Looking for a Husband to Confine Me - Chapter 4
Chapter 4
I’ve heard that a very, very, very, very long time ago, an ancestor of the Hazel family was famous for being a snake charmer. Perhaps that ancestor’s ability was passed down to me. I can only guess.
I can gather information thanks to snakes. Slinky is the smallest and lightest of the snakes I care for, so I brought it with me today for sneaking around.
“Wait here, Mel.”
“Ronen?”
He spoke to me and then left for a moment. His back was too dark to see clearly.
Not long after, Ronen returned.
“What’s going on?”
My eyes, filled with confusion, landed on the white creature in Ronen’s hand.
“Can you take care of this guy too?”
“…That’s.”
The long, white snake dangled and swayed. It lay limply in Ronen’s hand, unmoving.
Or rather, it looked like it was dead, hanging limply…
“Isn’t it dead? Even I can’t handle a dead one.”
“No, it’s alive.”
“What?”
“You can feel its body temperature if you touch it. I don’t know if it came here a few days ago or if it was here when I arrived today. But it’s stretched out like this because it’s injured somewhere.”
“You need to take it to the hospital. What am I supposed to do with this…?”
“If you like it, you can keep it. I’m too lazy.”
This guy! He’s just dumping this on me because he’s too lazy to take it to the hospital and take care of it!
Before I could snap at Ronen, a pale hand shot out of the space and placed the white snake in my hand.
I instinctively took the white body. As he said, I could feel its body temperature in my palm.
“Take good care of it. It’s our first child.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
And what’s so precious about it, it’s just a nuisance.
I muttered my displeasure to myself.
What if Ronen also knew how to handle snakes and was entrusting it to me to get information about me? I briefly suspected.
‘That doesn’t seem right, does it?’
The white snake was truly lying there like it was dead.
I could just refuse and leave the snake on the bar table. But I was bothered by the snake that was stretched out with its tongue hanging out.
“…I’ll add this to the debt.”
“Hahaha!”
Ronen laughed lightly at my words, spoken through gritted teeth. I heard his laughter and turned to leave. My business here was finished.
I heard a click behind me as he lit a cigarette.
“I told him, he’s addicted.”
I shook my head, muttering. I put the white snake in my bag for now. As I left, a long snake that had been secretly hiding moved beside me. The sound of its movement tickled my ear.
“You waited a long time, Wiggly?”
Wiggly is a snake as tall as an adult. It swayed its body, greeting me.
[You took a long time today?]
“Ronen must have wanted to chat.”
Wiggly’s appearance seemed to threaten me, but it was just showing off. The snakes I’ve been with since I was a child often showed off in strange ways.
I gently tapped the tip of my finger under Wiggly’s chin and started walking. Wiggly used to have a name, but it was hard to remember. In the end, I gave it a simpler name, and the snake seemed to like it better.
“Shall we go home?”
There was a flower garden where the snakes I handle lived. The rent was not cheap, but it was worth it because I could use the children to get information.
Today, I was planning to check on the condition of the motionless white snake that was in my bag and return to the mansion.
***
I checked the list of husband candidates I received from Ronen and narrowed it down to four final candidates.
I didn’t choose randomly. I had my own criteria for choosing the final candidates.
‘First, someone who is not engaged.’
I didn’t want to break up a happy engagement, and I didn’t want to be involved in scandals with Hector while I was in the process of breaking up with him. If there was a scandal, it would be a big deal. It would make finding a husband even harder.
‘Second, someone with some power.’
I don’t want someone with too much power because I’m afraid of them. If I accidentally wield power and fall from grace, it would be a big deal. But they can’t be powerless either. They need to have the ability to drive away my family who will try to take my money and kick Hector out when he regrets it later.
‘Third, someone who doesn’t believe in love.’
It would be a problem if he expected love from me. I didn’t plan on asking for love from him either. My relationship with my future husband would be purely business! A contractual relationship.
When the time is right, I will divorce cleanly. If the other person develops feelings for me even though I don’t have any, it would be a big problem.
