The Price is Everything of Yours (76 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 195

Neris let out a low hum as she read the report Dora had handed her.

“Twenty years ago. Other than that, has he never left his post?”

“Yes. At all other times, he appeared at imperial court gatherings at least every few days. They say that’s when he began taking the medicine.”

In that case, only Megara—among the Marquis’s two children, Megara and her younger brother—could be Rebecca’s child.

Megara’s younger brother, now thirteen, was the first heir to House Rikeandros, but he had been frail since childhood and, unlike his sister, timid. Neris had once thought they were siblings with completely opposite personalities.

Not long after the boy was born, the Marchioness passed away. She had always been frail, so people assumed she had miraculously survived the birth of her first child but couldn’t withstand the second.

“Could the Marquis have assassinated his wife? Because she stood in the way of passing off his illegitimate child as legitimate?”

“It’s possible. But the Marchioness’s death itself wasn’t suspicious. They say it was already considered miraculous when she gave birth to her first child, given her frail constitution from youth. Even before the young Marquis was born, she spent more days confined to bed than out of it.”

“Is that so?”

According to Dora—and Talprin, who had assisted her investigation—Rebecca had first come to the capital twenty-one years ago and soon fell in love with the young Marquis Rikeandros of that time, who was now the current Marquis.

By then, he had already been married for four years, and he and his wife had no children.

Neris guessed that the young Marquis and his wife must have faced immense pressure from elders to produce an heir quickly—the more ancient the house, the more old-fashioned such expectations. She herself had been treated as “the vessel destined to bear the next emperor” from the very day she married Abelus.

Though the narrative changed somewhat after several years passed with no sign of a child and an eventual diagnosis of infertility.

Fortunately for the young Marchioness, luck favored her. Shortly after her husband’s affair became widely known, she retreated to the countryside for rest—and returned a few months later with a child. That child was Megara.

The girl had vibrant violet eyes that left no doubt about her noble lineage and was remarkably healthy. Around that time, Rebecca also disappeared briefly, but no one paid it much mind.

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