Episode 4. While You Are By My Side
2023.08.04.
Lowell's wide-open eyes took in every detail of the man before her. Disheveled pale white-gold hair and vivid blue eyes. A gloomy and ferocious atmosphere that couldn't be hidden despite such bright coloring.
The sum of all those descriptions pointed to only one person.
Peter. Her childhood friend. Her only lingering attachment.
But why on earth was Peter here?
Lowell moved her steps as if stumbling, bewildered.
The hand that had been gripping her skirt hem had gone limp long ago.
Like someone fumbling through darkness, she approached him with a vacant hand stretched out before her.
The exit from the darkness was, of course, the man before her eyes—Peter.
But Lowell could not escape the darkness.
The moment her hand was about to touch the man, he roughly snatched it.
The man she faced at such close range made Lowell's conviction even clearer.
“……Peter.”
It's definitely you. It can't be anyone else but you.
Even if his frame had grown sturdier and his impression changed, bodily instinct was more certain than the mind.
Without even needing to meticulously compare his features one by one, she could recognize the man before her.
He was undoubtedly Peter.
At the moment elation was about to rise in Lowell's black eyes at this unexpected reunion—
“So now they even teach acting as a last resort?”
A cold sneer awakened her.
Only then did she break free from the boy in her memories.
The man before her was gripping Lowell's wrist, sneering coldly.
“Black hair and black eyes—I didn't believe it when I heard it. I didn't know they'd bring a woman who resembled her this much.”
To the point where it's nauseating how similar you are.
The man muttered so and then simply picked her up and threw her.
Though it wasn't that strong a force, because she was defenseless, Lowell was pushed back without resistance and tumbled onto the bed.
The skirt hem, padded and puffed out by the maids, was so thick that it didn't hurt, but it was obvious that her appearance had become a mess.
And the fact that the one standing before her was enjoying that sight as well.
Before she knew it, the man had approached and grasped Lowell's chin, lifting it.
His vivid blue gaze, like a frozen river, was ferocious as if it would cut her at any moment, and cold at the same time.
“Speak. What else did those who sent you to me say?”
“……What,”
“If you dared come before me carrying that face, there must be a purpose, no? Did they tell you to seduce me? That if you called me Peter and shed tears, I'd lift your skirt?”
His voice was even and calm at first glance, but Lowell could feel the suppressed anger within it.
She also knew the name of the emotion contained in those pupils staring at her.
Killing intent.
“Did you think I wouldn't kill you?”
“……Yes.”
If she didn't answer here, she would die.
And Lowell had already anticipated a situation to this extent.
Naturally, she also had an answer ready.
“You need me.”
The Emperor's brows furrowed.
Strength entered the hand gripping her chin, but Lowell continued resolutely.
“I heard…… that you've already reached your limit. That if it progresses even a little more, it will be difficult to maintain your reason……”
Lowell's breath trembled.
Facing the Emperor's glaring killing intent at such close range was not an easy thing even for her.
Moreover, it was especially so because what she was saying now was touching his reverse scale.
There were two well-known facts about the von der Lien Imperial Family of the Velp Empire.
The first was that they carried the bloodline of dragons.
Though dragon blood ran in their veins, their outward appearance was not greatly different from ordinary people.
The problem was the second fact.
The second fact was that madness flowed in the bloodline of the von der Lien Imperial Family.
It was an abnormal reaction caused by non-dragons inheriting dragon blood.
And there was only one way to suppress that madness: finding a mate.
Without a mate to obsess over, the madness would gnaw away at themselves.
The living proof of that was the current Emperor, Peter von der Lien Velp.
He had long gone without taking a mate, and because of that, the fact that the current Emperor suffered from mad frenzy had long been an open secret among the high nobility.
That was also the reason why all the nobles had been put on high alert when the Emperor said he would find a bride.
Because if the Emperor didn't have a mate, or something resembling one, he would truly go mad.
The Emperor, understanding Lowell's meaning, let out a scoffing laugh.
“So, does that become a reason for me to keep you alive? There are plenty of women who aren't you.”
“But there would be almost no woman with the same conditions as me.”
The reason the Emperor had chosen not to find a mate until now and to slowly go mad.
The Emperor's first love, who had black hair and black eyes, and was now dead.
What kind of person she was, and how she died, no one currently knew, but at least the rumor that she was one rarely born with the color black had already spread far and wide.