Hector made it impossible for me to trust anyone.
‘The fourth one is someone who has something in common with me.’
In other words, someone I could also help.
Only then could we make a deal on equal footing. A one-sided relationship wouldn’t last long. I sorted through the information in my head as I walked across the ballroom.
“I heard that Grand Duke Asid broke off his engagement with Lady Hazel.”
“It wasn’t a formal break-up, was it? It’s just a rumor.”
“Even so, seeing Lady Hazel here alone today without Duke Asid as her escort makes the rumor seem true, doesn’t it?”
With every step I took, I could hear whispers from the nobles.
‘The rumor has already spread.’
I didn’t really care. I expected this to happen when I came to the ball. My only purpose today was to look over the potential husband candidates present.
I was just about to find a corner to stand in and ignore everyone when the murmurings of the nobles grew louder. Soon, their heads turned towards the ballroom entrance. I followed their gaze and glanced at the entrance.
“Oh, damn it.”
Was Hector attending this ball, too?
There he was, with a woman beside him, shyly smiling. The woman was on Hector’s arm as they entered the ballroom. A soft, happy smile graced her lips.
The kind of smile I, or Amelia in the novel, had worn before.
The reason Hector was engaged to Amelia in my transmigrated novel, ‘Unrequited First Love’, was simply a matter of obligation.
She was his childhood friend and his closest confidante. Moreover, Amelia had been injured trying to save Hector when she was young, so he felt he had to protect her.
When the Hazel family first brought up the engagement, he probably didn’t even consider refusing. He must have accepted because he naturally felt responsible for Amelia.
Amelia knew everything about Hector’s feelings. Still, she held onto a sliver of hope.
She hoped that, with time, he would come to love her, his fiancée.
‘And I felt the same way.’
I chuckled bitterly, recalling Amelia’s actions in the novel and my own situation.
I had tried to change Amelia’s life. At first, I decided to become his real fiancée by bringing forward the time they met. But I struggled with it several times a day. In the end, I even tried to avoid getting close to him, thinking it would be better to stay away.
‘But I couldn’t ignore Hector when he was in danger, so I saved him.’
That incident made him develop feelings of responsibility towards me, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t just watch him die.
Still, I tried to live a life as different as possible from Amelia’s, except for that incident. But the moment I got entangled with Hector, I couldn’t escape. My own wishes didn’t matter to the Hazel family, who were blinded by the wealth and power of the Duke Asid family.
Since I was engaged to him, I tried my best to reach a different ending than the original story.
“What a shameless bast*rd.”
I gritted my teeth and muttered under my breath.
The couple, Hector and the woman, were walking towards me, their faces beaming with smiles.
I raised my head and met Hector’s gaze. He flinched and stopped in his tracks, his smile vanishing. The woman on his arm looked at him curiously and called out his name, “Hector?”
She hadn’t noticed me yet.
“It’s nothing, Vivian.”
I could even hear him forcing a smile as he answered her.
He composed himself and looked back at me. I turned away first. I remained indifferent even as I saw the two of them, the very picture of a loving couple.
I had feelings for Hector, but he had clearly told me, ‘…I love someone else.’, ‘She’s carrying my child.’
I glanced at the woman’s still-flat stomach. I hoped they would live happily ever after, for all that it was worth. But that wouldn’t happen, according to the novel.
‘I’m not interested in that man anymore. I just wish they would live their lives together.’
I think it’s possible to be swayed by someone else and mistake it for love when you don’t know your own feelings. I could even accept him having feelings for someone.
But what I couldn’t forgive was that he had slept with someone else despite being engaged.
‘He should have at least ended things with me first.’
He shouldn’t have had a reckless night like that. At least not while he was still engaged to me.
But thanks to Hector acting just like in the original story, all the respect I had for him was gone.
“…Disgusting.”
I couldn’t help but mutter it out loud, even though the physical disgust hadn’t disappeared. But how soon after breaking off the engagement was it that he brought someone else here?
‘Isn’t that rude?’
I didn’t like Hector’s actions more than I disliked their relationship.
