**Became the Guardian of a Future Villain**
**Chapter 2**
“Huff!”
Waking up in a cold sweat, Hastia gasped for breath and fumbled to touch her throat.
“It’s… still attached…”
Relieved to be alive, she quickly realized that the room was both unfamiliar and oddly familiar.
“Wait, this place is…”
“Hestia, are you okay?”
The door opened, and a woman entered the room. Hestia’s mind went blank the moment she saw her.
“…Mom?”
“I heard you crying, so I came to check on you. Did you have a bad dream?”
The sight of her mother felt oddly foreign.
She looked much younger and more beautiful than Hestia’s last memory of her, and she was holding a newborn baby in her arms.
Looking at the baby’s reddish-brown hair, Hestia mumbled without realizing it.
“Elvin?”
“What do you mean, Elvin? Elvin is right here.”
Her mother laughed and pointed to a little boy holding onto her skirt.
“Annie! Sister! Annie!”
Elvin stretched out his short arms, pointing at the newborn. So that baby must be the third child…
“We decided on a name today. Annie Frost. Isn’t it a cute name?”
Giggling at their mother’s touch, Annie smiled. Everything before Hestia seemed so unfamiliar.
“Oh dear, Hestia!”
Anna let out a short scream.
Tears streamed down Histia’s face.
“Emergency! Sister is crying!”
Elvin ran around the room, declaring an emergency, and soon a man entered.
“What’s happening?”
“Dear, Tia suddenly started crying. Do you think she’s hurt…?”
“Let’s see here.”
The man placed his thick, warm hand on Hestia’s forehead, and as the tears blurred her vision, she belatedly noticed him.
“No fever… Should we call the doctor just in case?”
“…Dad.”
The man paused. His eyes widened as if he had just heard something unbelievable.
“Tia, what did you just call me…?”
“Sob… Dad!”
Hestia hugged him with all her strength and cried like a child.
Before the man could even rejoice at being called ‘Dad’ for the first time, he had no choice but to comfort his weeping stepdaughter.
‘This isn’t a dream. No dream could feel this… real!’
Hestia, who had been taking care of her younger siblings alone for 12 years, now clung to her long-missed parents, finally letting go of all the pain and fear she had bottled up.
* * *
“Sniff. So, Tia, who am I again…?”
“…Why do you keep asking?”
“Because I want to hear it. Could you call me that just once more?”
“…Dad.”
“Yes, I’m your dad. Thank you for accepting me as your father.”
Hestia, having come to her senses, blushed as her father stroked her hair.
Soon, Anna and Derek stepped out with red eyes to make breakfast, She could feel how happy they were that she had accepted him as her father.
“…Well, I suppose I never did call him ‘Dad’ before.”
The man she had just called “Dad” was Derrick Frost, a viscount and her mother Anna’s second husband.
Hestia’s biological father had died in an accident when she was three, and Anna had remarried to Derrick when she was five.
As a child, Hestia hadn’t been able to accept Derrick as her father, even though her mother had given birth to her half-sibling.
As time passed, she gradually accepted him as her father, but by then, it was too late to comfortably call him “Dad.”
The first time she called Derrick “Dad” was after his death.
“Now that I think about it, I feel sorry for him.”
After all, Hestia shared no blood relation with Derrick.
Yet, Derrick willingly adopted her and raised her without any distinction from his biological children. In fact, he doted on her more than his own children.
Now, she understood just how difficult that must have been.
“…But how did this happen?”
Hestia looked down at her small hands.
They weren’t the rough, calloused hands of someone who had lived through hardships, but rather the soft, delicate hands of a child.
She got out of bed and looked into the mirror in the corner of the room.
In the mirror, her hair was a bright brown, not quite as light as blonde, all tangled up, and her forest-green eyes sparkled with intelligence.
And what truly caught her attention…
The face staring back at her wasn’t that of a weary thirty-year-old but a child with a smooth, fair complexion.
“…Since Annie was just born, I must be about eight years old.”
If so, could it be that she had returned to the past?
Perhaps, at that final moment, her brother’s prayer had somehow reached the gods.
Whatever the reason was, she had returned to the past, escaping that horrible moment.
“I won’t… I won’t live like that again.”
For a moment, Hestia was immersed in the joy of returning to the past but then shivered with fear.
Her parents had been killed by another branch of the family, leaving her to raise her siblings alone for twelve years.
She had hoped that her suffering would eventually end in peace, but instead, she had met a sudden death.
“…We didn’t do it! Why kill us over nothing?!”
Recalling Leonhard for a moment, Hestia hit the pillow in frustration.
After venting her anger for a while, she could finally think clearly.
“To think that the young master survived…”
Leonhard had supposedly died ten years ago.
But twelve years ago, when she was eighteen, she had lost everything and fled to another region, so she wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to the Winston family afterward.
“Let’s try to organize my thoughts.”
Hestia rummaged around the room, searching for writing materials.
“These should do.”
March 547: Death of the Duke and Duchess.
November 547: Death of my parents.
December 547: House Frost is taken over by House Harbor.
May 549: Leonhard’s death
This was a summary of the major events.
But Leonhard didn’t die, and he lived to take revenge on all the other branches of the family, including her own.
“Then it wasn’t a coincidence that the news of his death was spread.”
