“Father. You’re not really thinking of going there, are you?”

Leon’s voice barely suppressed the disgust for his own flesh and blood and the self-loathing that stemmed from it.

Kasha sensed the unsettling atmosphere and reached out towards Eve. Eve then ran into her arms as if she had been waiting.

However, the Grand Duke just brazen furrowed his brows as if he hadn’t noticed anything. His bloodshot eyes were unfocused, glancing here and there.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said we’ve been invited! Go change into your uniform at once. We must go and show the might of the Osilote Ducal House!”

Those murky eyes that truly believed his own nonsense made sense and that overbearing voice.

“Father.”

Leon, who had called for his father, let out a long sigh.

Recent conversations with his father were always exhausting and provoked anger. It wasn’t easy to bear with a body tainted by a curse. He too was always on the verge of exploding.

The fact that that man was his ‘father’ was the only reason he couldn’t unleash that anger.

For Leon, ‘family’ was the foremost value to protect. The only shelter he had to create for his pitiful younger siblings Eve and Anthony. And his father was, anyhow, the person who was supposed to create and protect that shelter.

Leon’s teens were punctuated by efforts to understand his father.

He desperately wanted to believe that there must be a reason why that man, who followed only greed and betrayed even his own flesh and blood while scheming dirty tricks, had no choice but to be that way.

Anyway, he hoped that someday, when his father’s foolish steps came to an end, he would look back at his ‘family’ and realize its preciousness.

But even in this situation, the ‘family’ his father spoke of was not Leon, Anthony, and Eve.

The family his father wanted was not here. Only the imperial palace. The imperial family. The direct line of the imperial household. That was the only shelter he wanted.

His father, who calls the crown prince he himself had dethroned ‘family’, commanding him to go to that party with him to suffer the humiliation the prince personally inflicts.

There was a time when Leon thought that enduring the crown prince’s subtle humiliation by his father’s side was also something he had no choice but to do since it was for ‘family’.

And after being afflicted with the curse of lust, he had essentially lost even more of the justification to face that humiliation.

He firmly believed that he, tainted with dirty sins, had no right to step on his father’s karma and stand up to the crown prince. Rather, he even welcomed that level of pain as atonement.

But then one day, out of the blue, Kasha appeared before him who had naturally given up all happiness like that, and reached out her hand.

‘I… I hope you can be happy.’

‘The right to be happy is something you earn for yourself. It’s not given to you. So don’t give up yet.’

She said those words with a truly sincere face. Too much so to dismiss it as a bad joke.

And she truly freed him from the curse.

She miraculously restored him, who had lost all hope. It was something that the many prayers he had memorized, the sacrifices he had made, and even his god could not do.

She, the ‘outsider’ he was most wary of and suspicious of, accomplished that. She pulled him out and freed him from a secret that no one, not even his ‘family’, had noticed.

Then, who should he protect now?

Leon felt the confusion that had clouded his eyes gradually clearing.

Even if that letter was speaking the truth. Even if she really was the evil woman who unsealed that magic stone. She must have had a reason to do so.

Because the Kasha he had watched over was that kind of person. Indifferent yet kind, slow yet passionate, a person with a fire burning alone inside.

The kind of person who takes the hand of an injured child to comfort them, and tells a holy knight corrupted by a dirty curse to be happy.

Such a person wouldn’t do something like that without reason.

Leon was convinced that there must be a reason why she couldn’t tell him the truth.

Therefore, from now on, Leon himself would become Kasha’s shelter.

She doesn’t seem interested in protecting herself, so now he will protect her. No matter what threatens her.

The identity of the emotion that had slowly taken shape since the moment he met her became clear. And the moment he acknowledged it, Leon felt a stronger inner strength than ever before.

He was no longer anxious or afraid of anything.

Because this was not a ‘responsibility’ given from birth, but his own choice. And he had already come to deeply love that choice.

Leon looked straight into his father’s eyes. His father, meeting his gaze, flinched, but his appearance was no longer pitiful.

“Who exactly will welcome us there, Father? His Highness the Crown Prince is just calling us to mock us. You must know that.”

Leon spoke in a calm voice, suppressing his emotions as much as possible for Kasha and Eve’s sake. But the Grand Duke threw a fit as if he had heard something absurd.

“Mock? Who dares to mock us! Me, the younger brother of Ramon! What’s better about him except that elder brother Ramon was born earlier? He should know that he owes me his life when he conquered the Gillenua Kingdom!”

The Grand Duke’s attitude of roughly calling the emperor’s name with no respect was precarious. He didn’t seem to realize that the guards or maids guarding this place could accuse him of imperial blasphemy at any moment.

He was always gripped by foolish desires, but he wasn’t usually this lacking in judgment. Why? Could it be that he was really going senile at such a young age?

Even if they raised their voices at each other, Leon had to make his father face the situation squarely.

Leon glared at his father with a cold face. The spirit of a son who had become an adult alone without anyone’s protection was enough to overwhelm his father.

