HSYR 39

Chapter 39

The moment he called her name, Helena opened her eyes as if she had been waiting for it.

Within her eyes, opened wide, he could see her green irises shaking unsteadily.

Helena spoke while gasping for breath.

“I had a nightmare.”

“So it seemed.”

“Haaah….”

Helena exhaled deeply, her chest rising and falling noticeably. As if she didn’t even have the strength to sit up, she let her head fall limply to the side.

Seeing that, Benjamin began to feel strange.

His chest felt tight, and despite knowing he hadn’t done anything wrong, a creeping sense of guilt welled up inside him. It felt frustrating that he should do something, yet there was nothing he could do.

Without a word, he lay down at an angle beside Helena and brushed away the strands of hair clinging to her cold forehead.

Helena looked up at him resentfully and said,

“It’s all your fault.”

“……”

“If I tell you to go away, why are you still here? When I tell you to come, come, you never do.”

Benjamin silently pulled her hand and tucked it beneath his own waist.

With her eyes closed, Helena muttered,

“Yeah. If I fall asleep without tucking my hand somewhere, I always have nightmares like this. I’m really sick of it….”

She continued in a small voice, like a sigh.

“But it’s probably not that strange, right? Everyone has a few strange sides. I’m normal enough….”

Her trembling voice gradually subsided and soon turned into the soft sound of steady breathing.

Benjamin looked at Helena’s sleeping face.

For a very long time.

Some time later.

“Yaaawn.”

Helena, who had slept deeply for the first time in a while, opened her eyes with a smooth, refreshed face.

What greeted her vision was some kind of beautiful sculpture. It felt instantly refreshing.

But it wasn’t a sculpture.

‘Benjamin Ishfern?’

Benjamin was sprawled across the bed in loose clothing, a pillow propped behind his back.

It looked as though he had been lounging on the bed for quite some time; the front of his shirt hung loosely open.

Between the parted lapels, she could see his firm chest and abs bulging like armor.

‘Gasp.’

Helena slowly closed her wide eyes, then reopened them into a squint as she admired Benjamin.

Benjamin looked utterly bored, but the viewer certainly wasn’t.

He had loosely tied up his black curly hair, a look she had never seen before, which made it feel fresh.

Resting on the bridge of his handsome nose was a pair of glasses—also something she’d never seen before.

With the glasses on, Benjamin frowned slightly, as if deeply annoyed and suffering a headache, glaring at the book in his hand.

Judging by the cover, which said something about accounting, it didn’t look like an interesting book.

Perhaps because of that, the pages weren’t turning at all. It seemed less like he was reading and more like he was staring at the book while lost in thought.

Helena let out a satisfied sigh as she gazed up at him.

‘Honestly, that man as a person is awful, but because of that face, I really can’t bring myself to hate him.’

While admiring his taut chest muscles and sculpted abs, Helena realized that her hand was still pinned beneath his magnificent torso.

‘Ah….’

She understood then.

That the reason Benjamin was enduring the bed with that deathly bored expression was because of her.

Her mood began to feel strange.

Perhaps because her condition wasn’t good, she felt something surge up sharply from deep within her chest.

‘No.’

She knew those emotions.

Weak feelings that arise on their own, without any clear reason.

Such feelings make people weak and cloud their judgment. They lead to biased choices and even make people rationalize wrong decisions.

They were frightening enough to make one not even regret things when something went wrong.

Helena had allowed such feelings only toward her family.

No—she had merely left them the slightest opening. In any situation, she always put herself first.

And so, she coolly pulled her hand out from beneath Benjamin’s solid back.

“My hand’s numb.”

Benjamin lowered his glasses and stared straight at her with ruby-red eyes.

Seeing his bespectacled face head-on made her heart drop with a thud, but Helena forced herself to act indifferent as she tidied her messy hair and stood up.

“Were you next to me the whole time while I slept?”

She spoke in an irritated tone.

“I don’t like that.”

Benjamin frowned slightly at her words, then snapped the book shut with a sharp sound.

“I should have just left you to tremble and shake while suffering through your nightmare.”

“A nightmare?”

Helena rubbed her slightly numb hand and raised her eyes.

As her hazy memory returned, she recalled that something like that had happened before she fell asleep.

Embarrassment flushed both her cheeks.

“I wasn’t… trembling or anything.”

Benjamin snorted, then slowly removed his glasses by gripping the lens with his large hand.

It was just the act of taking off glasses, yet it was so seductive that Helena had to blush not only from embarrassment but from something else as well.

“You certainly have some nerve, making things up like that. You were shaking all over and breaking out in cold sweat.”

Whether wearing glasses or taking them off, Benjamin was dangerous.

Normally, she would have been furious to the top of her head at his twisted remarks, but strangely, she wasn’t very angry.

In that odd mood, Helena had to force out an angry tone.

“That’s enough. My head hurts, so stop it.”

She then neatly straightened her disheveled clothes.

Thank goodness she was wearing thick wool pajamas that weren’t provocative at all. If she had been wearing something embarrassing on top of that, she wouldn’t have been able to endure it.

“I slept too much—my head is pounding. Seriously, what time is it now? I had so much to do today….”

Benjamin untangled his long crossed legs and complained.

“This is the result of your own actions. I never imagined there would be this much to do in this castle. Just how much work have you piled up? Did you not consider your own stamina at all?”

“That’s—!”

You lunatic. This is all your fault!

Helena, who was about to shout that, failed.

Because Benjamin had finally straightened up and was undoing his loosely tied hair, running his large hand through it.

He grimaced as if the place where his hair had been tied felt awkward, roughly ruffling it.

He stretched his neck and shoulders lightly, perhaps stiff, and the exposed nape of his neck and deeply hollowed collarbones looked smooth and pale, as if carved from ivory.

“Take this experience as a lesson and learn something called allocation.”

Benjamin tossed out those ridiculous words while turning his back to her and rising from the bed.

It was laughably absurd advice, but it was hard to scoff at when his broad back and slender waist formed such a beautiful inverted triangle.

Helena thought,

‘Why did the gods give that man such a beautiful body instead of the ragged one that would suit his filthy, lazy soul…?’

That afternoon, after waking up fully rested, Helena handled her backlog of work with a much improved condition.

“Madam, I’ll place the brazier here.”

Though there were no heated stones, Jo brought a brazier filled with charcoal and set it by her feet. The warm heat made her tightly tensed body loosen pleasantly.

Wesley brewed milk tea with cinnamon sticks to warm her up and even brought caramel as a treat.

Helena was startled when she saw the caramel on the plate.

“Caramel? We had something like this?”

Wesley smiled with satisfaction.

“Madam, you didn’t know? Sugar is surprisingly common in the south.”

“Really?”

“In Griffia, farther south than Burwood, there are many plantations that grow sugarcane.”

“Hm. Griffia….”

“And there used to be a refinery in Burwood that distilled it into sugar.”

Helena, who had been listening absentmindedly, was so shocked that she nearly dropped the caramel in her hand.

“T-that’s true? I had no idea!”

Wesley let out a troubled sigh.

“That plantation was a business personally managed by the former Count, but it has been completely shut down for several years now. Moreover, the technician he worked hard to bring in, Ms. Merara, was taken away by the lord of Griffia under the pretense of an invitation and has not been returned.”

Helena’s mouth fell open.

In the north, sugar was a luxury. It was rare and expensive.

Furthermore, because sugarcane and sugar beets could not be grown in the northern climate, sugar had to be imported by ship from the south.

Passing through multiple intermediaries added fees at each step, multiplying the price several times over.

Simply put, sugar was no different from a lifeline of money.