Alfonso failed to detect the annoyance in Ariadne's voice.
Today, this hall was perfect in many ways. The 'Room of the Stars' had a very high ceiling, so it felt like being outdoors. The temperature was comfortable and the lighting was soft.
Alfonso could not perceive all these elements separately, but he thought it was a truly beautiful space. Of course, Ariadne was the woman who occupied that space.
With her sleek silhouette and tall stature, the finest silk dress worn over it, her glossy skin, and her beautifully styled hair, she was the epitome of sophistication in both her speech and movement.
She said with a smile, her gaze fixed squarely on his.
“You really have no talent for party planning.”
Alfonso's heart sank. Ariadne took her hand away from Alfonso and drew a long line that divided the entire hall, not just the front part.
He couldn't come to his senses because the warmth had escaped from his arms.
“Because a space this high absorbs sound, the orchestra needs to fill the space from here to there so that the guests can hear the performance.”
He smiled awkwardly.
She was always like this. She pointed out things he couldn't see and opened up horizons he couldn't imagine.
He still remembered the scenery he had seen with her when they were young, sitting on a tree in the backyard of the Queen's palace.
She told him, who had always hidden in the shade of the trees and kept his eyes fixed on the book in his hand, that the wall of the Queen's garden was surprisingly low and he could see people passing by.
From then on, the zelkova tree in the garden of the Queen's palace was reborn as a place for Alfonso to read books as well as observe people.
That's why he fell for her. Being with her opened up another dimension of seeing the same things.
There were many beautiful opposite sexes out there. Nothing could catch his eye.
“But it is true that the protagonist must enter through the central door.”
Ariadne said, turning around. Her upper body was now facing Alfonso's face.
She was simply looking at the central door, but Alfonso thought Ariadne had made eye contact with him. His heart thumped foolishly once more.
No, it could not be said that he was no longer fascinated by beauty. He was truly captivated by her beauty.
At the age of twenty, Ariadne de Mare was dazzlingly beautiful. Her voluptuous waist resembled a willow branch.
Alfonso raised his gaze a little higher and unconsciously turned his head diagonally.
The only way to control the wild gaze like a civilized person was to not look.
There was an irresistible magic to the fully blossomed and mature body.
Alfonso was convinced that any man would rush over and embrace her at any moment. He was just suppressing her with reason and education.
As Alfonso thought about this, he remembered Elko's appearance from earlier. To anyone who saw him, he looked like a man desperately trying to look good to a woman.
Meanwhile, Alfonso could clearly see the direction in which Elko was looking.
He was feeling a bit down. Alfonso wasn't the type of person to vent his frustrations on his subordinates, so he wouldn't take it out on Elko.
So, the feeling of discomfort did not go away.
“It was a good thing I saw the central door.”
Her words suddenly woke him up. A slight smile appeared on Ariadne’s face. She felt complimented.
“...Ari.”
Alphonso instinctively took a step closer to Ariadne. She smelled of myrrh and citrus.
He couldn't stand the thought of another guy trying to covet it. He bent his head down to get a better sense of the scent.
“I hope you are happy.”
It was a confession without context. Half true, half false.
“I want to give you whatever you want.”
This was true. Alfonso would do anything if he could just see her smiling face. That was part of the reason he decided to open the 'Room of the Stars'.
At Alfonso's words, Ariadne looked up at him with a surprised expression.
Her cherry lips parted, and between them, he glimpsed the rabbit teeth he loved.
"Ari."
Without realizing it, he pulled Ariadne closer and tried to kiss her on the lips.
It was an unstoppable urge. There was nothing left in his mind but her lips.
But he ended up kissing the air because Ariadne quickly pulled away and stepped aside.
Love fever turned even the continent's strongest knight into a fool.
“...Alfonso.”
Ariadne took a step back and called his name in a low, seductive voice.
Her expression was provocative. Her large green eyes were clear and focused. Ariadne was the only Countess in the capital.
The boldness of a woman of status was different from that of a lady or a young lady.
Ariadne put her face right under his nose, and he involuntarily took a deep breath.
“What on earth are you thinking?”
But her voice was filled with anger, a suppressed, genuine anger.
He looked at her as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep. Before he could argue, she snapped at him first.
“Let’s do just one, Alfonso de Carlo.”
In fact, Ariadne was furious.
“You told me in the letter that you had a woman you had to take responsibility for, so I shouldn’t come near you. So why do you keep hovering around me?”
