Cesare, who had been slapped, gritted his teeth and asked.
“What are you trying to do now?”
But Ariadne, in a panic, had no time to care about his feelings.
“Don’t touch me!”
Cesare took a deep breath as the resentment surged in.
Just now, in that situation, pushing, committing, and gently comforting a sobbing woman and then cutting off contact was easier than eating cold soup.
Cesare gritted his teeth and endured it because he really wanted to do well.
He was worried that she was afraid of him because of his notoriety, so he held back with difficulty.
“What? Don’t touch me?”
Cesare's voice began to gradually rise.
“Yeah! I didn’t touch you! I gave you everything you wanted! What’s wrong with you?”
Ariadne, on the other hand, was terrified.
Her left hand was now covered in bright red spots.
Beyond the red tint, it looked like it had been dipped in fresh blood and then taken out.
When Sancha told her to call a doctor, Ariadne pretended to be calm and said that she did not want it to be known to the outside world, but whenever she could no longer bear it, she would wash her left hand with a dishcloth and soap.
The damaged skin was layered on top of it, and now it was in a horrible state with dead skin cells and pus piled up here and there.
This is a terrible punishment for a woman of marriageable age. It is an irreversible disability that reduces the person to a coarse creature.
...What if Cesare finds out about this?
“Why don’t you listen to people?”
Ariadne shouted back as Cesare raised his voice.
“What did you not do! You did whatever you wanted! I told you not to touch the gloves!”
Cesare eventually exploded.
“If I hadn’t stopped you if you hadn’t bowed down obediently to me like a dog in the yard, do you think you would be standing here in front of me like this?!”
He took a step closer to Ariadne and cried out.
“To be honest, I didn’t hate it. You’ve been lukewarm on the balcony all this time, so why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”
Cesare's face distorted and the words he shouldn't have said came out of his mouth.
“You were having fun, but then you suddenly remembered that brat, Alfonso? Is that why? Are you staying chaste for the sake of the person who left you?”
“What did you say?”
Ariadne's face turned bright red. Cesare's words were a reminder of her mistake.
'Should I have pushed Cesare away for the sake of Alfonso?'
She did not think so, but everyone else, including Cesare himself, seemed to think so.
Ariadne, too, half-knowingly stepped on Cesare's sore spot.
“Are you that insecure?”
It was an expression that was difficult to describe, but Cesare felt a hint of sneer between her eyebrows. His face twisted.
"What?"
“Are you really that scared of your half-brother who has just left the continent across the ocean and hasn’t even replied to my letters?”
"Shut up!"
Cesare's face also turned pale.
“Shut up, you don’t know anything!”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know anything!”
Without even knowing what kind of mind she has.
Tears welled up in Ariadne's eyes.
Prince Alfonso is a good man. She knows it too.
He is a hundred times better than the Cesare before her eyes, and than Ariadne herself, who is shaking like a reed.
She was so carried away by the sweet temptation, by Cesare's beauty, by her own greed, by the fragments of the past that she almost let go of Alfonso's hand... though there was no way of knowing if he still held it.
You. Annoyingly. Without even knowing my heart.
The words that could not be said rose to the tip of her lips and then fell back down. Instead, sharp, sharp words came out.
“It’s not because of Prince Alfonso’s welcome that I hesitate, it’s because I don’t trust you!”
It was only when she was pushed to the limit that her true feelings came out.
Cesare, was so cold to her in her previous life because he was an incompetent person. Cesare left for the beautiful and proud Isabella.
Cesare had no compassion for the weak. Cesare, who coldly assessed people's worth and put a price tag on them.
“Your breasts are so big and saggy that he thought you were a cow!”
Isabella's voice rang like a bell in her ears. Those words, she will never forget for the rest of her life.
Would Cesare, who evaluated her by breaking her down into ditto units, accept her as his companion if he saw her left hand?
Cesare took Ariadne's cries in the exact opposite way.
He understood that she meant that she couldn't trust his current innocence because of his splendid past.
“If you make one mistake, it’s over forever?”
He gave up all his debaucherous lifestyle. He stopped drinking, with friends, and card clubs.
Compared to the past, Cesare's life was like that of a monk.
