Chapter 22 Tears Like Anesthetic
His calm eyes widened at the words.
She had never seen him so flustered.
Suddenly, as if in frustration, he jerked the tie around his neck.
With such force, several of the top buttons came off.
He stopped dead in his tracks as he spotted them on the floor.
He hesitated for a moment, holding the hem of his shirt where he’d lost the button.
‘… What is he stirring?’
Is he… hesitating to take his shirt off?
The man, his eyes dishevelled with desire, smiled weakly.
“Lady. You’ve been a little depressed lately. What’s going on…”
But he didn’t get the words out.
Delphine slowly approached him and placed her hand on his chest through his shirt.
No matter how determined she was, it was still very strange and embarrassing for her to approach a man and ask for his affection.
Raising her eyes, which were unavoidably a little red, Delphine hesitated and muttered.
“Don’t you like…?”
The man’s patience was ridiculously short.
With that one word, the mask he wore instantly fell off.
His face, elegant and aristocratic, suddenly changed in an instant, like a beast with bared teeth.
A boiling sound rose from his throat, and he pulled her roughly to him.
From then on, unfamiliar sensations crashed into her like a giant wave.
Delphine felt as if she were floundering in a violent storm.
The idea of maintaining her sanity against his frenzied thrusts burned away like a marsh on fire.
The unmasked man was something she’d never encountered before in her life.
Rude, rough, animalistic.
A nobleman never bends the knee. Even with a knife at his throat.
But this man had no qualms about kneeling before her.
He even licked her everywhere like a dog.
She was dazed by this barbaric behaviour, which she had never experienced or thought of in her life.
“This…”
“I thought you said you were ready for this, Lady?”
Licking the corner of his mouth with his red tongue, the man who had thrown off the mask of nobility spat out a string of vulgar words.
Despite his frightening arousal, the man had not yet taken off his shirt.
‘I must realize…’
Delphine struggled against her fading sanity to unbutton his shirt one by one.
But the embarrassment didn’t end there.
“Ugh…”
Suddenly, the man who had pinned her down on the bed pinned her arms firmly above her head.
I’ve never heard of anything like this, not even from Anna…?
Panicking, Delphine jerked her wrists away from his grasp.
“Wait. No, no, no. What’s this…?”
The man breathed harshly and leaned in close.
Delphine held her breath in horror.
No, no, no.
She couldn’t just give him her body like this, without knowing who he was.
Delphine cried out urgently.
“… I’m leaving!”
“What?”
Replied the man languidly, his voice boiling with excitement.
Delphine added hastily.
“I-I want to do it for you.”
Suddenly, the man stopped moving.
He quickly turned his head back, his brown eyes darting wildly.
…To her surprise, even his earlobes and the nape of his neck were red.
But only for a moment.
“Ahh… Delphine, Del. My Del…”
The gripping hands were finally released.
Delphine slowly raised her upper body, pulling the man to his feet.
They sat belly to belly for a moment.
Just as they had done at their wedding, when they had looked at each other and exchanged vows.
Delphine sat there, oblivious to his rising urgency.
The man gasped for air, like a starving beast before a carcass.
She can feel that ragged mask slipping off his face, taunting him.
Finally.
Unable to hold back his boiling need any longer, he demanded harshly.
“Come on…. Del, what are you doing?”
Now.
It was finally visible that he had completely lost it.
The moment the man tried to pull himself up.
Delphine seized the moment, grabbed him by the shirt, and brought her hand down as if to rip it off.
And then.
It was…!
A lightning bolt of sensation shot through her from head to toe.
His back, finally exposed, was white, as if it did not belong to a human being.
This could not be the back of a noble.
She was right.
She hadn’t gone mad with shock.
Lord Pride? The Marquis?
You’re being ridiculous.
Ioan Pride. That you would try to deceive her, his master, with the mansion she gave him.
Delphine ran her hand over his hunched back.
Then she stroked it with a callus-free, calloused palm.
Just as she had done when she was rubbing medicine on the bloody back of a slave boy.
It all happened in the briefest of moments, a blink of an eye.
“Ugh…!”
The man was so quick it was hard to believe he had been so melted.
In an instant, Delphine was back on the bed, under his firm thighs.
His right arm flailed in the air in a moment of panic.
He was hit.
Delphine squeezed her eyes shut against the menacing force.
But no matter how long she waited, the pain she was expecting never came.
Instead, she felt the rough touch of a gnarled hand on her cheek.
Delphine opened her tightly closed eyes.
“Del… Delph…”
A dog, then a cow. Never a cat, then a horse, then a chicken, and only then a man.
There was not a single tear in his brown eyes, not even when all the skin on his back was peeling off, his flesh crushed.
“Del. Del… I, I thought you really wanted me… to…”
He buried his face damply in the nape of her neck.
Rubbing his face against the nape of her neck, like a furry animal craving something from its master.
Maybe now she could get what she wanted from him.
As he removed his mask, she had a million questions.
Why did you pretend not to know me all this time?
Did you really have to cut my father’s throat in front of me?
Why is it that I am the only one who remembers the old you, the slave boy?
How did you rise from a commoner to captain of the Emperor’s guard?
Delphine didn’t want to cry… but the tears that soaked her shoulders seemed to anesthetize her.
Delphine remained lying beneath the man, not daring to move a finger.
***
From the moment he could remember, his world had been red.
So maybe it was inevitable that the moment he saw the girl with the fiery red hair, he felt she belonged in his world.
“They say redheads are stubborn.”
Although she usually wore a wig, the woman who gave birth to him had brown hair with reddish undertones.
“I should have been born blonde.”
She sighed heavily and tied her hair into a ponytail, then slipped a flimsy, cheap blonde wig over it.
It was a wig that had been tugged at and ripped off by ‘guests’ on several occasions, making it look even worse.
Despite lamenting the color of her hair, the woman was beautiful.
In his younger days, he used to be proud of her beauty.
That is, when he was still searching for her warmth, when he sometimes paced around her, wondering if she would hug him or call him by name.
He wondered what he could do to make her look at him.
Troubled, young Ioan watched as the ‘guests’ cuddled his mother and then left, leaving behind a few copper coins.
For days and days, the little boy wandered the streets collecting the coins.
Sometimes he picked them up by luck on the ground, sometimes he ran errands that others didn’t want to do.
The woman didn’t care what he was doing out and about.
When he finally succeeded in getting his hands on a few coins, he dropped them in front of her mother and stretched out her tiny hands.
Give me a hug.
Call my name.
Please smile at me.
Slap-.
A fierce hand cupped his young cheek.
He could clearly feel the unkempt nails raking across his delicate flesh.
“Uh, uh, mum…”
The palm flew in a few more times, unmoved by his pathetic pleas.
Even you ignore me?
What are you?
You’re the reason my life is like this!
One after the other, she cried out in anger.
The harsh words tore her young heart to shreds.
The pain in his heart was worse than the pain in his body.
So that’s why his mother never called him by his name, he realized.
After that day, Ioann never again asked a woman to call him by name or beg for a hug.
His innocent face shaded and his smile faded.
“At least I won’t starve.”
Then, for a pittance, she sold him to a slave trader in District 1.
As he remembers it, her last words were.
“… Forget about this shitty District 3 shit.”
He stared blankly as the slave trader grabbed his wrists, but she never looked back at him.
