Creepy little brat. Tsk. Celia clicked her tongue.
She didn’t understand it.
What on earth was so great about a woman like that?
For three years, she was the one who’d served as his personal maid—bring him his meals, bring him his laundry, clean up after this and that.
And yet Jayden had gone and given his heart away completely to a pharmacist who’d rolled in only a few days ago.
It had happened again just now.
Knock, knock.
The moment she knocked, Jayden’s voice came from inside.
“Is that Viola?”
It had been such a glad, bright voice that she’d doubted her own ears the moment she heard it. She’d wondered whether that was really the same cheeky little brat as always.
But the instant he opened the door and saw it was her, Jayden’s expression went cold in a heartbeat.
“…Oh.”
“Young Master, I’ve brought your meal.”
“Leave it there and get out.”
Just thinking about it made her blood boil all over again. How could anyone be so rude to his future aunt? Celia fanned herself roughly to cool off.
That pharmacist woman really is no amateur.
Seeing how she’d managed to win over even prickly Jayden, she clearly had some underhanded scheme.
The scheme of winning a child over to her side and using that as a stepping stone to seduce the Duke.
It was obvious, since Celia had been trying to do the same thing.
Maybe because she’s a mother, she’s damned good at buttering up a child, at least.
But it was laughable. As if the position of Duchess could be won with something like that?
That woman was a commoner and an unwed mother, and she was a count’s daughter, raised like a treasure.
How dare she covet my place?
Hadn’t she, as the future Duchess of Asheln, gone to warn the woman personally?
But like the stupid commoner she was, she clearly hadn’t understood a word.
And she was cheeky, too, without the faintest idea of her place.
“The future Duchess of Asheln is watching you very closely, so mind how you behave.”
“That doesn’t make sense…”
In that moment, she remembered what Viola had said.
She was no ordinary woman, clearly—she’d scraped at Celia’s nerves with those innocent eyes of hers.
“Insolent commoner…”
Celia ground her teeth.
At first she had meant to pay no attention to someone like Viola. She might be strutting around calling herself Jayden’s physician, but she’d leave the residence someday anyway.
All the renowned doctors before her failed.
As if a mere commoner pharmacist could succeed.
It was obvious she’d be exposed as a quack and thrown out within a few days.
But by now, something kept nagging at a corner of her mind.
Jayden’s attitude, as different from how he treated her as the palm from the back of the hand.
“Haa! That creepy brat is the problem, I swear.”
In the end, unable to contain her anger, Celia had spent the last two days digging hard into Viola’s past.
Surely it would be nothing to dig up a weakness or two on an unwed mother who’d been dumped by her man.
But the maids and servants all said the same thing, as if they’d agreed on it beforehand: they didn’t know anything.
Not a single thing to show for it. But far from being in a bad mood, Celia was, if anything, triumphant.
She’s desperately hiding it, then.
She clearly had some enormous secret.
“If she had nothing to hide, would it make sense that no one knows what kind of man the child’s father is, or where she used to live? She must have been rolling around with some back-alley thug.”
Ha. And someone like that dares to set her sights on our Duke.
At some point, Celia had come to accept her own guess as fact.
The maids, and Jayden, and everyone else worshipped that woman as if she were some sort of saintess. She had to find out that woman’s dirty true colors somehow.
After leaving Jayden’s room, Celia was stalking irritably down the corridor when something caught her eye. At the far end of the corridor, she saw familiar faces.
Marie and Becky. The maids who’d talked back so impudently in front of the laundry the other day.
Between the two of them, a pink-haired little girl was giggling.
They look exactly alike.
Anyone could see she was that woman’s daughter.
All the better. That child would know something about her father.
Celia went straight over to them.
“Hey, you.”
“…Lady Celia?”
Spotting her, Becky recoiled and tried to step in front of the child.
But Celia was faster. She shoved Becky’s shoulder irritably.
“Would you move? You’re in the way.”
Thud. Becky fell down.
“Uu?”
Melody scowled and looked up at Celia.
Jayden, and now this one too.
