moment he boarded the carriage to the monastery, Lothar had already anticipated his own death.
Was that why he had so readily accepted such an absurd proposal of a marriage-by-abduction?
Suddenly, I recalled the sight of Lothar I had seen in the past. A corpse in a coffin.
As it was a royal funeral, the archbishop had attended without fail, bringing along me—his decorative piece.
The man lay among bright flowers like a finely crafted doll. When I saw his face, I had thought:
‘He’s like me.’
Maximilian’s doll. Beings who lived if he allowed it, and died if he commanded it.
My brief reverie was broken by his calm, low voice.
“Do you know why Tobias abandoned me?”
Of course I did. Over countless lifetimes, I had heard it often from Maximilian himself.
He always found it amusing that his half-brother’s loyal retainer had chosen him instead.
Feeling Lothar’s hand move down toward my lower back, I replied,
“Frederike is carrying Maximilian’s child.”
At that moment, Lothar’s hand paused.
“Fridi… is carrying that man’s child?”
Fridi. Frederike.
Both names referred to the younger sister of Commander Tobias.
Judging by the nickname, they must have been quite close. Though that relationship was already shattered.
“Their wedding will be held next spring. Originally, it would’ve been announced after your funeral.”
Maximilian and Frederike’s marriage, and the birth of their child.
It was a future that had repeated itself countless times. Tobias’s sister would become the Crown Princess—and eventually, the Empress—of the Elheim Empire.
Lothar’s hand, which had gone still, began moving again.
“No wonder Tobias was placed at a crossroads.”
His murmured voice had sunk slightly lower than before. Somehow, he seemed a little pitiful.
Whether to support the political struggle of the lord he had served his entire life, or to serve as emperor the man who would become his sister’s husband and the father of his future nephew.
From those choices, Tobias had always chosen Lothar’s death. Not once had it been otherwise.
Was it purely for his family’s sake?
No way.
In exchange for exposing the location and scale of Lothar’s private army, Tobias was granted a count’s title.
For a second son of his house, betrayal had become an opportunity.
And that wasn’t all. Afterward, he became Maximilian’s right-hand man, handling all sorts of dirty work.
That bastard really was something else.
Perhaps Tobias had been a proper subordinate while serving Lothar. But a person’s soul can corrupt faster than one might think.
The Tobias I had known in the past was nothing more and nothing less than the emperor’s puppet.
“If we had made it to Lumen Monastery… Tobias would have come to take my life.”
“That’s right.”
I could only hope Lothar wasn’t naive enough to have missed that fact.
Having finished wiping my back, Lothar draped the warm cloth over my shoulders. I heard him stand.
“Then I’ll step out for some fresh air. You seem rather shy.”
“Huh? Me?”
“Your ears are as red as carrots.”
“……”
Damn it. Was he lying? I touched my ear for no reason.
With no mirror in sight, I had no way to confirm it. All I could hear was his quiet laughter behind me.
Soon, the door opened and closed. Glancing back, it seemed he had truly left.
“…Is that consideration, or mockery?”
Muttering, I picked up the towel draped over my shoulders.
Lothar didn’t return to the room until I had put on my chemise and finished preparing for bed. He must have had a lot on his mind.
Climbing onto the bed first, I hesitated briefly before lying down on the left side, leaving the right side empty.
For a moment, I found myself thinking about a proper meal I hadn’t had in ages—rice, kimchi stew, and rolled omelet.
“Ghh… huh?”
It seemed I had dozed off. When I opened my eyes, the lamp in the room was already out.
And then—
“You seem to have rather poor sleeping habits.”
In the darkness, I met a pair of deep green eyes glinting in the moonlight.
And then I realized—I was lying on my side, my right leg draped over Lothar’s thigh.
Oh, damn.
The thin chemise had long since ridden up carelessly.
Beneath the hem, which barely covered the boundary between my hips and thighs, pale skin overlapped with Lothar’s bronzed skin.
It was an indecently suggestive sight. At a glance, it looked almost as if…
“……”
As if what?
I must have been out of my mind for a moment. It had been a long day.
Acting as though nothing had happened, I pulled my leg back and tucked it under the blanket.
Turning onto my back, I stared at the ceiling when his pleasant, low voice followed.
“Come to think of it, there’s something important I didn’t ask.”
“What?”
“How did you persuade the Margrave of Staufen? Given her personality… even if she had the information, she seems more like the type who would tear Tobias limb from limb.”
Oh. A reasonable guess.
Across all my lifetimes, I had only met the Margrave of Staufen once—this time. Yet she had been such a striking figure that I understood her personality immediately.
Even if she had been born in modern Korea, she would have been a soldier. Or perhaps a terrorist.
Either way, it was a valid question from Lothar’s perspective.
Tobias’s betrayal. The Staufen family’s deliberate cooperation in exposing it.
It was a plausible sequence of events, but there was no clear link connecting the two.
Because I hadn’t told him the most important part.
