No Regression for the Victor - Chapter 15
The man’s face, as he spoke, was solemn and quite stern, making Mikhail feel as if his heart were being squeezed tight.
What should he say? He knew all too well that simply answering, “I’m interested in you,” was out of the question. He needed to come up with some other plausible answer.
Holding his breath, Mikhail quickly racked his brain and, to avoid the man’s gaze, looked up at the desk. His bewildered eyes drifted toward the upper right. As before, the desk was piled high with books.
“……”
What should I say, what should I say…? In that moment, Mikhail blurted out whatever came to mind.
“I-it’s just… My master doesn’t like it when I’m somewhere visible…”
What kind of answer was that? If that were the case, he should have just hidden away in some storage room—why was he loitering here?
While Mikhail berated himself inwardly, the man narrowed his eyes and looked him over from head to toe. At the moment, Mikhail’s hair was dusted thick with ash to conceal his identity, his clothes were thoroughly worn out, and his shoes looked so old the soles could fall off at any time.
To anyone, he would seem the very picture of a mistreated servant. Perhaps he looked too pitiable, because the man let out a brief sigh.
“Ha…”
He asked again.
“So you’re not afraid of being seen by me?”
Mikhail shook his head in protest.
“N-No, it’s not that!”
“Then what is it?”
Now, even if he had ten mouths, Mikhail couldn’t find an answer. He fiddled with his fingers, unable to come up with any excuse that would make sense, when suddenly there was a faint, breathy chuckle.
“……?”
Mikhail, who’d been staring at the floor, startled and looked up. The man, still seated calmly in his chair, looked up at Mikhail and asked,
“What’s your name?”
To the Duke’s question, Mikhail gave the nickname he had used so naturally before becoming a prince.
He looked so timid and pitiful, like a squirrel trembling before a predator, that the man’s intention to interrogate and drive him out seemed to vanish. It was clear to anyone that he wasn’t some suspicious infiltrator with an ulterior motive, but rather just a clueless child.
“Misha… You can call me Misha.”
“All right, Misha. It seems you’re in desperate need of a place to slack off where no one’s watching, so feel free to take it easy. There’s no one here who’ll nitpick your conduct as a servant.”
The remark was clearly tinged with teasing. The moment the Duke’s crisp voice called his name, it felt—though it couldn’t be—that Mikhail’s heart was being squeezed by a curse, just like the Duke’s.
Afraid that his heart might actually burst out of his mouth if he stayed any longer, Mikhail quickly left the room. He bowed so deeply that his golden hair, not fully covered with ash, peeked through in patches, but the Duke didn’t seem to care at all.
Having finally returned to his room, Mikhail crawled under the covers and held his breath, squeezing his eyes shut. With his eyelids closed, all he should have seen was darkness, but the scene from earlier kept flickering before his eyes.
‘I’ve never seen anyone turn the pages of a book so elegantly…’
Mikhail Osbrandt was barely a prince, having only spent three years in the imperial palace until now. Even then, he had spent most of his time out on monster subjugations in foreign lands, so he’d actually spent less than a year around the palace staff.
In other words, in his short life, nearly everyone he had ever known was rough enough that palace people would call them savages and shrink away.
Moreover, the foster mother who raised Mikhail was a woman with hands strong enough to strip the hide from a wild goat with her bare hands, and his foster father worked as a hunter in the winter and as a mercenary on the battlefield in better seasons.
To them, food meant anything that didn’t kill you when you put it in your mouth, and you had to swallow your share quickly before someone else could snatch it away. Refined etiquette and graceful composure were behaviors that had no place in their world.