And in each and every one of those empty daily lives, Ariadne was present.
“It all happened before we got engaged. Did I ever glance at another girl when I was with you?”
He took a step forward in anger. All his efforts had been in vain.
“The past is already the past! I don’t even remember the time when I called my real dog, a sheep, panting and running when I called it, kneeling when I told it to, and rolling when I told it to roll over!”
He pounded his chest in frustration.
“What more do you want from me here? What more do I have to do for you to believe me? Should I run to the Holy See and buy an indulgence?!”
Ariadne reacted sharply to Cesare's threatening words.
“First of all, lower your voice!”
But his anger did not subside.
“You shouted first!”
Now she was starting to get really scared. Ariadne took a step back.
She looked up at Cesare and said, half accusingly, half appealingly.
“If you say you love me, why are you being so forceful with me?”
“Love?! Ha!”
But the words seemed to have pressed Cesare's buttons. He snorted loudly.
“Honey, that was a good thing you said!”
He glared at Ariadne with eyes filled with a mixture of hurt, anger, and resentment as he muttered.
“So, what does the noble Countess de Mare think of this lowly man?”
A fire flashed in his eyes.
“Have you never once told this foolish tribe that you love them, even risking your life to save them?”
The wounds he suffered were clearly expressed in the tone of his speech, which was both dramatic and poignant.
“I think I told you a hundred times a day, every time I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ah, if I had told you less than that, it was not my intention as a lowly person. It was just that the cold wind was blowing so hard that I couldn’t dare tell you that I love you.”
He really, truly whispered to her whenever he had the chance. He said he loved her. He said they should be together.
And it was she who coldly dismissed Cesare's confessions as mere jokes, telling him not to joke every time.
“...Do you love me?”
Cesare's aquamarine eyes pursued Ariadne earnestly.
“Yes? Ariadne.”
His voice trembled.
“How on earth am I going to get you to let me have you?”
Ariadne's face was already soaked with tears. She had been crying for some time.
The moment she says 'I love you', she completely abandons Alfonso.
That was the line she had set in her heart. Ariadne didn't trust Cesare enough to go one step further.
And she was instinctively afraid of any further progress in the relationship.
She remembers Cesare's affection, which after giving her permission to the end, suddenly darkened like the sun setting over the horizon.
A predator that has successfully hunted will lie down on its side for a very short time until its stomach swells, then wander off to find its next prey.
Ariadne left defenseless in her fiancé's house, was like a lunch box to kill time.
As the engagement grew longer, when he felt hungry and had no suitable partner, Cesare would return home, fill his stomach, and then leave again.
She remembers waking up in an empty bedroom with dirty sheets.
The warmth left behind by the person next to her had cooled down, and the cleanup was entirely her responsibility.
Ariadne shook her head, her face wet with tears.
“...I don’t trust you.”
“How on earth can you trust me?”
Cesare, who was frustrated with his life, cried out.
“Should I split open my chest and take out my heart and show it to you?”
He felt around his waist for the hunting knife he always carried, but thanks to Leo III's body search, there was nothing there today.
He picked up the letter-opening knife from the table next to him and held it to his chest.
“If I show you my heart, will you trust me?”
“Stop this useless stuff.”
“I’m like that because I’m so frustrated!”
He stabbed himself in the chest with a blunt letter knife. The blade wasn't sharp at all, but the metal was still metal.
A knife was thrust through Cesare's open shirt, striking his chest more like a club than a blade.
He stabbed himself in the chest again with such force that she could barely see the bruise.
“Whoa!”
Ariadne screamed in surprise.
“Stop it!”
Cesare seemed unwilling to listen to her appeal.
Ariadne tried to open the door, half to bring in someone to stop the situation, half to avoid it.
If someone other than her appeared, they would be able to stop Cesare.
Ariadne was of no use at the moment except to provoke Cesare.
Clank, clank clank.
But in her panic, the doorknob didn't turn properly.
Cesare thought that Ariadne was still trying to leave him at this point. To some extent, he was right.
"Ha!"
It was hopeless. In the end, he was left alone. His mother and father had abandoned him, and he was left alone forever in an empty palace.
“...In the end, you’re just like other women.”
