Chapter 159
He forcibly swallowed something boiling up from inside his stomach and consciously steadied his voice.
“I will pretend I did not hear what you just said.”
He deliberately spoke in a stiff tone and turned around to change clothes, but then he heard a rustling sound behind him.
When he turned back again, he saw the woman raising her upper body, disheveled.
As she lowered her legs outside the bed, the blanket slipped from her slender shoulders, which looked as if they might crumble apart.
Because of the nightgown that had been enlarged to fit her pregnant body, she looked even smaller and younger.
The woman approached unsteadily with that delicate body like a glass sculpture and shot him a deathly pale gaze.
“Why?”
Varkas, who had been reaching out an arm to catch her, clenched his fist in the air.
If he touched her carelessly, he felt as if he might break her.
“Why do I have to be here?”
The woman spat the words as if testing his patience.
“I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be with you. I feel like I’ll go mad just seeing your face.”
Her voice trembled unstably, like the melody of a viola tightened to its limit.
Her slender fingers clung to his clothes as if hanging on.
“So send me anywhere. Whether it’s the Imperial Palace or a monastery, I don’t care!”
He lost his patience in an instant and pushed her down onto the bed.
The ragged breath that burst from between her cracked lips poured hotly against his neck.
Her blue eyes, with dilated pupils, blurred hazily right before his nose.
As if forcing each word into those wet, submerged holes, he spoke with emphasis.
“Say whatever you want. Nothing will change.”
The woman distorted her face as if she could not understand.
For some reason, that expression churned his insides even more.
Following a damp, dark impulse he had not even known existed inside him, he recited in a low voice,
“You must spend your entire life inside my domain. That was the fate decided the moment you swore with your own mouth that you would become my wife.”
He felt goosebumps rise over the cold skin beneath his hand.
A fragile light mixed with confusion, resistance, and fear spread over her eyes.
After looking quietly into it, he forced himself away from her and sat on the edge of the bed.
Then, as he struggled to gather his scattered mind, the woman finally drove a blade into something that remained deep inside him.
“How... can you be so fine?”
Varkas, whose back had stiffened rigidly, slowly turned to look at her.
The woman, who had been shooting him a resentful gaze, began to pour out violent sobs.
“Our child died, so how can you stay so cold? I... I’m in this much pain...”
Then she clawed at her chest like someone truly feeling physical pain.
Looking down at her blankly, he asked himself.
Am I fine right now?
Perhaps he was.
He could not empathize with the pain this woman felt.
Even when their first child was in a state where he could not even breathe, all he could see was his wife bleeding.
He had even ignored her plea to let her hold the child.
He could not possibly allow it because he feared that if he showed her the child whose breath had already stopped, she might let go of everything right then and there.
He had sincerely thought that as long as this woman was safe, the child did not matter.
Even now, all he wished was for this woman to forget the dead child as soon as possible and escape her grief.
Just as he was about to confess that, regardless of whether she would come to despise him even more than she already did, the tiny face wrapped in swaddling cloth flashed across the back of his retina like a burn mark.
It had been a face smaller than his palm.
Perhaps it might have resembled him and this woman by half each...
When he recalled that tiny blood clot buried beneath the ground without ever once being held in its mother’s arms, his tongue would not move, as if paralyzed.
Overwhelmed by helplessness, he let both arms hang down.
She was no longer looking at him.
He watched the woman, who covered her face with both hands and trembled faintly, for a while, then rose.
If he stayed there any longer, he felt he would say that he would grant anything she demanded.
Varkas fled the bedroom as if escaping, shut the door behind him, and leaned his body against it, heavy as lead.
In his vision, which kept losing focus, he saw the window pouring out the sunset.
Feeling his head gradually turning red, he pressed hard on his dry, sandpaper-like eyelids.
It was the end of an especially long and troubled day.
***
After that day, Thalia began acting even more cruelly than before.
She wanted Varkas to become sick of her.
So that he would abandon her without any guilt.
She had already been thoroughly abandoned by everyone.
The fact that the Emperor had offered to write a divorce permit meant that Senevier had also given up on her.
By losing the child, she had surely cast aside even the last bit of expectation she had for Thalia.
When she first learned that fact, she felt a faint pain, but the shock was not as great as she had expected.
Now, her mother no longer mattered either way.
Thalia no longer thought about a way to live.
Even if she were killed by Gareth’s hand immediately, she felt it would not matter much.
Right now, she only wanted to get away from this man.
She looked at Varkas with eyes full of pain.
He was changing out of the clothes that had been ruined when he was hit by the bowl of porridge she had thrown.
His calm appearance, as if nothing had happened, made her feel suffocated.
His patience was horrifying.
And she herself, who became an uncontrollable monster before him, was even more horrifying.
She murmured in an exhausted tone.
“Shouldn’t you be getting sick of this by now?”
Varkas, who had been pulling down a dark blue tunic, turned his head toward her.
No emotion could be read from his face, which bore a faint trace of fatigue.
The man, staring straight at her with eyes that seemed covered by a layer of opaque film, folded up his sleeves and spoke in his characteristically flat voice.
“Shouldn’t you be getting sick of these childish tantrums by now?”
Thalia let out an empty laugh.
The fact that the actions even she herself was sick of were nothing more than tantrums to him filled her with futility.
“Most of the vassals don’t welcome me as the Grand Duchess anyway. If I disappear, everyone will be happy.”
“Since when have you cared about other people’s happiness?”
Varkas let out a dry laugh and brought the newly prepared food the maids had brought to the bed again.
Thalia looked down at it with powerless eyes.
She had already caused a scene three times today alone, so she no longer had the strength left to overturn the bowl.
“Do I have to feed you myself?”
Pushed by the voice that rang softly beside her head, she eventually picked up the spoon.
When she put a few spoonfuls of food into her mouth, she saw faint relief pass over his face.
As she consciously turned her eyes away from that sight, she sensed someone outside the door.
“Your Grace, guests have arrived from the capital. It seems you should come out.”
It was the chief butler’s voice.
Thalia looked up at him while gripping the spoon.
Varkas, who had been looking out the window with his brow furrowed, soon picked up his outer garment.
“I will be there shortly.”
Then he rang the bell to summon the maids, told them not to take their eyes off her for even a moment, and left the room.
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