Chapter 24 Contradictory Emotions
His eyes sparked as he looked up at her and sneered.
“You’re the… master, My Lady.”
“How dare you pretend you don’t know… ah!”
She barely had time to finish her sentence before a strong hand grabbed her wrist and dragged her away.
Ioannes shoved her backwards onto the table.
In an instant, their positions were reversed.
He looked down at her as she lay on the table, his pomegranate-red tongue darting out to lick her lower lip.
A savage, sensual look.
‘If this is going to happen so soon, why do you keep putting on this aristocratic act.’
Delphine struggled to free her wrists from his grasp, but it was a futile gesture in the face of the absolute difference in strength.
He looked down at her, the corners of his mouth lifting in a sneer.
“Master? This mansion, you, all of it, is mine.”
He wanted her to think about who was the master now.
“Then I will only ask you once more, Lord Pride.”
Delphine sagged, giving up all pointless defiance, and spoke through gritted teeth.
“Then why did you marry the traitor’s daughter, if you are the Ioannes?”
“I believe I told you that… then, but perhaps my explanation was insufficient.”
The man, who had been staring down at her with an unprecedented coldness, opened his mouth expressionlessly.
The answer was simple.
“Beauty is a man’s pride.”
“… You mean, that is.”
Her voice trembled at the end.
Whether the tremor was from shame or anger, Delphine couldn’t tell.
“You married me for a trophy?”
Delphine clenched her fists and glared at the man with watery emerald eyes.
“Because all those medals and titles of hero weren’t enough?”
The man looked down at her expressionlessly, then slowly parted his lips.
Once again, the answer was simple.
“… Yes.”
His tone was dry and indifferent.
But despite this, Delphine realized that the man pressed against her was slowly becoming aroused.
It was almost too obvious to notice.
“Then I don’t understand even more.”
Delphine glared back at him.
“Then why didn’t you hold me for nearly two months after our marriage… Lord Pride?”
‘Lord Pride,’ Delphine said in an exaggeratedly elegant tone, mimicking him.
Despite her regal tone, her cheeks flushed uncontrollably.
No matter how proud and fiery her temper, she had been raised as an earl’s daughter.
She had never even uttered words similar to these to herself.
The man’s eyes sparked as he stared down at her.
Delphine flinched and instinctively tried to shield herself, but the hard table was the only thing touching her back.
“Were you so suspicious that I would not hold you out of respect?”
“I mean…”
“You mean-“
The man cut Delphine off coldly.
This, too, was a behavior that had never occurred to him before.
“You mean that there is no reason for me to put up with you any longer.”
“Hmph…! Ugh.”
Delphine opened her mouth to retort, but her voice was cut off mid-sentence.
The man’s lips covered hers as if to swallow them whole.
For a moment, for the first time in her life, someone else’s lips were on hers.
He didn’t give her a moment’s pause before he thrust roughly inside her.
In a flood of bewildering sensations, Delphine suddenly realized that this was the first time this man had ever kissed me.
He meant it, this time.
He’s not going to stop halfway, this man.
His entire body was hot, not warm, as they pressed against each other.
‘Ioan. How did you get to me…?’
For a moment, Delphine felt a surge of betrayal, anger, and a little fear.
Slowly, a strange sensation began to rise within Delphine’s body.
A gasp for air would give him a momentary respite, and then he’d press in again, as if he wanted to crush me.
Was kissing supposed to be this wild and savage?
It’s as if he’s sucking my soul out with his breath.
After what seemed like an eternity, his lips parted.
Delphine collapsed on the table and gasped, her eyes disheveled.
As Ioan looked down at her, a mixture of emotions flashed through his eyes.
There was a sense of triumph, an odd sense of satisfaction, and the eyes of someone who had decided to do something.
“Ha, ha, ha… Ioan… You…”
“Yes. That’s how you call me… not here.”
The man murmured lowly, pressing his lips to her earlobe.
“In bed.”
A cold shiver of regret ran down the nape of Delphine’s neck and down her spine at the words.
