Duke, This Will Sting for a Moment (30 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 6
“Brother.”
Dolman’s sword, which had been swinging through the air, jerked to a halt.
“What did you just say?”
“Brother~.”
While distracting Dolman for the moment, I groped around with both hands for anything that might serve as a weapon.
“You insolent little—how dare you speak to me like that…!”
As expected, Dolman’s lips trembled furiously. Being called “brother” by me must have wounded his pride terribly.
Without stopping my searching hands on the floor, I blinked my eyes as innocently as possible and looked up at Dolman.
“What! Why! What are you going to do with those devilish red eyes glaring at me!”
Dolman shuddered as if he had stepped in dog dung on the street, his face twisted in greater disgust.
Well, it was understandable that Dolman reacted so violently to my eyes.
Red eyes are rare in the Empire. A vivid crimson like burning flames, the kind Yuriella possesses, is almost impossible to find.
Originally, Yuriella did not have red eyes. According to my stepfather Thomas, she had clear sky-blue eyes that beautifully resembled her mother’s.
Yet when the frail Yuriella wandered on the verge of death from high fever and dehydration, and finally stopped breathing only to open her eyes again, they had turned into this striking crimson.
‘Which means it happened the instant my soul took over this body.’
These red eyes. They are the exact same red as my hair color from my previous life. A trace of my former existence? Or perhaps something with deeper meaning?
Emperor Justin once whined that my red hair looked like a ripe, tempting apple he wanted to bite every time he saw it. Perverted bastard. Bite what, exactly.
Just remembering the face of that annoyingly handsome emperor made my stomach churn with anger. At that moment, my groping hand found a plate, and before I knew it, I had hurled it.
—Thwack!
“Ouchhh!”
Oops. The plate struck Dolman’s forehead and eyebrow before crashing to the floor and shattering. That must have hurt.
“You! You!”
Seeing the blood on his hand, Dolman gnashed his teeth with a “Grrgh” and raised his right foot high.
—Thud!
“Urgh.”
Huh? Neither the pain nor the pained groan was mine.
When I looked up, Dolman Grande was slammed into the corner of the cell, glaring at the leather boot of Captain Leo that had just kicked him. Blood streamed down from Dolman’s cracked head.
Look at that, Captain Leo. Breaking Dolman Grande’s head. That guy isn’t Dolman Grande—he’s Dolman Rockhead.
He inherited only his father’s brute strength; the maids whispered that even after eight years he still hadn’t graduated from the five-year Imperial Academy course and was pitifully stuck among his juniors—I heard every word.
Dolman stood up abruptly, touching his bleeding scalp.
“How dare you!”
Indeed. Even the knight commander of a grand ducal house breaking a marquess’s son’s head.
Dolman stomped his bear-like feet as if he would charge any second.
“It would be troublesome if an important suspect still under interrogation were injured.”
The moment Captain Leo drew his sword and held it to Dolman’s throat, Dolman immediately tucked his tail and stood obediently with feet together.
The blade touched Dolman’s throat, yet why did the back of my own neck feel cold?
“Lady Grande. Would you come with me for a moment?”
Leo sheathed his sword and approached me.
“Frost—no, His Grace the Grand Duke… He’s not… dead, is he…?”
Leo did not answer, only glaring at me with a sullen expression.
The prolonged silence squeezed my heart. Is this how it feels to have one’s heart ripped out by a troll? Is he really… dead…?
“Hey, when someone asks a question, you answer!”
Marquis Grande shook his cane wildly and berated Leo.
I glared at the marquis in disbelief. He knew I was a person, yet he had beaten me like a monster with that cane.
Perhaps thinking the same, Leo glanced at my disheveled hair and crumpled dress and frowned.
“He has passed the critical point.”
“Oh. Really? Thank goodness. Thank goodness.”
As Marquis Grande hurriedly tried to leave, Leo stepped forward and blocked his path.
“He is sleeping now. He needs rest for the time being, so please return for today. The lady will come with me.”
“Oh, of course. At times like this, Yuriella, you must stay by His Highness’s side.”
The marquis winked at me, signaling that I must definitely seduce His Grace the Grand Duke. He quickly added a hand gesture threatening to rip my head off if I failed.
Phew. A deep sigh rose within me.
‘Hey, Yuriella’s dear father. Have you seen the Grand Duke’s mistress and still say that?’
Even as a woman, my heart flutters looking at her. Well, she seems a bit ill-tempered, but her face is kind. Her figure is angelic. Because of that woman, Frost refuses ten other women and hates the idea of marriage—so what am I supposed to do?