She could somewhat guess why he got caught up in all of this.
Leonhard’s parents had died in an accident two years before his life was threatened.
At that time, he was just 8 years old.
An 8-year-old kid could barely run a duchy by himself.
So, according to the Empire’s law, one of the cadet families had to be chosen as his guardian.
The guardian would manage the duchy for the young duke until he grew up.
It was a position that many people wanted.
If just the death of a baron could get all sorts of relatives fighting for a slice, you can imagine how coveted a position in a duchy would be.
“Most of them were just driven by greed, obviously.”
Anyway, the Frost family was one of those side branches, so she had gone to the Duke and Duchess’s funeral with her dad.
Even though it was a while back and her memories were hazy, she clearly remembered the crowd of adults, buzzing with desire, around the young lord who had just lost his parents.
Malrus Humphrey.
It was said that he had been close to the Duke and Duchess while they were alive, but perhaps he had been coveting the duchy all along.
“Since the Harbor family also wanted our Frost family, it wouldn’t be a shock if Humphrey had the same intentions.”
The Winston Duchy’s cadet families were made up of five houses: Humphrey, Harbor, Eldora, Greenwood, and Frost.
Among them, only the Humphrey family held the rank of Count; the other four were all Barons.
Though they were all cadet families, the Winston Duchy had few descendants, so the connections among them were longstanding.
“Our Frost family… has the weakest position of them all.”
They governed a small territory in the south, but it wasn’t particularly prosperous, nor did it have any notable specialties, making it rather insignificant.
The only advantage was its location at the entrance to the capital, leading into the Duke’s lands, which meant it had a fair amount of foot traffic.
So, most people traveling to the Duke’s lands would pass through it.
“…We could have made decent money from that business, but we ended up going bankrupt.”
There was a reason the Harbor family took over the Frost estate.
It was because we simply couldn’t repay the family debts.
Just before they died, her parents had put their money into a big business deal and got scammed, losing all their investments.
On top of that, a bunch of other bad luck had hit, pushing the family to the edge of bankruptcy. Her parents had gone to ask other cadet families for help to sort things out.
But they never made it back from that trip…
“They never came back.”
At barely 18 years old, Hestia didn’t have the skills or experience to handle her family’s crises.
Moreover, she was neither Derek’s biological child nor of noble birth, so discussions arose in other branch families regarding her legitimacy as a successor.
In the end, it was concluded that Histia lacked the ability to lead the Frosts, and upon hearing the news that the Harbor family might kill not only her but also her siblings, she had to flee in the night.
“In the end, it was all part of the Harbor family’s scheme.”
She had once dreamed of revenge and hired a guild to dig into the Harbor family, uncovering the truth.
The scam that ruined her parents, the string of other disasters, and even their deaths were all planned by the Harbor family.
Hestia crumpled the piece of paper with the Harbor family name on it.
“This time, things won’t go your way.”
She wasn’t about to sit back and let the same fate happen again.
“So, what can I do right now…?”
It was lucky she got a second chance at life, but what could she do with the body of a child?
Hee-hiiing—
Lost in thought, she was suddenly interrupted by the sound of a horse neighing outside. Hestia looked out the window.
“Speak of the devil…”
The person who stepped out of the carriage was none other than Victor Harbor.
The very Baron Harbor who had driven her and her family out of the Frost estate.
The memory of his barely concealed smirk at her parents’ funeral filled her with rage.
Clenching her fists, Hestia hurried downstairs.
“Oh my, Baron Harbor. What brings you here at this hour?”
“I came to congratulate you on the birth of your daughter. I was starting to wonder if Baron Frost could ever have children, but here we are, with not just one but two.”
“Hahaha, it must be my wife’s good fortune. Please, come inside.”
The two men shared polite, empty laughter. As they were about to enter, Victor and Hestia’s eyes met.
“Father!”
“Oh, Tia. Are you feeling better?”
Histia descended the stairs and was embraced by Derek, who welcomed her. She glanced at Victor, pretending to be discreet.
“This child is your wife’s….”
“Yes, she’s my wife’s child. Histia, say hello. This is Baron Harbor.”
Despite the kind smile on his face, Victor’s gaze was very sharp.
Hestia noticed how his gaze narrowed for a brief moment.
‘He never liked me being called Frost.’
He had always hated a commoner pretending to be a noble.
Knowing how much Victor valued noble propriety, Hestia carefully lifted the hem of her skirt to greet him.
“Hestia Frost. It’s an honor to meet you, Baron Harbor.”
“…It seems you’ve learned your manners well.”
There might as well have been a ‘for a commoner’ tacked onto the end of that sentence, but it was clear that Victor was surprised.
“My goodness, Tia. When did you learn such things?”
Histia, conscious of Victor, hadn’t paid attention to Derek. When Derek gave her a proud look, Histia rolled her eyes.
“Well… I learned it from the noblewoman who visited the other day. She said a lady should at least know the basics.”
“Indeed, such things are important. We should find you a good etiquette teacher, Tia.”
“Haha…”
“Ahem, Baron Frost. May I come inside now?”
“Oh, yes! Tia, let’s talk more in detail next time.”
Derrick then escorted Victor to his study. As they walked away, Hestia wiped the innocent smile off her face.