Only then did Delphine realize she’d been holding out hope that this man-Ioan-wouldn’t force himself on her.
“You are my saint.”
If he was indeed the boy who’d been debating whether to touch the hem of her dress or step on her shadow…
But three years have passed since then.
The man before her was a different man, a little more distant from the Ioannes of old, a little more unknown.
In one swift motion, he scooped Delphine up in his arms and stormed out the door.
Delphine, overcome with anxiety and anger, struggled and cried out.
“Let go of me! Let go of me!”
The users in the hallway scrambled to their feet, startled by the manly behavior of the owner and his life.
“My Lady. You’re impatient to say the least, but you’ve got some dignity, so you’ll have to wait a little longer… or else.”
He headed for the stairs that led up to the quarters, and then, impatiently, flung open the door to the first-floor parlor.
He plonked her roughly down on the sofa in an unoccupied room.
“Would you prefer it here?”
“You’re crazy!”
The harsh words came out of her mouth.
Ioan!
Delphine glared at him, her eyes blazing.
The man, his aristocratic mask completely removed, turned to face her with a frosty gaze, as if he would not let her off the hook this time.
“… I tried to treat you as gentlemanly as I could.”
“Gentlemanly? Oh, yes. That’s about as much manners as you’re capable of, Ioan!”
“But now that I know you’re desperate to be held by me, I don’t have to put up with it at all. Isn’t that so?”
“Pining? Nonsense! Is that the only way you see everything in your lowly eyes?”
At the word ‘lowly,’ the man’s eyes sparked once more.
A cold, somehow twisted, kind of gaze.
“I don’t know who you see in me.”
The man roughly threw off his dressing gown.
Her wrists were seized in a gnarled grip, her torso trapped between thighs thicker than her waist.
Delphine could no longer even struggle.
“That bastard is no more… and I, the man before your eyes, am now your husband, Ioan Pride.”
“This…!”
His hands dug mercilessly into the hem of her dress.
It was at that moment that Delphine gritted her teeth, about to spit out something harsher at him.
Knock, knock.
Someone knocked hesitantly on the parlor door.
The man looked openly annoyed and muttered a string of profanities.
“Get out of my way,” he said.
“Uh… Pardon me. Master. But…”
Betty.
Delphine’s heart sank at the sound of the voice at the door.
Her faithful and brave maid must have plucked up the courage to save her.
All the others must have been too afraid for their lives to dare.
“There’s a visitor… master, and he needs to see you urgently, but the parlor is not the place for him…”
The announcement brought a look of surprise to both Ioan’s irritation and Delphine’s relief.
The quiet of the parlor was broken only by the sound of the wind rattling the windows.
Guests?
In this weather, when the ‘mania’ was beginning to set in?
“… Hah.”
Delphine stopped flinching when he buried his face in the nape of my neck and let out a deep sigh.
But only for a moment.
The man pushed himself up uncomfortably, a mixture of annoyance and anger on his face.
“I’ll be out. Guests are to be taken to the dining room at… first.”
***
The fearless and cheeky maid slipped her arm through Delphine’s and they left the parlor.
Ioannes flung open the rattling window to cool off before going to see his guest.
A gust of wind, mixed with sleet, rushed frantically into the room as soon as he opened the window.
He gritted his fangs against it as if it were a punishment to himself.
Ioan Pride, the man who had risen from the lowliest slave to the Empire’s most honored hero.
“… Damn.”
The weather outside the window, the mania, seemed to speak for itself.
She’d found out.
The scar on his back, the one he wanted to erase the most and yet, like a stigma, never did.
It was his failure to let go of his common sense defencelessly.
To think that a naïve noblewoman who knew nothing could have devised such a clever ruse to seduce a man and get the truth out of him.
That wasn’t the only thing that had changed in the past three years.
‘That boy and girl are nowhere to be found.’
Those innocent feelings are gone, too.
Ioan realized with bitterness.
As her hand stroked the scarred back of her father.
And earlier, in the dining room, when she’d looked at him with triumph in her eyes.
In that moment, many contradictory emotions swept through him at once.