“…Didn’t you, Father, the emperor’s younger brother, the crown prince’s uncle, harm Her Majesty the Empress, the crown prince’s mother? Have you really forgotten that she still hasn’t woken up and is in a coma?”

“What, such… nonsense only lowlifes would believe… How dare you, in front of your father!”

The Grand Duke’s sunken cheeks turned pale with rage. But in that moment, Leon clearly read the fear darkly rippling in his eyes.

The attempted poisoning of Empress Anne.

It was an incident that had turned the imperial court and the entire empire upside down years ago.

At that time, Empress Anne’s power was immense. She had the brilliant and beautiful 1st Prince Nigel and Princess Melissa, and her maiden home, the Vistas Duchy, was also in good health.

That is, until the variable called Empress Dowager Alisa appeared.

Everyone knew that Grand Duke Osilote had a hand in her ascent to the position of empress dowager, despite being a beauty but from a humble count family.

At the time, the Grand Duke, who was on bad terms with the Vistas Duchy, Empress Anne’s maiden home, had Alisa, the daughter of his vassal family, the Quirion County, enter the palace to restore his power.

And Empress Dowager Alisa gave birth to a son just one year after entering the palace. It was the birth of the 2nd Prince Arthur, who brought a storm of blood to the imperial palace.

At that time, the emperor was openly infatuated with the beautiful Empress Dowager Alisa. Moreover, Prince Arthur showed remarkable intelligence, such as learning to read and write at the mere age of three.

And that ignited the ambitions of Empress Dowager Alisa and the empress dowager faction nobles, who should have stopped at simply keeping Empress Anne in check.

One afternoon, Empress Anne, who was enjoying tea time as usual, collapsed while vomiting blood.

The poisoning incident of the empress who had produced the legitimate heir.

Circumstantially, it was clearly an assassination attempt by the empress dowager Alisa faction, but there was no evidence anywhere.

The empress, who had been hovering between life and death for several days, barely survived but fell into a coma.

Of course, an investigation was conducted, but due to Empress Dowager Alisa’s power at the time and the emperor’s subtle patronage, the case was anticlimactically concluded with a nominal culprit being caught and executed.

No evidence was found anywhere that Empress Dowager Alisa or the empress dowager faction nobles, including Grand Duke Osilote, were involved.

Thanks to the desperate defense by the Vistas Duchy and the remaining few empress faction nobles, Empress Anne was at least able to remain in the imperial palace in a comatose state. However, she was confined to the most remote palace in the imperial palace.

1st Prince Nigel, who was scheduled to ascend to the crown prince position as soon as he came of age, was also exiled to the Kazim Kingdom under the pretext of studying abroad.

Meanwhile, the power of Empress Dowager Alisa and the empress dowager faction nobles only grew.

Until the day the 2nd Prince Arthur met an unexpected catastrophe.

Prince Arthur had accompanied Empress Dowager Alisa on a visit to her hometown when he was chased by assassins and his carriage plummeted off a cliff.

That’s not all. He met a miserable end, his body torn to shreds by a wild beast that appeared at the scene.

Empress Dowager Alisa, who was trapped inside the carriage that fell off the cliff and witnessed her son’s horrible death before her eyes, went mad. She took her own life not long after, haunted every night by the ghost of her son who had turned into a terrifying specter.

The group of assassins who caused the carriage accident vanished without a trace. In the end, only the soldiers, maids, and servants who accompanied them at the time were unjustly reprimanded and met their deaths.

Most of the maids and servants attending Empress Dowager Alisa and Prince Arthur were the children of the empress dowager faction nobles, so the imperial court was enveloped in a bloody silence for a while.

And quite exquisitely, it was right at that time that 1st Prince Nigel returned from the Kazim Kingdom and made his comeback before everyone’s eyes. Needless to say, the 2nd Prince’s absence instantly highlighted him as the sole heir to the throne.

During the time when everyone was indifferent, Nigel had grown dazzlingly. His brilliance, charm, and maturity, incomparable to before, instantly captivated the noble factions and his father, the emperor.

In the end, he ascended to the crown prince position as soon as Empress Dowager Alisa’s funeral ended. All of that happened in just a few months.

Thus, Empress Dowager Alisa and the empress dowager faction collapsed in an instant. In the same way they had toppled Empress Anne.

The Quirion County, Empress Dowager Alisa’s maiden home, and most of the empress dowager faction were gradually purged. In ways that seemed completely unrelated to the attempted poisoning of the empress on the surface, such as being involved in corruption or suspected of treason.

However, only Grand Duke Osilote survived that quiet purge process. Of course, his power became incomparably modest compared to before.

Most people thought he had survived because of his special status as the emperor’s younger brother.

Some also recalled the anecdote of Grand Duke Osilote saving the emperor, who was about to lose his life to the princess in the conquest war against the Gillenua Kingdom more than a decade ago.

They speculated that the emperor could not abandon the younger brother who had saved his life.

Leon had also thought that way and had once resolved to repay the crown prince someday. But as time passed, those thoughts changed.