Episode 51: Why Did It Have to Be Her?

Lara tried to calm herself by recalling the image of him embracing Valery. She didn’t know exactly what he did in the bridal chamber with the Second Empress, but she could infer it from the sheets Valerie sent her. It wasn’t a lie—he had truly been with her.

The vivid bloodstains on the sheets and Alec’s unblemished body told the story of their union. But why had she thought otherwise? Even while looking at the bloodied sheets sent by Valerie, Lara had convinced herself that he wouldn’t have slept with another woman.

She believed the blood on the sheets was from a wound he had inflicted on his arm to create the illusion. It seemed impossible, but still…

A man who enters the bridal chamber after his wedding wouldn’t abstain from holding his bride. Yet, somehow, she naively believed he wouldn’t have tangled his legs with another woman while leaving her behind.

“Urgh…”

Pushing Alec away as he feverishly caressed her warm, inviting skin, Lara sat up. She clamped a hand over her mouth, suppressing the urge to vomit. Leaning out of the bed and gasping for air, she felt his cold gaze on her.

“Move.”

“Lie down.”

“I feel sick.”

“You feel sick because of me?”

“Yes. Thinking about the day you embraced the Second Empress makes me so nauseous I can’t stand it.”

Alec froze. Taking advantage of his momentary shock, Lara quickly reached for her nightgown.

“That never happened,” Alec said, grabbing her wrist.

Lara recoiled and shot back, “Never happened?”

“…”

“I remember everything! I haven’t forgotten a single thing. I can’t forget the humiliation and betrayal of that day! It must have felt great for you, didn’t it? Watching me go insane while you got everything you wanted! You tied me down with your greed! Do you even know how scared and lonely I felt among those women? Of course not. You never went through any of it.”

Lara was panting, seething with fury. The thought of him coming to her after being with other women filled her with revulsion. Even their skin touching now made her dizzy and filled her with chills.

“…You’ve never known fear, have you?”

Tears welled up and finally spilled over. She broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.

The memory of losing the baby she was carrying so close to full term was unbearable. The devastation of being told that the brain of her second child, born after ten months of carrying him, had been dissolved by poison was overwhelming.

Could he ever understand how it felt to lose two children and be powerless to stop it?

When Alec realized Loras couldn’t be made his heir, he impregnated Valery. After Valery became pregnant, he impregnated Gladys as well, using her to keep Valerie in check. This setup created a power struggle within the palace, deliberately orchestrated to shift Oppreesé’s attention from Lara to Belzenor.

“No matter what you say, to me, you’re the man who slept with the woman who killed and ruined my children—and had a child with her. If that’s the ‘protection’ you’re offering, I’d rather die.”

“…”

“I don’t want anything to do with you.”

Lara screamed as she cried. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to kill him, the baby inside her, and herself. Ever since fully regaining her memories, all she had were destructive thoughts.

Why had she returned? Was it because she hadn’t found peace? Lara thought of the burning trees and the collapsing circular ceiling.

At that moment, Lara was holding Loras. The child lay in her arms, breathing as though asleep. She thought she no longer had a reason to live. Loras had been the only reason for her existence. In other words, he was the chain that kept her bound.

“Do you remember?”

Her tear-filled eyes blinked. Unable to look into his steely eyes, she stared at his sharp jaw.

“Our son.”

Lara twitched her fingers as though she were touching her dead child. Her hand remembered the sensation of running through the sandy-colored blonde hair. The soft hair that tickled her fingers and the scent of wood. Her son, who had inherited everything from her. Lara also remembered the day she was told something had happened to him.

“I remember the day I was told something was wrong with him.”

She raised her gaze. Alec was motionless, like a corpse. Despite this, his hand, still gripping her shoulder, felt as though it had turned to stone. The hand, gripping her like a fossilized root, was disturbingly stiff.

“People wouldn’t give me the baby. They kept telling me the nurse was taking care of him, that he was too tired. I didn’t do anything when I heard that. The next day, when I told them to bring the baby, only then did they tell me he was a little sick.”

Her tear-filled vision blurred. Alec’s outline faded into a pale smudge. Tears kept falling endlessly. The memories she was supposed to forget, those moments when Alec hadn’t even risen, swallowed her bit by bit as she spoke them out loud.

It felt as though everything was happening right now. Just like the day she heard something had gone wrong with Loras. Lara trembled as if she were facing a lost child. Alec, who had been barely holding himself together, embraced her. Lara pushed against his chest and shouted.

“Do you remember, darling? How it felt that day?”

“Lara.”

“That crazy woman was right next to you. That woman who was so vile that even if her intestines were ripped out and chewed, it wouldn’t be enough. She was next to you as if she were the mother of that child. The same woman who had a maid poison a baby less than a month old was there first, right next to you.”

“I was wrong.”

“I am!”

“….”

“Why her? Why did you have to match your belly with hers?”

She couldn’t forgive him. No matter how many times, hundreds, thousands of times she tried to understand, she couldn’t accept that her husband had shared a bed with the woman who had killed her children. She couldn’t accept that he had forced her to live under the same roof with two women who constantly humiliated her, who were always ready to strip her bare and throw her out as soon as they could. She couldn’t call such a man her husband. Still…

“I tried to understand you. Because…”

She had cried so much, her throat choking with emotion. Lara thought of the son she could never touch, the son who was never born. The child who had done nothing, who had never been able to do anything for her. The son who, through her failure to protect him, had become a fool. She missed him so much.

