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Chapter 12
Duke Clark took the necklace from the hand of the young lady of Marquis Nayett.
When their fingers brushed for a moment, the color in the marquis’s daughter’s cheeks deepened.
Thank goodness. He recognized the necklace!
Even the headmistress could not defy a duke’s command.
Fortunately, she stopped where she was, and Duke Clark closed the distance between them.
He looked back and forth between the necklace and me, then finally lowered his gaze to me.
“Who… are you?”
└ Didn’t Rose dye her hair red right now? He probably mistook her for his own daughter lol
└ Whoa, that’s genius.
“…What?”
That wasn’t… part of the plan.
* * *
“Where did you say you came from?”
“From Jelton…”
“No, I mean—how old are you exactly right now?”
“I’m five—no, that’s not it.”
“Five years old, you say. Considering the time when she disappeared… the age roughly matches. Then what about that necklace?”
“I only received it briefly, and um—”
“Do you have any memories? Any memories of your mother?”
“No, but that’s not what I’m saying!”
In a guest annex near the garden—
A young man who appeared to be the duke’s aide had seated me and was firing questions nonstop.
And beyond the wall…
“Isn’t it possible she approached the duke with ulterior motives?”
“No, absolutely not!”
It sounded like the headmistress was being interrogated.
Judging by how he mistook me for his blood relative, it seems the duke didn’t know he had a son.
A misunderstanding piling on top of another misunderstanding, creating an entirely new one.
“That necklace isn’t mine…”
“Of course. It must have belonged to the young lady’s mother.”
This man gave me no room to explain—whatever I said, he twisted it to suit his own interpretation.
Duke Clark sat across from me, examining the necklace with a complicated expression. Since it could be a fake, it made sense for the head of the family to confirm it personally.
“Now, take a deep breath and slowly try to recall your memories.”
└ Is this hypnosis or what?
At this rate, if I kept hearing this, I might actually get brainwashed into believing I was the duke’s daughter!
“I know where the duke’s son is!”
“Yes. So you are the duke’s daughter—wait, what?”
The aide finally fell silent, and Duke Clark, who had been focused on the necklace, finally looked at me.
“Did that man tell you to say that?”
“That man?”
“The man who came with you.”
The guards standing behind the duke tightened their grips on their swords, as if they were about to storm into the next room and deal with the headmistress.
Our headmistress may be petty, but she hasn’t done anything worth dying over!
It was only natural not to believe a five-year-old child who suddenly claimed she could find his son. But the headmistress truly had nothing to do with this.
“The owner of that necklace… passed away.”
Duke Clark’s expression hardened coldly.
Perhaps because I’d spent so long living while reading Count Torto’s moods, my body reacted instinctively to the change in an adult’s expression.
I felt like I might start hiccupping, but I still had to say what needed to be said.
“She had a son… a boy with red hair and gray eyes, just like yours, Duke.”
“Duke…”
Even the aide, who had been piling up misunderstandings, finally seemed to grasp my meaning and turned toward the duke.
“The headmistress doesn’t know anything. A friend asked me to come in his place.”
“A friend?”
“The duke’s son.”
The duke fell into thought for a moment, then looked back at me.
“Where did you say you came from?”
“From Jelton…”
“And your parents—what do they do?”
“Um… I don’t have any.”
“I see. So a mere orphan claims to be friends with my son.”
└ What’s with him? The duke’s giving off bad vibes.
└ Instant disqualification as a father-in-law.
└ Sir, that’s really not okay.
Until just now, Duke Clark had only shown interest because of the possibility that I might be his blood relative. Now, his expression was completely indifferent.
The look he gave me was the same one someone might give a pitiful commoner child passing by on the street.
Before my regression, I had never seen him from the perspective of a commoner, so I hadn’t expected this kind of attitude.
With only the information I knew, it became difficult to judge Duke Clark properly.