*
Inside the Grand Duke’s bedchamber, a woman’s sobbing voice rang out brightly.
“Your Highness~ Grand Duke~.”
Shabelle, sitting at the bedside, blinked her lush golden lashes, letting clear teardrops fall from her large eyes.
Each time she lifted her dew-laden lashes, revealing a pair of soft violet eyes, not only the servants attending the Grand Duke but even the knights standing guard far away blushed and let out shallow sighs.
The peerless beauty who had seduced Frost Eelheim—the guardian of the North and master of the ice sword Ielo—at first sight and secured the position of mistress. The notorious seductress whom northerners pointed fingers at for clouding the eyes of their wise and beautiful Grand Duke.
Yet anyone who had seen her beauty even once could only nod, understanding why the ice-cold Grand Duke lost his senses.
“Your Highness~ Sob sob, please open your eyes. Open them and call me ‘my Shabelle’ again~.”
Shabelle rose gracefully, cupped the sleeping Frost’s face with both hands, and diligently pressed her pretty lips—like a bird pecking at feed—onto his forehead, bridge of nose, and both cheeks.
Chief butler Alexis, cheeks flushed, signaled to head maid Rosalynne with his eyes.
Rosalynne nodded and spoke softly to the maids and knights.
“It seems best we withdraw now so His Grace the Grand Duke may rest comfortably.”
Everyone left, leaving only Captain Leo in the room. Shabelle carelessly dropped Frost’s head she had been cradling back onto the pillow and shook the Grand Duke’s shoulders mercilessly.
“Your Highness! Can you not hear Shabelle’s voice? Do you not wish to see Shabelle’s face? Oh, darling Highness. My beloved Highness~.”
Her voice dropped an octave.
“Oh, how can my heart ever reach you? Highness~ Highness~.”
The hands shaking his shoulders were now clutching and shaking his collar.
When Frost still did not open his eyes, Shabelle pursed her plump pink lips and brought them so close they nearly touched his.
“How naughty. Shabelle knows you’re already awake. Urk—.”
Frost’s large fingers seized Shabelle’s flushed cheeks, stretching them sideways and pushing her body backward.
“Enough.”
Frost sat up and shoved Shabelle into the chair beside the bed.
“So heartless.”
Shabelle pouted her glistening lips.
“Don’t you know that making an enemy of a woman brings frost even in midsummer?”
“Lady Shabelle is not a woman. You are also a freeloader living in my house. You should be repaying kindness, not bearing grudges.”
Shabelle spread her legs wide, leaned back against the chair, tilted her head back, and waved her arms limply.
“I’ll earn my keep and repay the favor, so stop scaring people half to death, big brother. I nearly died of shock thinking I’d suddenly become an orphan.”
“An orphan is one who has lost their parents. His Highness’s parents—the late Emperor and Empress—ascended to heaven many years ago.”
Frost suddenly placed a hand on the tightly wrapped bandage, his expression turning thoughtful. The pain was gone, and breathing was easy.
“They say when parents are gone, an elder brother takes their place.”
“Lady Shabelle’s elder brother is not I, but His Majesty the Emperor residing in the capital.”
“Oh, how cruel. A cousin is still a brother! I’m hurt.”
As Shabelle sulkily rested her chin on both hands and pouted, Leo shuddered as if witnessing something he shouldn’t and grimaced.
“Lady Shabelle. Please choose one. Either act like a proper lady, or close those spread legs.”
“Ugh, whatever. At least when it’s just us three, let me be comfortable.”
Shabelle waved her arms and began untying the ribbons of her dress with her legs still spread wide, intending to remove even the stifling corset for a moment.
“If you take that off, you’re leaving my house.”
At the icy voice, Shabelle flinched, retied the ribbons neatly, and whined.
“Big brother, try living just one day with this ivory corset cinching your waist and keeping your legs primly together. Is this any way for a person to live? Tears would blind you.”
“You seem well-fed these days. Three years ago when you arrived looking like a beggar and begged to rely on me, you were willing to work as a stable hand.”
Frost raised one eyebrow.
Recognizing it as a sign he would no longer indulge her, Shabelle straightened her previously slouched back and primly closed her spread legs.
“How much longer must I play the role of your mistress? Not that I’m complaining. From the start, calling me a mistress is absurd anyway. A mistress is a woman who secretly shares affection with a married man. But since you have no wife, the term ‘mistress’ doesn’t even apply to me.”