Alfonso was momentarily taken aback.
“A letter? What letter?”
“The letter you wrote when you returned to the Etruscan kingdom!”
Alfonso wrote hundreds of letters in Yesak but never wrote to Ariadne on his way back.
“I have never written a letter like that.”
He added hurriedly, fearing that Ariadne might misunderstand.
“No, while I was in Yesak, I wrote several letters. It’s not that I didn’t write any letters, but I never wrote letters with such content. No, and you’ve never written me a single letter, right?”
This further fueled Ariadne's anger.
“Are you lying now?”
It seemed true that there were many errors in the exchange of letters across the ocean.
Sir Manfredi, a knight under Alfonso, also said that he had been broken off from his fiancée because he had not been able to contact her at all.
The fiancée's family thought that Sir Manfredi was dead. But Manfredi was Manfredi, and Alfonso was Alfonso.
“Let’s say we made a hundred concessions and never received a single letter through the Crusade supply lines.”
It was a huge concession. If Sir Manfredi had written letters, how many would he have written? Ariadne had written and sent nearly a hundred letters.
Doesn't it make sense that they were all lost, leaving behind not a single one?
Moreover, Ariadne was distrustful of the Crusaders' supply lines and even sent them a separate letter.
“You must have received the letter I sent through Raphael!”
“A letter through Raphael?”
Alfonso was dumbfounded.
“I didn’t get anything.”
Seriously, he's never received it.
“I swear on heaven.”
But belief in the gods was too little collateral to restore Ariadne's trust in Alfonso.
“So, does that mean Raphael lied to me?”
It was an expression of firm trust. In fact, Ariadne had no tolerance for not trusting Raphael. He was the man who crossed the sea and the desert at her request.
He is a man who takes charge of the education of children at her school without any compensation and produces excellent human resources.
Raphael had never let her down. How could anyone not believe that?
But this stabbed Alfonso in the heart. In front of him, there was another person.
“Who do you believe now?”
Alfonso asked Ariadne.
“Raphael,m or me?”
Ariadne snorted. It was such an easy question.
“You call that a word? Of course, it’s Raphael!”
Alfonso shivered as if he had been doused with cold water. From head to toe, his heart and blood vessels felt frozen.
Ariadne kept shooting at Alfonso.
“I understand that you couldn’t contact me when you were at the Gallico Palace. You were essentially imprisoned then. But you should have contacted me after you left for Yesak!”
Alfonso raised his voice in frustration.
“I did it!”
“Don’t yell at me!”
Ariadne's sharp cry stabbed him. Ariadne became angry again as Alfonso paused for a moment.
“Stop lying! I haven’t heard from you even once. Do you think that if you deny it because it’s embarrassing, everything will be covered up? And you’re telling me to trust you instead of Raphael?”
Alfonso felt his anger rising to the top of his head. He took two steps closer and looked straight into Ariadne's eyes.
“You don’t know me?”
There was anger and resentment in his blue-gray eyes.
Ariadne looked into those blue eyes she loved and spat out the words through clenched teeth, half in anger.
“I thought I knew, but now I really don’t.”
Alfonso could not accept these words of Ariadne. They were words that negated his entire life.
“I have lived my life without ever doing anything shameful to others, especially to you.”
He bit his thick lips.
“Becoming a trustworthy person has been my life goal, and I have lived to become that.”
Even if there was an easy way, if it wasn't the right way, he wouldn't take it.
To be proud in front of Ariadne, he declined the marriage that his father was pushing for and sent his favorite knight to his death.
But in one mistake, Ariadne refuses to trust him.
“Who on earth told you what that made you not trust me like this?”
At those words, Ariadne laughed. It was both a bitter laugh and an expression of sadness.
“There’s a woman, you.”
She thought she wasn't crying, but she couldn't be sure.
“I heard you married the Grand Duchess of Lariesa.”
Alfonso gasped as soon as he heard those words. Even when he was hit by a double-handed sword on the battlefield, the shock was not this great.
“That is...”
He barely muttered.
“How on earth...”
“Raphael told me.”
Ariadne's voice was already locked.
“Now, tell me, Alfonso.”
With a voice that seemed on the verge of tears, she sorted out the paper in front of her and handed it to Alfonso.
It was a problem she really wanted to postpone. But there was no way to avoid it any longer.
“Which name should I believe in? Raphael de Baldessar or Alfonso de Carlo?”