“Yes. This necklace is indeed mine. I gave it to someone precious. And now you’re saying she died—and that there’s a son who resembles me?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“And how am I supposed to believe you? You could have stolen the necklace from somewhere. And now that I look closer, that red hair isn’t even your natural color. It looks like a clumsy attempt to imitate my own.”
Up close, the uneven dye apparently stood out.
He had completely decided I was a fraud.
“…I didn’t come here expecting anything in return from you, Duke.”
I couldn’t exactly say I hadn’t come partly to escape Count Torto.
Given the atmosphere, if I asked for anything now, I’d be branded a con artist for sure.
Since things had come to this, even if I got no reward, I decided at least to achieve my true goal—finding Leon a stable family.
“The owner of the necklace was attacked. She hid her son beforehand.”
When I told him that his lover had been murdered by unknown assailants, his expression shifted from indifferent to visibly angry.
“…If you’re deceiving me, I will not let you go unpunished.”
“It’s true. Please believe me. Your son wants to find those people and make them pay.”
“So then—where is my son?”
He didn’t seem to fully believe me yet, but it looked like he was willing to take the risk of being deceived once.
I let out a quiet sigh of relief.
“Before I tell you…”
The duke’s gaze sharpened with suspicion when I didn’t immediately get to the point.
But there was something I had to confirm first.
“I need to know you’re someone I can trust too. Will you protect your son?”
The duke hadn’t known he had a son at all. The only person he’d been emotionally attached to was his lover.
Seeing how abruptly his attitude had changed, I grew anxious about how he might treat Leon.
“Ha, hahahaha!”
The duke threw his head back and laughed loudly, then fixed me with a sharp, glittering gaze.
“A child who knows how to provoke. How impudent.”
His eyes held far more interest than before, but I still couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“If what you say is true, I swear I will tear apart everyone involved in her death, hang their corpses for display, and create the safest world possible for that child.”
└ Sir, watch your language in front of a kid.
└ He’s unhinged. This place is doomed.
└ You’re tanking your own son’s stock all by yourself, you know?
The comment fairies were furious, saying they didn’t like Duke Clark at all.
Still, this really is the best option for Leon.
I knew that before my regression, Duke Clark had kept his lover’s necklace with him for a very long time.
A duke seeking revenge for his beloved, and a boy seeking justice for his murdered mother.
With the same goal, those two were bound to meet eventually.
* * *
“I have high expectations for you.”
The Emperor of Develoa lounged lazily against his throne.
Standing before him was the true star of today’s title-granting ceremony—Duke Myers Valent.
“I had to endure days and nights of old men screaming just to raise you to a dukedom. I nearly started another war inside the imperial palace.”
“Is that so.”
“That attitude right there—that’s exactly why.”
The emperor let out a dry chuckle at Valent’s detached, almost indifferent demeanor.
Before the war ended, one of the few remaining ducal houses of the Develoa Empire had been wiped out for conspiring with a foreign nation.
While the nobles cowered in fear, terrified of being dragged down with them, the man who filled the vacant seat was the emperor’s right hand—commander of the Imperial Knights, a man who had never shown the slightest interest in noble society.
There was fierce backlash, but the emperor needed a high-ranking noble who would firmly support the imperial family.
“I have high expectations—but also many worries. People tremble just looking at you.”
A hero of war, and the shadow of war itself.
To have earned so many merits in battle also meant that countless lives had fallen by his hand, crushed beneath his feet.
Whenever people saw the duke, they would be reminded not only of the empire’s victory, but of the long, brutal war itself.
“So I thought long and hard about how to make you more… duke-like.”
Anyone else would have been deeply honored, but Duke Valent simply listened in silence, standing straight.
He was someone who could hold his ground better than anyone—but when it came to reading the room and acting accordingly, he was worse than a child.
The emperor knew all too well that he had to spoon-feed him like this.
“First of all, try relaxing that murderous expression of yours.”