Why do children these days have such impertinent eyes?
Her pride thoroughly wounded, Celia looked down at the child with a sneer.
“Hey. Where did your daddy go?”
“Uu!”
“I asked you where your daddy went.”
“P-please stop, Lady Celia.”
Marie stepped forward as if to protect Melody, but Celia ignored her.
Ha. The mother and the daughter are just as irritating as each other.
“What? Why can’t you talk? Don’t you have a mouth?”
“…Miss Melody, don’t listen!”
Becky, who had fallen, hurriedly covered the child’s ears, but Celia said what she’d meant to say anyway.
“Tsk, tsk. A mother who’s an unwed woman with a child in tow, and a daughter who’s a simpleton. Blood will tell, I suppose. Birds of a feather…”
It was then.
“Lady Dorn.”
At the cold voice behind her, Celia started and turned around.
Conrad was standing there with an icy face, though she had no idea when he’d appeared. Behind his glasses, his eyes gleamed with an unusual sharpness.
“Miss Melody is a valued guest under His Grace’s patronage. She is not someone you may talk down to like that, Lady Dorn.”
A tone that clearly drew a line. But Celia played innocent and feigned ignorance.
“…Talk down to her? What do you mean? I was only worried because the child can’t speak.”
At the shameless answer, Conrad smiled coldly with only the corners of his mouth, as if he had no intention of being fooled.
“You’d do well to watch your tongue. And…”
He took a step closer and added quietly:
“I’ve been receiving reports that you keep digging into Miss Viola’s background.”
“I’m digging because there’s something worth digging up! Sir Conrad, you don’t know how cunning that woman—”
But Conrad cut her off.
“It seems you don’t quite understand what’s being said to you.”
“Wh-what?”
“As I understand it, Count Dorn went to a great deal of trouble to secure your position as a lady’s maid.”
There was a smile on Conrad’s face, but the look in his eyes was chilling.
“It would be a shame to let your father’s efforts go to waste, wouldn’t it?”
“…!”
So he’ll dismiss me depending on how I treat that woman? Does he know how much I’ve put up with, looking after that creepy Dragonblood brat all this time?
At the blatant threat, Celia’s face flushed red and white by turns.
Me? Over a stray pebble that just rolled in?
While Celia trembled with indignation and rage, Conrad turned on his heel pointedly and swept Melody up into his arms.
“Miss Melody, you must have been frightened. Shall we go together?”
“Uu!”
Melody snorted angrily and swung her fists at Celia.
Conrad rocked the child gently, as if he found her adorable, and left.
“There now, let’s go have a tasty snack.”
Marie and Becky pretended otherwise, but they looked secretly delighted; they sniffed and trotted along after him.
Left standing there alone, Celia let out a disbelieving laugh.
A crescent moon hung high in the sky.
Under the soft moonlight, Cain walked alone through the garden.
The cool night air. But Cain’s thoughts were in a tangle.
Because of the report he’d received from Conrad an hour earlier.
An Analysis of the Mechanisms and Principles of Pharmacological Reactions Acting Specifically Within the Dragonblood Body
The old book Viola said she had found in the library of the Devereux marquis’s house.
According to Conrad, astonishingly, it was a book that had originally been kept in the ducal residence and then lost. A full three hundred years ago.
Strange.
It might have happened long ago, but it was not something to take lightly.
Information about the Dragonblood was handled with great sensitivity. It could become a weakness for Asheln in itself.
So much so that every record related to the Dragonblood was kept in the residence’s secret library. A place that couldn’t even be opened unless Dragonblood ran in your veins.
And yet there was no way of knowing how a book that had been kept safely there had ended up, out of nowhere, in the library of the Devereux marquisate.
What’s more, it couldn’t have been stolen.
No one but those of Asheln blood could even take that book out.
He was walking along, lost in thought, when—
In the distance, he saw a figure pottering busily around the garden.
A woman with curly pink hair.
Before he knew it, the corners of Cain’s mouth curled up.
Since when were squirrels nocturnal?