“Only I…… will be able to suppress Your Majesty's mad frenzy.”
“……Ha.”
In the end, the Emperor burst into short laughter.
He released Lowell and slowly sneered, then soon approached the bed.
“Yes, you're right. If you want to deceive me to such an extent using a dead person, fine. I'll play along.”
His face was smiling, but it was obvious before long that the Emperor was by no means in a pleasant mood.
It was because the voice of the Emperor, who laid Lowell back down onto the bed, scraped roughly against his throat.
“Open your mouth. I'll do as you wish.”
“Wait—”
An urgent voice leaked from Lowell's mouth, but the words couldn't even be completed before being blocked.
It was because the Emperor's lips roughly devoured hers.
Through lips parted in bewilderment, a violent intrusion slipped inside.
Rene's words that she would have to bear the Emperor's anger in full had indeed been right.
Lowell couldn't close her eyes for even a moment.
The overlapping bridge of his nose, the sharp breaths, the hands holding her—all of them seemed to violently shake her mind.
No crisis she had experienced in her life thus far had set her on edge like this.
No temptation of death had been this sweet, and no hardship had left her this breathless.
Therefore, this was a boundary being struck by instinct.
The moment she let go of this thread, she would be swept away like sand engulfed by waves.
The moment she realized it, Lowell pushed the Emperor away.
As if the tightly pressed together moment just before had been a lie, the man docilely drew his lips away.
“They didn't educate you properly. I'm not some deviant who gets aroused by a refusing woman.”
The Emperor's hand pressed against Lowell's lips, which were breathing heavily.
In that brief time, Lowell's lips were swollen red, as if proving the rough kiss.
“Isn't this what you wanted? If you came to deceive me, you should do it properly. When you dare say you'll play along.”
Behaving like this meant nothing more than asking to be killed.
At the end of it, Lowell tumbled onto the bed.
It was because the Emperor had thrown her.
Looking down at Lowell with a gaze of contempt, the Emperor spoke.
“They found a good doll this time.”
It was obvious mockery.
Because they were words that reminded her that Lowell's position was not even that of a person, but merely a plaything to be toyed with and discarded.
An ordinary person would have felt humiliation at such treatment.
Or else trembled at that killing intent and shed tears.
But Lowell was calm.
No, rather, she was glad.
Because what she had truly wanted from the very beginning was not something as base as survival.
‘……It's enough now.’
The reason she hadn't pushed the Emperor away the instant their lips met was that she had wanted to make sure.
Whether this man really wasn't Peter.
Whether it had merely been her own delusion.
And the conclusion came more easily than she had thought.
‘There's no way someone like this is Peter.’
The Peter whom Lowell had loved, and who had loved Lowell more than anyone else in the world, was a boy who smiled easily at even a single flower.
He was a child who had doggedly trailed after Lowell with a cynical-looking expression, an innocent child for whom brushing her hair was his greatest happiness.
A boy she had recalled like grabbing a lifeline under bright sunlight when life grew too harsh, whose mere memory lifted her mood.
If such a Peter were the same person as the Emperor before her—
‘……I'd kill him.’
Lowell felt as though she wouldn't be able to forgive anything.
For the past 10 years, Peter had never once come back for Lowell.
The Peter who never returned, and the Hessen household that was annihilated by the Imperial family's hands immediately after he left.
Could these two things truly be said to have no connection whatsoever?
Peter was connected to the fire at the Hessen mansion in some way.
‘And yet despite that, he still lives with his mouth shamelessly shut.’
The moment she realized that fact, a hot flame surged fiercely from within her stomach.
The only memory that had kept Lowell alive, that had allowed her to exist as Lowell, became a blade as it was and savaged her.
Longing turning into betrayal required no more than the time it took to blink.
If the Emperor before her eyes were Peter, her emotions surged this much even at such a worthless assumption.
‘I can't forgive him.’
Therefore, the Emperor had to not be Peter.
The Emperor reacting to the nickname Peter, the matter of him searching for a black-haired, black-eyed woman—these had to be things unrelated to her.
He merely had to be an opponent she must kill, a target of her resentment.
She must not taint the only light she had barely kept to survive.
Please, at least this…….
“While you are by my side, you are Lowell.”
At that moment, something thudded heavily down inside Lowell.