We're Married, After All - Chapter 36
“……”
The wire slipped from my hands. Hurriedly, I pulled the postcard out from the pile of letters. The handwriting was familiar. Though deliberately scrawled to obscure recognition and written in a foreign language, there were quirks in a few letters that immediately caught my eye.
“Haha… ha… hahaha…”
Laughter escaped me, unbidden.
Though the sender’s name wasn’t written on it, I knew without a doubt it was Petios’s handwriting. The mere fact that this postcard was here was proof enough. It meant Danel knew who the sender was, just as I recognized Petios’s handwriting at a glance.
But then my chest sank, and my blood ran cold when I flipped the postcard over to see the postmark on the back.
There, stamped with precision, were numbers burned into the card with a branding iron—a date, marking the day the letter was sent. This was a standard practice to prevent letters from being misplaced or delayed.
The date was hauntingly familiar: two weeks after the wedding. A week after we—or rather, I—had shut myself away in Lafecia Castle.
My trembling hands rifled through the drawer. Petios’s letters weren’t just one or two; there were several. The postmarks spanned quite a long period, suggesting that the correspondence had continued, at least until the time Danel left the monastery to attend the wedding.
One overwhelming thought took over my chaotic mind:
Danel… you knew. You knew what Petios was thinking, didn’t you?
The postcard contained only four sentences, all written in a foreign language I couldn’t read.
And yet, I recognized the final sentence at a glance, purely because I had spent so much time observing Petios. Watching him lying in bed reading, sitting in an armchair reciting foreign poetry, or immersing himself in academia to avoid the knight’s exam he was too afraid to take.
“Thank you.”
It felt as though my blood turned to ice. A wave of betrayal so intense washed over me that it nearly made me nauseous.
When I thought about it, everything had been strange from the start. Petios was not someone capable of eloping, let alone undertaking long journeys. He lacked the stamina to walk for extended periods. From the beginning, it never made sense that the Count of Veloce couldn’t find him.
But if Danel had helped him escape, it all fell into place. Monks typically traveled on foot rather than using horses or carriages. Danel would also have known secret paths that ordinary people wouldn’t.
But if that were true… what about those grotesque drawings?
I looked down at the drawer I had consciously avoided for so long.
The chaotic lines emanated an emotion so strong it was unmistakable: hatred. The pure, concentrated fury that had built up over all those years of watching me.
And yet, Petios expressed gratitude toward Danel. Gratitude to the younger brother who had come to Lafecia Castle in his place, who had taken on the burden of his troublesome fiancée.
I picked up one of Petios’s letters and held it close to the candlelight. I was curious—desperate, even. What kind of conversations had they shared that made Petios believe Danel would take over his estate, his position as heir, and even his engagement of over twenty years?
But before I could make out the words illuminated by the light, the candle’s melted wax tipped, and the flame extinguished.
Darkness engulfed the study in an instant.
I groped around, searching for a new candle, but my attention was drawn to the window. The faint light outside wasn’t from the morning sun.
It was the glow of a distant carriage approaching, accompanied by four knights.
The carriage, carrying someone important enough to have torches lighting their path, drew closer.
As soon as I realized what the lights were, I hurriedly organized the letters. Fortunately, the drawer’s lock was self-closing, so I didn’t need to struggle with it. It was a relief I had started with the lower drawer earlier.
Quietly but as quickly as possible, I shut the study door. The faint tremors of the ground signaled the carriage’s approach.
Barefoot, I ran down the hallway. My legs wobbled from the overwhelming dizziness that gripped me.
A long moment later, I heard the carriage come to a stop. By then, I was already back in my room, returning the candlestick to its original place. Thanks to the coachman’s careful, steady pace, likely out of concern for Danel’s safety, I had made it back unnoticed.
I carefully closed my door and slipped into bed.
I worried my body might have gone cold during the night, but instead, a faint warmth lingered, like a mild fever.
Having learned so much in a single night, my mind was a tangled mess. All I could do was lie there with my eyes closed, unable to process it all. The continuous betrayals left me utterly drained, as if every aspect of life had become unbearable.
Danel came straight to the bedroom the moment he stepped out of the carriage. He didn’t even bother changing his clothes before pulling me into his arms. I could feel the rough texture of his coat through my thin nightgown.
“Haa…”
He buried his face into the nape of my neck and my hair, exhaling deeply. His e******n pressed firmly against my thigh, the hardness unmistakable.
I assumed he would touch me as he always did—like the nights when I hadn’t accidentally consumed sleeping powder, or on the rare occasions when he did so in the early hours of the morning. I expected him to grope me, strip me of my underwear, bury his lips between my legs, and eventually move his s***t.
But Danel did nothing.
He simply lay there, holding me in his arms. He wasn’t sleeping. The only movement was the thudding of his heart against my back, which quickened every time he breathed in my scent.
It came.
Desperately, my body began to heat up. The body that Danel had trained so thoroughly responded obediently even to a simple embrace. Both the places I was aware of and those I wasn’t tingled faintly.
I tried my best to continue pretending to sleep. Opening my eyes now would bring too much to confront. Danel would undoubtedly run off before I could even ask why he had used sleeping powder on me, and I would be left waging another battle of wills for several days. Just the thought of it was exhausting.
Fortunately, Danel fell asleep holding me in that position. Right up until he drifted off, he breathed in my scent, stayed hard, and yet only held me tightly. As though that was all he wanted to do… or perhaps all he needed to do.
“Haa…”
I inhaled and exhaled slowly, trying to maintain the façade of ignorance, trying not to scream at the man holding me in his sleep.
Thump, thump. My heart pounded heavily.
What is this? Why is he doing this to me?
A mix of anxiety, disappointment, and fear churned violently within me. The realization that this man—who told me nothing—had actually been hiding even more was unbearable.
The urge to scream clawed at me. It was painful. I wanted to rip out this wildly beating heart of mine.
And then, I heard it—a small, soft pulse, like the lightest of footsteps.
Thump.
All my turmoil vanished in an instant as I focused on the sound I had just heard. But it didn’t come again. The only heartbeats left in the room were mine and Danel’s.
Had I imagined it? A hallucination, perhaps?