Ariadne turned to face Cesare's low soliloquy.
She was trying to open the door handle behind her back.
He muttered in a blood-curdled voice.
“At first, everyone said they liked me. They said they would stay with me until the end. But when they found out what kind of person I really am, they all ran away.”
He wanted to cry, but strangely not a single tear came out.
“No matter what I do, you’re going to leave me, and I’ll end up alone.”
Clank, clank, creaky.
After repeatedly trying to open the door, the doorknob kept getting stuck in the wrong place, but eventually, by chance, the jaw clicked into place.
The door opened gently, and Ariadne, who had been leaning against the door with her weight back, lost her balance and fell backward when the door opened.
Either way, the escape was successful.
She gritted her teeth and tried to keep herself from screaming, but she couldn't help falling.
Thud!
The luxurious dresses and ornaments, and the sound of human weight hitting the marble floor were loud.
The outer corridor was crowded with the honored guests who had been assigned rooms and people who had gathered to catch their eye.
All the swanky people were gathered there. There was no way they could miss the event where people were butting heads at the ball.
Even more so when the fallen person was Countess de Mare, the fiancée of Count Pisano. People gathered like clouds.
“Oh my, what is this?”
“Countess de Mare...?”
“Why are you dressed like that...?”
Ariadne was lying in the doorway, her face a mess of tears. Her clothes were also a mess.
The partlet had been completely removed, and the corpique was half-open.
Anyone can see that she fell over after getting her steps twisted while trying to escape from the room.
And Cesare's appearance through the open door was also not normal.
His face was pale, the front of his shirt was unbuttoned, and he was holding a knife in his hand as he snarled in anger.
People started to murmur.
'Ah... Shit...'
Ariadne, surrounded by people, now realized what the people were thinking as well as they looked at her appearance and Cesare's.
She bit her lip. She had to leave quickly.
Should I take Cesare back into the room? Or should I just leave the ball?
As she was quickly thinking of a solution, a familiar voice came into her ear.
“Ari! What is happening now!”
Raphael de Baldessar, terrified at the sight of her, was running through the crowd.
“What are you trying to do now?”
But Ariadne, in a panic, had no time to care about his feelings.
“Don’t touch me!”
Cesare took a deep breath as the resentment surged in.
Just now, in that situation, pushing, committing, and gently comforting a sobbing woman and then cutting off contact was easier than eating cold soup.
Cesare gritted his teeth and endured it because he really wanted to do well.
He was worried that she was afraid of him because of his notoriety, so he held back with difficulty.
“What? Don’t touch me?”
Cesare's voice began to gradually rise.
“Yeah! I didn’t touch you! I gave you everything you wanted! What’s wrong with you?”
Ariadne, on the other hand, was terrified.
Her left hand was now covered in bright red spots.
Beyond the red tint, it looked like it had been dipped in fresh blood and then taken out.
When Sancha told her to call a doctor, Ariadne pretended to be calm and said that she did not want it to be known to the outside world, but whenever she could no longer bear it, she would wash her left hand with a dishcloth and soap.
The damaged skin was layered on top of it, and now it was in a horrible state with dead skin cells and pus piled up here and there.
This is a terrible punishment for a woman of marriageable age. It is an irreversible disability that reduces the person to a coarse creature.
...What if Cesare finds out about this?
“Why don’t you listen to people?”
Ariadne shouted back as Cesare raised his voice.
“What did you not do! You did whatever you wanted! I told you not to touch the gloves!”
Cesare eventually exploded.
“If I hadn’t stopped you if you hadn’t bowed down obediently to me like a dog in the yard, do you think you would be standing here in front of me like this?!”
He took a step closer to Ariadne and cried out.
“To be honest, I didn’t hate it. You’ve been lukewarm on the balcony all this time, so why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”
Cesare's face distorted and the words he shouldn't have said came out of his mouth.
“You were having fun, but then you suddenly remembered that brat, Alfonso? Is that why? Are you staying chaste for the sake of the person who left you?”
“What did you say?”
Ariadne's face turned bright red. Cesare's words were a reminder of her mistake.
'Should I have pushed Cesare away for the sake of Alfonso?'