“I could only understand… That was all I could do. Understanding you and your women was all I could do,Alec.”

Did you ever understand how miserable I was? That all I could do by your side was accept everything you did? That you, the one who drifted away from me, still said you loved me? That you became those women’s husband for my sake…?

“But it was all useless, wasn’t it? Darling.”

And yet, I lost everything. I lost it all, and now I have nothing left to lose. Lara no longer had the courage to start that life again. Even though she remembered exactly how she had been shattered, twisted, and broken into pieces, she couldn’t bring herself to start over with him.

---

The prince’s mood had been more twisted than usual. His emotions had always changed unpredictably, but recently, they shifted so quickly and drastically that any guesses became pointless.

He was not the type to air his wrinkled emotions around others, so under normal circumstances, the palace staff wouldn’t notice. But Orchen immediately understood.

There had been a problem with the princess consort. He handed over the documents he had been investigating for the past three days and asked with a tight voice. The heavy silence felt suffocating.

The princess consort. Or no, officially she had never been titled as the princess consort, so perhaps she was just the prince’s wife. No. To be more precise, since there had been no official marriage registration in their jurisdiction, she was simply the woman carrying the prince’s child. The document was a summary of her past.

“Leave.”

Orchen bowed his head, watching the prince carefully. Though the prince was his sister’s son and his nephew, Orchen had never felt at ease around him.

Even when the prince was just a boy of about ten years old, he had been difficult to approach. Could it be because he was royalty? Even when he was less than half the age he was now, the prince had been a stiff, upright boy.

“What happened?”

Orchen knew well that the prince was sensitive, just like his sister. He seemed calm, but he was a man who kept many things to himself. He always responded sensitively to changes in his surroundings and environment, on edge about situations that were beyond his control.

Especially when it came to his pregnant wife. The prince, who had made a woman his wife, though she could not truly be called one, and had even gotten her pregnant.

The prince, who rarely showed emotional turmoil, only revealed his twisted feelings when it came to her. Orchen couldn’t understand this one-sided affection.

He didn’t know how long their relationship had lasted, but to Orchen, it seemed as though the prince was the only one with deep affection. Sometimes, this intense and devoted affection felt out of place and irrational.

“Your Highness.”

“…Leave.”

The prince gave a slight nod. He took a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled, making a small gesture with his hand. Orchen bowed deeply. The words from the documents swirled in his mind.

As Orchen left the prince’s office, he noticed a young man standing at the end of the hallway. This was the man who had recently accompanied him in his place.

It seemed he was now handling the prince’s secretary duties, and Orchen couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed. If it were an important event, like a ball at the Heslow Marquis’ mansion, shouldn’t he be the one accompanying the prince?

However, even after coming to Dranberg, the prince kept his distance from him. Although they were family, he could have trusted him and kept him close, yet he excluded Orchen. This was evident even with the man standing before him now.

Though Orchen had graduated from the prestigious Langcollisher University, the best higher education institution in the empire, he was still a commoner. Many noblemen had also graduated from universities.

But the prince’s decision to choose a commoner as his secretary, instead of a noble, was hard to understand. Furthermore, Orchen had only recommended two people, and they had been pushed to low-ranking positions.

‘Did I do something wrong?’

Orchen bit his lip and wondered. If there was anything that might have upset the prince, it could only be related to his wife. Orchen had looked at her with disdain and had not treated her with the utmost respect.

He clenched and then relaxed his fist, thinking of the woman. In order to regain the prince’s trust, he needed to show that he could be reliable when it came to her. He thought hard, trying to figure out how to regain his position.

Alec crushed his cigarette and examined the documents. The information he had gathered about Gillian von Oppreese, the eldest son and heir of the Marquis Oppreese, regarding his misdeeds during his military service, overlapped with the files on his wife’s early years and the investigations into the Dallas family, the Catlin family.

His wife. Afrosa… or rather, Lara, he knew everything about her. How she had been born and raised. How her father had died and how her mother had fallen ill.

He had already known about her meeting with the Dallas investigator and her connection to the Lauren family. This was something he had learned from the previous life.

After ascending to the throne, the Marquis Oppreese and Valerie had deliberately spread these details to the public, and that’s when he learned more about her. He had never heard it from her own mouth, and he had never been curious enough to ask.

Perhaps even she did not remember all the details of her past. But now, through Orchen, he was finding out more. He didn’t even know her name, Lara. Had Gillian called her that? It was a name that suited her well.

Though it was a name that brought back memories of a wounded face, he still wanted to call her Lara. After hearing the name once, it was the only one that came to mind when he saw her. Learning that the Dallas investigator’s real daughter was named Afrosa only deepened this feeling.

‘At that time, she had a different name. That’s why it took me so long to recognize her.’

Valerie had never told him her original name. The name on the slave documents she presented simply said “the daughter of Rosa and Derek.” She never spoke her true name, and there was no way for Alec to learn it.

As for her past, Alec wanted to know it. Even if she didn’t want him to. He needed to know everything about her. It had nothing to do with being able to protect her. He just wanted to know everything. At the very least, he should know more than he did about the women of Oppreese.