It was a wedding that had everything it should. The problem was that none of it belonged to the bride.
The engagement ring the bride received, the wedding ring, the tiara on her head, the historic jewels, and even the groom – in fact, the bride didn’t even deserve her place. She was just temporarily standing in someone else’s place.
“Here you go.”
Kaela returned the engagement ring she hadn’t worn since leaving Crania.
“Why… this…?”
Peon barely managed to squeeze out his voice, feeling choked. His sentence wasn’t even complete. He had clearly declared this was Kaela’s and given it to her, so why was she returning it?
“Because I received one…”
Or because one was enough. Watching Kaela look at him as if she didn’t understand, then suddenly start to look apprehensive, Peon couldn’t even sigh freely.
As she immediately hunched her shoulders, seeming to think she had done something wrong, he didn’t dare to frighten her more.
Since her collapse, Kaela had treated him no longer as the older brother she knew from childhood, but merely as the Grand Duke of Lusenford. After being ill for so long and waking up, she became even more formal.
She drew a line and showed no emotions at all. And now, the only emotion she showed was fear, watching his reactions. Peon felt disgusted with himself.
“Your Highness, no, Kaela.”
He shook his head.
“No. It’s all yours. I told you that you don’t need to return it.”
To the woman who had been confined in the northern tower and starved to death, Lusenford was a harsh land where she had to pretend to survive. She had to endure the nobles’ glares and rudeness every year under the pretext of tour berry.
If not, she would suffocate to death because of a single fruit that swelled frighteningly. Or she would be swept away by the flood of unreasonable demands and coercion.
How scared she must have been. Among the Lusenford people with their large builds and loud voices, Kaela had to endure both rudeness and threats.
At the last banquet, she must have been terrified and forced herself to eat the tour berry she didn’t want. She must have been swept along and eaten it. Surely she wouldn’t have eaten it voluntarily.
“Keep this as it is.”
He took out the engagement ring that had been neatly placed in the box and put it back on Kaela’s finger. The ring had become loose as she had lost weight.
“The new one is just a gift from a husband to his wife.”
The brilliant diamond was placed on her other bony hand. Holding her hand, which had no blood or warmth, reminded Peon of Kaela’s hand when she had died, and he unconsciously furrowed his brow.
“Wear them often. It’s okay if you lose them. I’ll buy you new ones if you do.”
Remembering her searching for a lost ring with red, tear-stained bare hands, rubbing her eyes, Peon said this in advance. He was an accomplice for not helping her search then, only to secretly find and return it later. He should have searched with her right there.
“Even if there were more rings, what…”
The words ‘What kind of idiot would take back an engagement ring he gave saying it was his mother’s?’ almost slipped out, but Peon barely held back.
The word ‘idiot’ was too vulgar to say in front of Kaela. At the same time, he knew well why Kaela was acting this way.
“…I’m sorry that I’m lacking and flawed compared to you.”
He was always reminding himself that he was a flawed man who had officially been in a relationship with another woman.
“No, that’s not it.”
Kaela reflexively denied it out of habit.
“No, it is. Don’t deny what others have seen with their own eyes. You know it too.”
She closed her mouth again.
“Since I’m a flawed husband, shouldn’t I give you many things like this?”
The large, strong hand was still holding the bony one. To Kaela, it was a very strange and peculiar sight.
“It suits you well.”
Compared to Beatrice’s long, slender hands, her hands were unimpressively small.
Kaela, who had lived under the shadow of Lady Ravalley’s reputation as the flower of society with beautiful hands and no imperfections anywhere, thought as she watched the large diamond ring being added to her ugly hand.
‘It would have shone more on Lady Ravalley’s hand.’
Holding tightly to the hands of the inferior Grand Duchess who was not as good as her in any way, the Grand Duke said once more clearly.
“It’s entirely yours.”
A lie. That couldn’t be.
“Take it all. It’s all yours. Never return it.”
The voice repeating over and over was directed entirely at her, and the large hands enveloped both of hers as if worried she might try to take off the rings again.
Even though she knew best that all this was just a moment, futile and meaningless, Kaela stared at her hands for a long time. Her small, insignificant hands engulfed in his looked quite alright for the first time in a while.
They didn’t seem so ugly after all.
****
Having barely persuaded Kaela, or rather, forcefully insisted on putting both rings on her fingers, Peon only wiped his face after the door closed behind him.
He knew. The woman behind that door was not the Kaela who had tried so hard to settle here and become a part of this place. She was not the person he knew.
She was the Princess of Ostein who could leave Lusenford at any time and would become a stranger to him if given the chance. She was not the woman who cried and searched between her eyes for a ring he couldn’t even remember giving her.
The ring was the only thing he had given Kaela. Or it was the only symbol of their marriage, which had been miserable for their own reasons.
Kaela had desperately searched for the ring. Either the marriage was important, or the ring itself was important, or both.
[I’ll return it to you.]
But now, Kaela showed no attachment to the ring at all.
Return it? The ring? Even if an engagement is broken off, only a petty and shabby man would ask for the ring back, but Kaela was very serious in treating her husband like such a man twice.
‘Have I treated her poorly?’
Peon pondered, retracing the past. He didn’t know much about women. So even though he was trying hard not to hurt Kaela this time, he might have made mistakes inadvertently.
Of course, he knew that his very existence, and the clear past that couldn’t be changed even if they went back in time again, was an indelible flaw to Kaela. This fact always troubled him.
‘But still…’
It still doesn’t make sense. The 21-year-old newly married princess, raised gently, was polite and shy. Surely she was. Peon cursed himself for having little memory of the early days of their marriage as he scraped together his memories.
He should have paid more attention to Kaela. He should have known what kind of person she was. Criticizing himself that it wasn’t such a great sin for one person to get to know another, he wracked his brain.
[Even if Your Highness doesn’t acknowledge it, I am the Grand Duchess. I will do what I have to do.]
No matter how little he remembered, he couldn’t forget her small but clear voice and the cold eyes that looked straight at him. With eyes on the verge of tears, or already filled with tears, she looked at him directly. She faced him head-on, unlike how he always avoided her.