Shabelle found Frost frightening yet couldn’t help complaining.
She had no confidence to live as a stable hand, and enduring three years of pretending to be a woman while being glared at as the seductress ruining the Grand Duke and the North was no easy task.
“Then I suppose I should just get married.”
Frost rose from the bed, put on a dressing gown, and spoke.
“Surely the partner isn’t that illegitimate daughter of Marquis Grande…?”
When Frost affirmed with silence, Shabelle frowned in disbelief.
Even Captain Leo, who rarely opposed his lord, urgently tried to stop him.
“This is not a matter to decide hastily, Your Highness. That lady is highly suspicious.”
“Suspicious? On what grounds?”
“That unheard-of strange treatment method.”
“Didn’t that very method save my life?”
“That is precisely why it is suspicious. How could a mere lady know a way to detoxify demonic poison that even renowned physicians and priests could not treat? The only medicines handled by the traveling apothecary troupe she was with were nutritional tonics, fatigue recovery potions, and virility drugs for the bedroom.”
Shabelle added,
“According to the physicians, that bizarre treatment did not detoxify the poison but merely suppressed the symptoms.”
Frost recalled the woman who had slipped into his bedchamber.
Strawberry-blonde waves reaching her waist, a small white face that could fit in one hand. Large ruby-like eyes that seemed to occupy half of that tiny face.
The delicate woman frowning with freckles across her nose had looked so frail she might blow away with a single breath from him.
Yet far from trembling at the killing intent he exuded, she had met his gaze without flinching. Her casual speech and profanity had rolled off her tongue with astonishing ease.
Frost combed back the silver hair falling over his forehead with his fingers and ordered Leo.
“Go bring the lady. Politely.”
“Your Highness!”
“We need Marquis Grande.”
“That man is the type to turn his back the moment it benefits him. Can we trust his daughter either?”
Frost walked past Leo to the portrait hanging on the opposite wall of the bedchamber.
When he pressed the blue gem embedded in the late Grand Duke’s cravat, the wall rumbled and opened automatically.
A detailed map revealing the empire’s capital and the eastern, western, southern, and northern regions at a glance appeared, making Leo’s and Shabelle’s eyes widen.
The creation of this imperial map—permitted only to the emperor and his direct line—had begun right after news arrived that the captain of the Solace Imperial Knights had been executed.
“Your Highness. I intend to depose the Emperor and enthrone a new one.”
Frost’s icy blue eyes stared straight at Shabelle—no, at Prince Lewis Della Ponti.
“As my most favored mistress, please be jealous of my marriage. Torment the wife who shortened my life. Show it openly and hide your true self, Your Highness—until the day I present the empire to you on a silver platter.”
It was the moment Grand Duke Frost Eelheim first spoke the word “treason.”
‘Finally…!’
Yet the tense atmosphere flowing between the three men shattered in an instant.
The bedchamber door burst open, and the knight guarding Yuriella rushed in.
“The lady—Lady Grande has disappeared!”
Frost’s face hardened coldly.
She ran away? From me?
When yandere male lead believes she loves him — but she never did
“How dare you!”
“How dare you make me love you, only to cast me aside as nothing more than a friend?!?
“I will never accept that.”
“I will never let you return to him.”
“Even if I have to burn myself to ashes.”
“Even if I must shatter my purity, my dignity, my very soul.”
“I will never let you escape me!”
This was the first novel that introduced me to the matriarchal genre. I’ve read it three times already!
At first, the male lead despised the female lead. Later, he misunderstood that she liked him, so he condescendingly and reluctantly reciprocated her feelings.
Then, he suddenly discovered that she was kind to everyone in the same way, and there was already someone she cherished in her heart, and that person was not him.
The male lead couldn’t believe it, he became angry and crazy. He was determined to capture her body and heart by any means necessary.
Synopsis:
Want to see how a green tea bitch male lead falls in love with the female lead?
Want to see how he flirtatiously pursues the female lead?
Want to see how he gets slapped in the face repeatedly?
The male lead is a green tea bitch, a poisonous lotus, jealous, ruthless, unscrupulous, with a venomous heart, and he’s also a delusional maniac.
The female lead is righteous, positive energy-filled, kind, a holy mother.
Let’s see how two people with extreme personalities come together~
_____
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Hahahaha!!! She is so funny!!!!!! How she changed so much!
I love how she realized she loved him from the begining. But I die seeing him jealous of himself.
Awww