Alfonso had nothing to say even if he had ten mouths. His lips trembled, but he was unable to say anything.
At his silence, tears welled up in Ariadne's cerulean eyes.
“You son of a bitch.”
There was a last hope.
There was this little, ridiculous wish that Alfonso would tell Raphael that he was mistaken, that he had never married, and that he still loved her.
But all her dreams and hopes were shattered by the silence maintained by Alfonso himself.
Ariadne stamped her feet in anger.
“Even if you look at people, they are easy to understand.”
The anger and disappointment that had been piling up were finally coming back to her.
“You want to make a foreign monarch’s daughter your Queen and have me as your government? Is that your plan?”
Alfonso, in the midst of all this, couldn't take his eyes off her movements and thought that he was the most horny, crazy man in the world.
“Or am I just wasting my time? The government is not laughing at me like this, saying, ‘I was going to play with it once or twice and throw it away, but now I have a big dream.’”
“Ari...”
“Don’t call me that, it makes me sick!”
“Ari, listen to me.”
Alfonso took a step closer. He took her hand.
“The situation is a bit complicated, but I really didn’t mean to do that. The letter wasn’t a lie, and I wasn’t playing around with it, that’s not true.”
“What is it that is not true!”
She shook his hand away violently.
“You already made a marriage vow! So you’re no longer just a married man?”
Ariadne glared at him with tearful eyes.
“Letters and such, yes. I can believe everything you say. It’s possible that nearly a hundred of them were lost in the middle! Stop arguing. The past doesn’t matter, right? The present matters! So what’s the present like? My beloved ex-lover, who already has a wife.”
Her words struck Alfonso's heart like an arrow shot by a master of rapid-fire hitting the target.
“Princess Bianca doesn’t even want to associate with Rubina because she’s a government! Rubina is a government, so she can’t even walk around with her head held high in front of you! You hate that woman so much, and yet you’re going to make me the same as her?”
Tears welled up in her green eyes. It wasn't because she didn't want to be a government official.
“Have you ever loved me?”
It was tears flowing from human disappointment in Alfonso.
“Really, I was mistaken.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks, wet her lips, and flowed down her chin. Alfonso couldn't hold it in any longer.
He took a brisk step closer, hugged Ariadne, and kissed her.
Today, this hall was perfect in many ways. The 'Room of the Stars' had a very high ceiling, so it felt like being outdoors. The temperature was comfortable and the lighting was soft.
Alfonso could not perceive all these elements separately, but he thought it was a truly beautiful space. Of course, Ariadne was the woman who occupied that space.
With her sleek silhouette and tall stature, the finest silk dress worn over it, her glossy skin, and her beautifully styled hair, she was the epitome of sophistication in both her speech and movement.
She said with a smile, her gaze fixed squarely on his.
“You really have no talent for party planning.”
Alfonso's heart sank. Ariadne took her hand away from Alfonso and drew a long line that divided the entire hall, not just the front part.
He couldn't come to his senses because the warmth had escaped from his arms.
“Because a space this high absorbs sound, the orchestra needs to fill the space from here to there so that the guests can hear the performance.”
He smiled awkwardly.
She was always like this. She pointed out things he couldn't see and opened up horizons he couldn't imagine.
He still remembered the scenery he had seen with her when they were young, sitting on a tree in the backyard of the Queen's palace.
She told him, who had always hidden in the shade of the trees and kept his eyes fixed on the book in his hand, that the wall of the Queen's garden was surprisingly low and he could see people passing by.
From then on, the zelkova tree in the garden of the Queen's palace was reborn as a place for Alfonso to read books as well as observe people.
That's why he fell for her. Being with her opened up another dimension of seeing the same things.
There were many beautiful opposite sexes out there. Nothing could catch his eye.
“But it is true that the protagonist must enter through the central door.”
Ariadne said, turning around. Her upper body was now facing Alfonso's face.
She was simply looking at the central door, but Alfonso thought Ariadne had made eye contact with him. His heart thumped foolishly once more.
No, it could not be said that he was no longer fascinated by beauty. He was truly captivated by her beauty.
At the age of twenty, Ariadne de Mare was dazzlingly beautiful. Her voluptuous waist resembled a willow branch.
Alfonso raised his gaze a little higher and unconsciously turned his head diagonally.
The only way to control the wild gaze like a civilized person was to not look.
There was an irresistible magic to the fully blossomed and mature body.