She did not think so, but everyone else, including Cesare himself, seemed to think so.
Ariadne, too, half-knowingly stepped on Cesare's sore spot.
“Are you that insecure?”
It was an expression that was difficult to describe, but Cesare felt a hint of sneer between her eyebrows. His face twisted.
"What?"
“Are you really that scared of your half-brother who has just left the continent across the ocean and hasn’t even replied to my letters?”
"Shut up!"
Cesare's face also turned pale.
“Shut up, you don’t know anything!”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know anything!”
Without even knowing what kind of mind she has.
Tears welled up in Ariadne's eyes.
Prince Alfonso is a good man. She knows it too.
He is a hundred times better than the Cesare before her eyes, and than Ariadne herself, who is shaking like a reed.
She was so carried away by the sweet temptation, by Cesare's beauty, by her own greed, by the fragments of the past that she almost let go of Alfonso's hand... though there was no way of knowing if he still held it.
You. Annoyingly. Without even knowing my heart.
The words that could not be said rose to the tip of her lips and then fell back down. Instead, sharp, sharp words came out.
“It’s not because of Prince Alfonso’s welcome that I hesitate, it’s because I don’t trust you!”
It was only when she was pushed to the limit that her true feelings came out.
Cesare, was so cold to her in her previous life because he was an incompetent person. Cesare left for the beautiful and proud Isabella.
Cesare had no compassion for the weak. Cesare, who coldly assessed people's worth and put a price tag on them.
“Your breasts are so big and saggy that he thought you were a cow!”
Isabella's voice rang like a bell in her ears. Those words, she will never forget for the rest of her life.
Would Cesare, who evaluated her by breaking her down into ditto units, accept her as his companion if he saw her left hand?
Cesare took Ariadne's cries in the exact opposite way.
He understood that she meant that she couldn't trust his current innocence because of his splendid past.
“If you make one mistake, it’s over forever?”
He gave up all his debaucherous lifestyle. He stopped drinking, with friends, and card clubs.
Compared to the past, Cesare's life was like that of a monk.
And in each and every one of those empty daily lives, Ariadne was present.
“It all happened before we got engaged. Did I ever glance at another girl when I was with you?”
He took a step forward in anger. All his efforts had been in vain.
“The past is already the past! I don’t even remember the time when I called my real dog, a sheep, panting and running when I called it, kneeling when I told it to, and rolling when I told it to roll over!”
He pounded his chest in frustration.
“What more do you want from me here? What more do I have to do for you to believe me? Should I run to the Holy See and buy an indulgence?!”
Ariadne reacted sharply to Cesare's threatening words.
“First of all, lower your voice!”
But his anger did not subside.
“You shouted first!”
Now she was starting to get really scared. Ariadne took a step back.
She looked up at Cesare and said, half accusingly, half appealingly.
“If you say you love me, why are you being so forceful with me?”
“Love?! Ha!”
But the words seemed to have pressed Cesare's buttons. He snorted loudly.
“Honey, that was a good thing you said!”
He glared at Ariadne with eyes filled with a mixture of hurt, anger, and resentment as he muttered.
“So, what does the noble Countess de Mare think of this lowly man?”
A fire flashed in his eyes.
“Have you never once told this foolish tribe that you love them, even risking your life to save them?”
The wounds he suffered were clearly expressed in the tone of his speech, which was both dramatic and poignant.
“I think I told you a hundred times a day, every time I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ah, if I had told you less than that, it was not my intention as a lowly person. It was just that the cold wind was blowing so hard that I couldn’t dare tell you that I love you.”
He really, truly whispered to her whenever he had the chance. He said he loved her. He said they should be together.
And it was she who coldly dismissed Cesare's confessions as mere jokes, telling him not to joke every time.
“...Do you love me?”
Cesare's aquamarine eyes pursued Ariadne earnestly.
“Yes? Ariadne.”
His voice trembled.
“How on earth am I going to get you to let me have you?”
Ariadne's face was already soaked with tears. She had been crying for some time.
The moment she says 'I love you', she completely abandons Alfonso.
That was the line she had set in her heart. Ariadne didn't trust Cesare enough to go one step further.
