The Northern Mad Dog Is Wagging Its Tail

Duke Scandars’s face hardened and he clenched his teeth.

“What are you doing now?”

Kyra was startled by the anger in the Duke’s voice. She hurriedly wiped her tears away, but they kept flowing. Unable to stop the tears, Kyra glanced anxiously at her father.

“What is this disgrace in front of His Highness?”

Duke Scandars glared at Kyra with cold eyes. Kyra finally stopped crying, but this time she hiccupped.

“I apologize, Your Highness. I think my daughter is nervous.”

Duke Scandars smiled and grabbed Kyra’s arm. Kyra’s eyebrows furrowed in pain from his tight grip.

“Kyra, are you okay?”

Britia tried to approach Kyra, but Duke Scandars opened his eyes wide and glared at her. Then he slowly erased the anger from his face.

“Ah, Lady Britia. It’s been a long time.”

Britia felt a chill run down her spine as Duke Scandars smiled at her. How could he ask her so kindly how she was doing with such cold eyes?

Duke Scandars didn’t seem to be very interested in her answer, so he turned to the maid he had brought with him.

“Fix her ruined face in 10 minutes.”

He whispered the order and turned to the Crown Prince with a smiling face.

“I apologize, Your Highness. It seems my daughter was so excited for today that she even shed tears.”

He joked that she seemed to be too sensitive, but that it wasn’t a bad thing for a painter.

“But I can’t let her show her ugly face to Your Highness, so she will control her emotions and be back soon.”

The Duke suggested that they go to the garden first. As the Crown Prince and Duke Scandars left, Kyra exhaled the breath she had been holding.

“Kyra, are you okay?”

“I’m sorry. I just got surprised and tears came out. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“How can I not worry?”

“I’m really fine. Just fix my makeup.”

Kyra urged the maid to do it right there on the spot. And that scene was watched by one of Scandars’s knights. It seemed that he planned to take her away as soon as her makeup was fixed.

“Kyra!”

Britia looked straight at Kyra, asking her why she was crying and what was going on. Kyra bit her trembling lower lip.

“I’m sorry, but please don’t look at me like that. I feel like I’m going to cry again.”

“Even so, Count Slanford was worried about you and came looking for you.”

As soon as Harty’s name was mentioned, Kyra, who had been trying to hold back, exhaled and started to cry again.

“This is not the time to fix my makeup.”

Britia waved away the maid who was trying to apply powder to the crying person.

“We don’t have time for this. Lord Duke told us to come back in 10 minutes…”

“How can you fix your makeup when you’re crying?”

Britia snapped at Scandars’s knight, saying that if he didn’t want to waste more time, he should be quiet.

Britia tried hard to ignore the stares of those around her.

“I’ll fix the makeup, so give it to me.”

She snatched the powder from the maid and hid behind a pillar at the end of a deserted corridor.

“I won’t run away, so wait there.”

The knight and the maid did not approach her when she warned them not to come this way.

“Now tell me. What’s going on?”

Britia asked, carefully handing Kyra a handkerchief. Kyra took a deep breath and swallowed her tears, trying to calm down.

***** *******

Kyra didn’t think she could keep deceiving her father forever.

So she hoped that the Crown Prince would find a man for her soon. That way, she could apologize to her father for failing to seduce him, saying that he was an impenetrable man.

There were many women who had approached the Crown Prince in hopes of becoming his wife and had failed, so there would be no doubt.

However, the Crown Prince was a more sincere man than she thought. He was very careful in choosing a husband for Kyra.

The more time passed, the more Duke Scandars’s expectations grew. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before he caught her before she could run away by getting married.

‘It’s not as easy as I thought to find a man who has accepted the day of his death, as the young lady said.’

‘It doesn’t matter who the man is, as long as the goal is to get married.’

‘It’s not good to decide too easily. You’ll most likely regret it later.’

She was frustrated by the Crown Prince, who was only talking peacefully while she was dying of anxiety.

‘What kind of painting are you working on these days? Have you finished the painting of the riverbank that you were going to paint before?’

‘Not yet.’

‘That’s too bad. I was going to ask you to show it to me.’

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t finished it yet.’

Kyra answered that she hadn’t even though she had finished it. Because she knew he would ask to see it.

‘You’re not lying because you’re slow and it takes you a long time to finish one, are you?’

‘…I’m slow-handed, so it takes me a long time to finish one.’

Once they started talking, the topic would soon turn from matchmaking to painting. She even wondered if he was seriously looking for a man for her.

‘But you seem to really like landscapes. Now that I think of it, all those paintings were landscapes.’

Kyra sensed something strange in his words at that moment. All she had shown him were portraits of Britia. But he was talking as if he had seen ‘all’ of them.

‘Where did you see my paintings?’

‘Where? You gave them to me.’

The Crown Prince tilted his head.

‘Duke Scandars gave me some paintings, saying that they were gifts from the Lady to me. Surely, you didn’t know about this?’

The paintings he had left in that hut had been given to the Crown Prince as a gift by Duke Scandars without her permission.

Kyra went to her father. But the Duke could not understand his daughter, who was arguing with him.

‘Don’t worry, I didn’t give them all away. It’s foolish to show all your cards at once.’

Kyra felt an indescribable anger at his attitude of treating her paintings as cards to be used when convenient.

‘Those are my paintings! You can’t just give them away as gifts, can you?’

‘Have you lost your mind just because you were away from home for a while? If so, wake up now. Don’t think you can have anything without my permission.’

Kyra was horrified by the fact that even the paintings she had drawn with her own hands could not be hers but her father’s property. She wanted to drag her father, who had pushed her into such despair, into the same despair.