Alfonso was convinced that any man would rush over and embrace her at any moment. He was just suppressing her with reason and education.
As Alfonso thought about this, he remembered Elko's appearance from earlier. To anyone who saw him, he looked like a man desperately trying to look good to a woman.
Meanwhile, Alfonso could clearly see the direction in which Elko was looking.
He was feeling a bit down. Alfonso wasn't the type of person to vent his frustrations on his subordinates, so he wouldn't take it out on Elko.
So, the feeling of discomfort did not go away.
“It was a good thing I saw the central door.”
Her words suddenly woke him up. A slight smile appeared on Ariadne’s face. She felt complimented.
“...Ari.”
Alphonso instinctively took a step closer to Ariadne. She smelled of myrrh and citrus.
He couldn't stand the thought of another guy trying to covet it. He bent his head down to get a better sense of the scent.
“I hope you are happy.”
It was a confession without context. Half true, half false.
“I want to give you whatever you want.”
This was true. Alfonso would do anything if he could just see her smiling face. That was part of the reason he decided to open the 'Room of the Stars'.
At Alfonso's words, Ariadne looked up at him with a surprised expression.
Her cherry lips parted, and between them, he glimpsed the rabbit teeth he loved.
"Ari."
Without realizing it, he pulled Ariadne closer and tried to kiss her on the lips.
It was an unstoppable urge. There was nothing left in his mind but her lips.
But he ended up kissing the air because Ariadne quickly pulled away and stepped aside.
Love fever turned even the continent's strongest knight into a fool.
“...Alfonso.”
Ariadne took a step back and called his name in a low, seductive voice.
Her expression was provocative. Her large green eyes were clear and focused. Ariadne was the only Countess in the capital.
The boldness of a woman of status was different from that of a lady or a young lady.
Ariadne put her face right under his nose, and he involuntarily took a deep breath.
“What on earth are you thinking?”
But her voice was filled with anger, a suppressed, genuine anger.
He looked at her as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep. Before he could argue, she snapped at him first.
“Let’s do just one, Alfonso de Carlo.”
In fact, Ariadne was furious.
“You told me in the letter that you had a woman you had to take responsibility for, so I shouldn’t come near you. So why do you keep hovering around me?”
Alfonso was momentarily taken aback.
“A letter? What letter?”
“The letter you wrote when you returned to the Etruscan kingdom!”
Alfonso wrote hundreds of letters in Yesak but never wrote to Ariadne on his way back.
“I have never written a letter like that.”
He added hurriedly, fearing that Ariadne might misunderstand.
“No, while I was in Yesak, I wrote several letters. It’s not that I didn’t write any letters, but I never wrote letters with such content. No, and you’ve never written me a single letter, right?”
This further fueled Ariadne's anger.
“Are you lying now?”
It seemed true that there were many errors in the exchange of letters across the ocean.
Sir Manfredi, a knight under Alfonso, also said that he had been broken off from his fiancée because he had not been able to contact her at all.
The fiancée's family thought that Sir Manfredi was dead. But Manfredi was Manfredi, and Alfonso was Alfonso.
“Let’s say we made a hundred concessions and never received a single letter through the Crusade supply lines.”
It was a huge concession. If Sir Manfredi had written letters, how many would he have written? Ariadne had written and sent nearly a hundred letters.
Doesn't it make sense that they were all lost, leaving behind not a single one?
Moreover, Ariadne was distrustful of the Crusaders' supply lines and even sent them a separate letter.
“You must have received the letter I sent through Raphael!”
“A letter through Raphael?”
Alfonso was dumbfounded.
“I didn’t get anything.”
Seriously, he's never received it.
“I swear on heaven.”
But belief in the gods was too little collateral to restore Ariadne's trust in Alfonso.
“So, does that mean Raphael lied to me?”
It was an expression of firm trust. In fact, Ariadne had no tolerance for not trusting Raphael. He was the man who crossed the sea and the desert at her request.
He is a man who takes charge of the education of children at her school without any compensation and produces excellent human resources.
Raphael had never let her down. How could anyone not believe that?
But this stabbed Alfonso in the heart. In front of him, there was another person.
“Who do you believe now?”
Alfonso asked Ariadne.
“Raphael,m or me?”
Ariadne snorted. It was such an easy question.
“You call that a word? Of course, it’s Raphael!”
Alfonso shivered as if he had been doused with cold water. From head to toe, his heart and blood vessels felt frozen.
