Tame or Be Captured (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 111

Asha finally understood why he didn’t smell of roses—and why she had detected an entirely unfamiliar floral scent instead.

Now she realized his eyes weren’t red because he wasn’t of Rose Imperial blood at all.

Daart frowned and smiled—but that smile was twisted and sorrowful somehow.

“They say the flowers erased from the Empire were all traitors. But could my father really have committed treason? No. How could a mere commoner like my father possibly have had the power to rebel against the Imperial family—alone, no less? It was Ricardo Rode Etzheim, the previous-generation Rose, who falsely branded my father a traitor—to take my mother as his own Banetsa. Since the child born to the Butterfly becomes the next Emperor, the Imperial Flower must marry the Butterfly and bear a child to preserve the Rose Dynasty.”

Asha’s eyes trembled helplessly from shock.

Daart spoke in a self-mocking tone.

“He needed a flawless, pure Butterfly as his wife, so my father must have been a thorn in his eye. Because of that, my father vanished without a trace from this Empire—no one even knew how or when—and I was cast aside without even inheriting my father’s name, a face I’ve never seen. I was nothing more than an illegitimate child the Imperial family needed to eliminate… I truly had nothing.”

A deep sorrow and anger shadowed Daart’s eyes.

Asha couldn’t find a single word to say to him.

“Still, it seems my mother—the previous-generation Butterfly—must have tried desperately to save me. She must have left me at the monastery to hide me from the Imperial eyes.”

Asha recalled what the High Priest had once told her.

A tiny newborn baby, pure white, abandoned in a shabby basket on the snowy doorstep of the monastery…

She could almost feel how her heart ached, imagining the scorching tears her mother must have shed, walking away through the biting wind that cut like knives.

Her mother’s surname, Chrysanthemum, even carried the flower meaning “sorrow of parting.”

Daart lowered his gaze and continued.

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