Foolishly, not knowing that he had been deceived by me!

Kyra returned to the house that the Duke had allowed her to live in for a while and wrote a letter.

‘His Highness has no intention of marrying me. He is trying to find a husband for me. Because I asked him to. You have been fooled by me.’

She left the letter on the table of the house where she was staying and headed for the Slanford mansion. But Harty was not home, and she had no choice but to leave a letter saying that she was going to the East.

However, at the eastern border, Kyra was captured by the pursuers sent by Duke Scandars.

‘I see how much my children have been making fun of me.’

Rutherford had tried to embezzle a small amount of money, which was enough to make him laugh, and now Kyra was feeding him. Duke Scandars was furious about this fact.

‘I knew Rutherford was too stupid to bear with this time, so I don’t need him anymore.’

He not only deprived Rutherford of his successor status, but also kicked him out of the family and abandoned his eldest son without any mercy.

‘But you’re different.’

Although she was arrogant, she had courage, and anyway, she currently occupied the position of the woman closest to the crown prince. She’d been trying to outsmart him for years, but Rutherford wasn’t like his sister, who couldn’t have a cup of tea with him.

‘You will continue to be useful.’

‘Do you still plan to use me? Will you do as my father wishes?’

Trapped in the cold underground, Kyra gritted her teeth and glared.

“You will regret it. I will ruin my father’s plans!”

“…There’s no need to let your temper get the best of you. It’s all because of that foolish girl that this unfortunate incident happened.”

He starved Kyra to the point where she had no strength to rebel. But even so, if Kyra resisted, the next target would be the painting.

“If you won’t listen to me, I’ll burn them one by one.”

Kyra snorted at his words, as if asking if he really thought breaking her spirit would be that easy. But she couldn’t help but feel her face stiffen. Duke Scanders burned the painting right in front of her eyes.

The smell of burning oil paints was unbearable.

Kyra watched as the painting burned while biting her lip until blood flowed. Meanwhile, Duke Scanders sat in his chair, casually reading the newspaper as if nothing was happening.

“Burn the next painting.”

He casually ordered, flipping through the pages.

The serene garden of the Stanford Manor that was meant to be shown to Harty someday. The forest beyond the window that Kyra had painted while spending peaceful days at the Lockhart Manor was set on fire.

“Is it still not enough?”

When the Duke gestured with his eyes, the butler tried to set fire to the next painting. A sigh escaped from Kyra’s lips.

It was the riverside painting that she had planned to give to the Crown Prince as a token of gratitude when she successfully escaped from this damn place.

“I will obey my father’s words.”

Before the fire ignited, Kyra surrendered with a trembling voice.

“If only you had done it earlier, we wouldn’t have to burn these pathetic paintings.”

Duke Scanders smirked and got up from his seat.

“No matter how much importance you place on these paintings, they hold no value to me. The reason I haven’t burned them all yet is because you still have some worth to become a Crown Princess.”

With her father’s words echoing in her mind, Kyra had no choice but to pledge herself as the Crown Princess.

After hearing the story from Kyra, Britia was so shocked that she couldn’t speak.

“Harty’s looking for you?” Britia nodded in response, and Kyra bit her lip.

“I got caught up in a stupid matter…”

Trying to hold back, Kyra burst into tears again.

“If I died, the only person who would be sad is that idiot.”

“What are you saying? If you died, I’d be sad too. Stop talking like that.”

As Britia patted her back, Kyra cried uncontrollably.

“I want to run away. I want to leave this damn place, leave my father!”

If that’s not possible, I’d rather die,” Kyra muttered softly, as if to herself.

“But I still need to talk to Harty, just to that idiot. He’ll cry his eyes out. But still…”

Britia noticed that her mental state was extremely unstable.

What should she do? If she finds Harty, can he hide Kyra from Duke Scandars? But how do you find someone you don’t know where they are?

As Britia pondered what to do next, she witnessed something swiftly passing by outside the window.

What was that just now?

Britia was startled to see something black swiftly pass by again.

“I came here determined, but seeing you makes me cry uncontrollably. Everything’s a mess. I cried in front of you out of the blue, so everything’s ruined now.”

As Kyra took a deep breath, recalling the angry face of Duke Scandars.

“To be honest, I never had any hope from the beginning. How could I seduce a man who only has a picture in his head?”

Britia noticed a familiar black tail moving outside the slightly open window. She wasn’t mistaken. It was Sig’s tail.

“He thinks that just because I can paint a little, I could somehow make a difference. He doesn’t understand that there are already plenty of talented people around His Highness.”

“Kyra.”

“I’m just a mere artist who happened to paint a picture for you!”

Kyra shouted in frustration, but Britia, distracted, kept glancing sideways, trying to confirm whether what she saw was really Sig’s tail.

“Hey, Kyra.”

“If I could do anything with just a slightly attractive face, I would have become the Crown Princess long ago. But His Highness has no interest in women at all.”

And then, she saw a lion’s tail appear.

“Kyra, please calm down.”

When Britia asked her to pause for a moment, Kyra took a deep breath. Britia encouraged her to keep breathing steadily while she subtly kept an eye on the lion’s tail that was slowly becoming more visible.

I’m pretty sure His Highness is right over there. Watch what you say.

Britia mouthed the words silently, but Kyra, who had her eyes closed and was exhaling, didn’t notice.

“Even if it’s not me, people around him wouldn’t leave him alone. Considering how indifferent he is, he must definitely be a eun—”

Kyra, please stop!

Seeing the lion’s tail twitch, Britia urgently covered Kyra’s mouth with her hand.