Ariadne kept shooting at Alfonso.
“I understand that you couldn’t contact me when you were at the Gallico Palace. You were essentially imprisoned then. But you should have contacted me after you left for Yesak!”
Alfonso raised his voice in frustration.
“I did it!”
“Don’t yell at me!”
Ariadne's sharp cry stabbed him. Ariadne became angry again as Alfonso paused for a moment.
“Stop lying! I haven’t heard from you even once. Do you think that if you deny it because it’s embarrassing, everything will be covered up? And you’re telling me to trust you instead of Raphael?”
Alfonso felt his anger rising to the top of his head. He took two steps closer and looked straight into Ariadne's eyes.
“You don’t know me?”
There was anger and resentment in his blue-gray eyes.
Ariadne looked into those blue eyes she loved and spat out the words through clenched teeth, half in anger.
“I thought I knew, but now I really don’t.”
Alfonso could not accept these words of Ariadne. They were words that negated his entire life.
“I have lived my life without ever doing anything shameful to others, especially to you.”
He bit his thick lips.
“Becoming a trustworthy person has been my life goal, and I have lived to become that.”
Even if there was an easy way, if it wasn't the right way, he wouldn't take it.
To be proud in front of Ariadne, he declined the marriage that his father was pushing for and sent his favorite knight to his death.
But in one mistake, Ariadne refuses to trust him.
“Who on earth told you what that made you not trust me like this?”
At those words, Ariadne laughed. It was both a bitter laugh and an expression of sadness.
“There’s a woman, you.”
She thought she wasn't crying, but she couldn't be sure.
“I heard you married the Grand Duchess of Lariesa.”
Alfonso gasped as soon as he heard those words. Even when he was hit by a double-handed sword on the battlefield, the shock was not this great.
“That is...”
He barely muttered.
“How on earth...”
“Raphael told me.”
Ariadne's voice was already locked.
“Now, tell me, Alfonso.”
With a voice that seemed on the verge of tears, she sorted out the paper in front of her and handed it to Alfonso.
It was a problem she really wanted to postpone. But there was no way to avoid it any longer.
“Which name should I believe in? Raphael de Baldessar or Alfonso de Carlo?”
Alfonso had nothing to say even if he had ten mouths. His lips trembled, but he was unable to say anything.
At his silence, tears welled up in Ariadne's cerulean eyes.
“You son of a bitch.”
There was a last hope.
There was this little, ridiculous wish that Alfonso would tell Raphael that he was mistaken, that he had never married, and that he still loved her.
But all her dreams and hopes were shattered by the silence maintained by Alfonso himself.
Ariadne stamped her feet in anger.
“Even if you look at people, they are easy to understand.”
The anger and disappointment that had been piling up were finally coming back to her.
“You want to make a foreign monarch’s daughter your Queen and have me as your government? Is that your plan?”
Alfonso, in the midst of all this, couldn't take his eyes off her movements and thought that he was the most horny, crazy man in the world.
“Or am I just wasting my time? The government is not laughing at me like this, saying, ‘I was going to play with it once or twice and throw it away, but now I have a big dream.’”
“Ari...”
“Don’t call me that, it makes me sick!”
“Ari, listen to me.”
Alfonso took a step closer. He took her hand.
“The situation is a bit complicated, but I really didn’t mean to do that. The letter wasn’t a lie, and I wasn’t playing around with it, that’s not true.”
“What is it that is not true!”
She shook his hand away violently.
“You already made a marriage vow! So you’re no longer just a married man?”
Ariadne glared at him with tearful eyes.
“Letters and such, yes. I can believe everything you say. It’s possible that nearly a hundred of them were lost in the middle! Stop arguing. The past doesn’t matter, right? The present matters! So what’s the present like? My beloved ex-lover, who already has a wife.”
Her words struck Alfonso's heart like an arrow shot by a master of rapid-fire hitting the target.
“Princess Bianca doesn’t even want to associate with Rubina because she’s a government! Rubina is a government, so she can’t even walk around with her head held high in front of you! You hate that woman so much, and yet you’re going to make me the same as her?”
Tears welled up in her green eyes. It wasn't because she didn't want to be a government official.
“Have you ever loved me?”
It was tears flowing from human disappointment in Alfonso.
“Really, I was mistaken.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks, wet her lips, and flowed down her chin. Alfonso couldn't hold it in any longer.
He took a brisk step closer, hugged Ariadne, and kissed her.
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