And she was instinctively afraid of any further progress in the relationship.
She remembers Cesare's affection, which after giving her permission to the end, suddenly darkened like the sun setting over the horizon.
A predator that has successfully hunted will lie down on its side for a very short time until its stomach swells, then wander off to find its next prey.
Ariadne left defenseless in her fiancé's house, was like a lunch box to kill time.
As the engagement grew longer, when he felt hungry and had no suitable partner, Cesare would return home, fill his stomach, and then leave again.
She remembers waking up in an empty bedroom with dirty sheets.
The warmth left behind by the person next to her had cooled down, and the cleanup was entirely her responsibility.
Ariadne shook her head, her face wet with tears.
“...I don’t trust you.”
“How on earth can you trust me?”
Cesare, who was frustrated with his life, cried out.
“Should I split open my chest and take out my heart and show it to you?”
He felt around his waist for the hunting knife he always carried, but thanks to Leo III's body search, there was nothing there today.
He picked up the letter-opening knife from the table next to him and held it to his chest.
“If I show you my heart, will you trust me?”
“Stop this useless stuff.”
“I’m like that because I’m so frustrated!”
He stabbed himself in the chest with a blunt letter knife. The blade wasn't sharp at all, but the metal was still metal.
A knife was thrust through Cesare's open shirt, striking his chest more like a club than a blade.
He stabbed himself in the chest again with such force that she could barely see the bruise.
“Whoa!”
Ariadne screamed in surprise.
“Stop it!”
Cesare seemed unwilling to listen to her appeal.
Ariadne tried to open the door, half to bring in someone to stop the situation, half to avoid it.
If someone other than her appeared, they would be able to stop Cesare.
Ariadne was of no use at the moment except to provoke Cesare.
Clank, clank clank.
But in her panic, the doorknob didn't turn properly.
Cesare thought that Ariadne was still trying to leave him at this point. To some extent, he was right.
"Ha!"
It was hopeless. In the end, he was left alone. His mother and father had abandoned him, and he was left alone forever in an empty palace.
“...In the end, you’re just like other women.”
Ariadne turned to face Cesare's low soliloquy.
She was trying to open the door handle behind her back.
He muttered in a blood-curdled voice.
“At first, everyone said they liked me. They said they would stay with me until the end. But when they found out what kind of person I really am, they all ran away.”
He wanted to cry, but strangely not a single tear came out.
“No matter what I do, you’re going to leave me, and I’ll end up alone.”
Clank, clank, creaky.
After repeatedly trying to open the door, the doorknob kept getting stuck in the wrong place, but eventually, by chance, the jaw clicked into place.
The door opened gently, and Ariadne, who had been leaning against the door with her weight back, lost her balance and fell backward when the door opened.
Either way, the escape was successful.
She gritted her teeth and tried to keep herself from screaming, but she couldn't help falling.
Thud!
The luxurious dresses and ornaments, and the sound of human weight hitting the marble floor were loud.
The outer corridor was crowded with the honored guests who had been assigned rooms and people who had gathered to catch their eye.
All the swanky people were gathered there. There was no way they could miss the event where people were butting heads at the ball.
Even more so when the fallen person was Countess de Mare, the fiancée of Count Pisano. People gathered like clouds.
“Oh my, what is this?”
“Countess de Mare...?”
“Why are you dressed like that...?”
Ariadne was lying in the doorway, her face a mess of tears. Her clothes were also a mess.
The partlet had been completely removed, and the corpique was half-open.
Anyone can see that she fell over after getting her steps twisted while trying to escape from the room.
And Cesare's appearance through the open door was also not normal.
His face was pale, the front of his shirt was unbuttoned, and he was holding a knife in his hand as he snarled in anger.
People started to murmur.
'Ah... Shit...'
Ariadne, surrounded by people, now realized what the people were thinking as well as they looked at her appearance and Cesare's.
She bit her lip. She had to leave quickly.
Should I take Cesare back into the room? Or should I just leave the ball?
As she was quickly thinking of a solution, a familiar voice came into her ear.
“Ari! What is happening now!”
Raphael de Baldessar, terrified at the sight of her, was running through the crowd.
Comments
Post a Comment