From the Tip of the Tongue of the Lowliest Maid - Chapter 11
For that reason, no one ventured near this beautiful lake, even in broad daylight.
Only Arzeletta, who didn’t want to be grabbed by her hair and plunged into the water by people’s hands again, foolishly came here. Other than her, there were no wild animals passing by, making it seem like abandoned land.
Arzeletta hunched her shoulders.
She had definitely sensed something. It was an unpleasant feeling that brought back very painful memories.
A long, long time ago… like the gaze of a hunter hidden in the bushes, watching her, aiming for her neck…
Arzeletta swallowed hard and bent over her laundry again.
Tension mounted, making her shoulders stiff. She had to finish the laundry quickly and return to the castle…
“Ah…!”
She dropped the laundry she was holding.
She didn’t know when he had come up behind her, but Arzeletta was pulled without resistance by an immense force that grabbed her body.
Too startled to even scream, Arzeletta was thrown directly into the bushes. The rough sensation of damp moss and soft, prickly grass brushed against her back.
“Who…!”
“Hehe. Just stay still.”
A thick, sticky voice fell over Arzeletta’s body. With her head dizzy from the sudden impact, Arzeletta painfully opened one eye.
“You… you are…”
“Damn it, those bastards were too noisy, I couldn’t do anything. So I followed you.”
She remembered he was one of the men who had been harassing and observing her in the infirmary earlier – a man with an enormous build, a protruding jaw, and clear scars.
Arzeletta shuddered, imagining the man who had silently stalked her after mixing with his companions and sneering at her earlier, now gripping her shoulder.
“Every time your butt swayed, I thought I was going crazy. The scent of your skin, it’s just…”
“No… I don’t want to…!”
“Don’t want to? You moaned happily when the other guys fondled and stripped you. Just stay still. Let me smell you.”
Arzeletta’s long hair spread out on the grass like a black carpet. Her neck and wrists, laid upon it, were strangely white.
Her deeply furrowed white brow and surging collarbones were pearl-white, and only her tightly bitten lips were as red as roses, making the man smile with a chilling sensation.
The man reached out and massaged her throbbing hamstrings.
A beauty who seemed to exist only in stories or fantasies was in his hands. It was exhilarating and amusing to watch the woman scorned as a monster by people and spit on her with them, but at night, when people’s gazes disappeared, all he could think of was this woman.
Her slender, desirable body that was constantly being thrown into the laundry place, her red eyes and lips suppressing tears, her loosely undone bodice and slim legs beneath her tucked-up skirt from doing laundry…
He wanted to beat this woman down and lick her straight legs from her ankles all the way up to her inner thighs.
Tear.
Her old, worn white cotton clothes were ripped apart by the man’s rough grasp.
“Don’t, stop, no…! Ah, no.”
Her lustrous black hair shone like precious silk from the East. The tears and fear in her mystical green eyes ignited a sense of triumph in him.
“Hehe. Just as I thought… pretty, very pretty.”
“Stop it. Please.”
“Good. Moan more. Say ‘no’ more. I like that.”
“Hmph…”
Arzeletta was weak.
Her arms and legs, which hadn’t eaten properly, were as frail as a child’s, and her spirit was suppressed.
Above all, she had no one to lean on. There was no one to help her.
Tears streamed from her jewel-like transparent eyes. Even her tears seemed like jewels adorning her beauty. Her resistance, saying “no,” only incited the man’s pleasure.
She couldn’t think of a way to escape.
It seemed the only way was, as always, to quietly curl up and wait patiently until her aggressor was fully satisfied.
But for how long?
What if this harassment wasn’t enough to satisfy him?
“Our Lord is such a sacred old man that there are no prostitutes in our domain, are there?”
“Hmph.”
“That’s why I make a living doing low-ranking knight work. Because I can travel to other domains besides this boring place. The red-light district in the great city of Arta is six times as big as our domain’s central avenue. It’s packed with prostitutes. They chirp like chickens pecking at feed, trying to find men. But…”
The man stopped speaking and grinned. To the exhausted Arzeletta’s eyes, he looked like a giant insect devouring her, baring its teeth.
