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Chapter 29
Scarlet, who had done something that aristocratic young lords would never understand, placed down her tools. Then she casually pulled the lever—something that might very well decide her life or death.
At that moment, a loud, rumbling sound filled the warehouse.
“It works.”
Scarlet said it and lifted her head. Even amid the roaring noise filling the warehouse, a tense atmosphere still lingered between the navy and the army.
Scarlet let out a small, almost disbelieving smile.
“It works.”
At her words, Evan was the first to pull his hands out of his pockets and start clapping.
“That’s amazing, Miss Scarlet! You really fixed it!”
The others still looked stunned.
Blight spoke honestly.
“So the Crimson family really is something else… I didn’t think you’d actually be able to fix it.”
At that, Scarlet smiled.
“You didn’t believe me?”
“Honestly? Not at all. So I was seriously and carefully thinking about what we would do if you failed.”
“What do you mean?”
Then Waldo said to Victor with a mocking tone,
“Were you planning to kill us or something?”
At that, Victor let out a short laugh and tossed off his coat. He checked his pockets, but there was no gun.
Evan scolded him lightly.
“How can there be so little trust between us?”
“You only trust what’s trustworthy.”
Even as they argued, the engine continued running. And perhaps because of that, the people who had seemed ready to fight soon stopped and began smiling.
Then someone shouted,
“A technician from the Crimson family is here!”
At that, Scarlet flinched, and others shouted as well.
“A technician!”
“We’re saved!”
The shouts echoed everywhere, and Scarlet, startled, hid behind the only thing she could rely on—the engine.
Seeing that, Victor sighed in disbelief and grabbed her arm, pulling her behind him.
Afterward
To celebrate fixing the engine, the soldiers drank.
Scarlet, whether relieved or not, was so exhausted she was on the verge of collapsing. She had climbed a mountain the day before without sleeping at all, and then worked on the engine all day. She felt as though she had burned through even the last reserves of her strength.
She borrowed Victor’s private bathroom, which was in his bedroom. She considered soaking in the warm water, but worried she might fall asleep and drown, so she washed herself with cold water instead.
“This week is way too exhausting…”
She muttered to herself, finished bathing, and changed into the clothes she had brought.
However, not expecting to meet Victor, she had only brought clothes she didn’t mind throwing away. If she showed him what she was wearing now—especially since he already had plenty to say about her lifestyle—he would definitely criticize her again.
With no other choice, she stepped out of the bathroom. As expected, Victor’s gaze swept over her.
“Are you protesting because I didn’t give you alimony?”
As expected.
She tried to reason that there was nothing to be embarrassed about, but it didn’t work. Heat rose to her cheeks.
“I just brought clothes I planned to throw away. Because of luggage weight.”
“So you wore them until they became like that.”
“…I’d prefer if you called it frugal.”
Victor let out a disbelieving laugh.
Embarrassed, Scarlet pulled her collar tighter.
“Is there any spare room?”
“There isn’t.”
“Then I’ll camp outside. It looks warm enough.”
“Hmm.”
Victor didn’t stop her. Instead, he walked over and personally opened the door, just like the day he accepted the divorce papers—he didn’t stop her twice.
Scarlet carried her sleeping bag and went outside. In the lobby, she spotted an insect and backed away in fear.
“Oh, sorry.”
One of the guards stepped on it and flicked it away.
“W-why is it so big?”
“Well, this is the south!”
The young man smiled brightly.
Scarlet trembled in the lobby.
Another soldier came over.
“You wouldn’t believe the insects that appear here compared to the capital.”
“W-what kind?”
Scarlet had chosen to camp outside because she believed that in an elite military facility, there would be no wild beasts. But at this point, insects felt worse than beasts.
The soldiers, as if waiting for the chance, began bragging.
“I once saw a centipede as thick as my arm—”
“Th-that kind of thing doesn’t exist!”
“It does! I swear! If you don’t believe me, I’ll risk my life to prove it—”
“Enough!”
Scarlet covered her ears, not wanting to hear any more.
Just then, Victor came down and draped an arm around her shoulder.
“Wouldn’t sleeping with your ex-husband be better than that?”
Scarlet rubbed her arms, covered in goosebumps.
“…You’re joking, right?”
“If you’re curious, I can bring them to you.”
At that, Scarlet shook her head vigorously.
In the end, she returned to Victor’s room.
She pointed at the door.
“What about that?”
“Closet.”
“…And that door?”
“Office. You’re not an insider enough to go in there yet.”
Trying to figure out how to sleep as far away from her ex-husband as possible, she looked around—but the sofa was the only option.
She headed toward it, but Victor grabbed her arm.
“You’ve already been stubborn enough. Sleep properly.”
“The sofa—”
“How can I make a lady sleep on a sofa? Haven’t we lived together long enough for you to know better?”
Victor led her to the bed and made her sit down. Fortunately, the bedroom was enormous, so even though Victor was there, it didn’t feel like they were sharing the same space.
Scarlet eventually took off her slippers and sat on the bed.
Through the massive window, the stars poured in.
“…Beautiful.”
Stars that could no longer be seen in the capital had gathered in this valley instead. The sky was so full it seemed impossible for that many stars to exist.
She wondered how she could possibly sleep in the same room as her ex-husband—but sleep came anyway.
She closed her eyes briefly and drifted off.
Victor’s Memory
After reading for a while on the sofa, Victor stood and walked over to her.
He gently took her left hand from under the blanket and examined it. The wound was still there.
“…Self-harm.”
He recalled her words.
It was absurd that she claimed not to remember, and even more absurd was the wound itself. The claim of lost memory and the injury didn’t connect.
And yet, he couldn’t look away from her wrist.
His mother was royal blood, but his father was not. Whenever they visited the royal palace, they treated him as half-blood.
Fearing criticism from the royals, his mother allowed his tutors to punish him so he would never make mistakes. When they returned, his father would hold him and speak as if brainwashing him—that one day, he would place those same royals beneath his feet.
As a child, his body was often covered in marks from the rod. Family, to him, was something sticky and suffocating like a spider’s web.
Scarlet Crimson had fallen in love with him from the very first moment she saw him. All she had was a beautiful face with a slightly provocative charm, yet she seemed desperate to give him everything she had.
She would interrogate him about his entire day, cling to him saying she would initiate intimacy herself, and even after awkward nights, she would still look at him the next morning with a flushed face and whisper shyly:
“I love you.”
“I’m so happy just waking up and seeing you beside me.”
Sometimes she would sit beside him while he drank alone, saying he looked lonely, and drink with him.
Eventually, she got so drunk she could barely walk, and he carried her to bed.
In his arms, she complained:
“I heard you get better at drinking if you practice, so I drank all week—but I didn’t improve at all. This is unfair…”
“Why would you do that?”
She tried to open her unfocused eyes properly and said,
“Because you looked lonely…”
That was probably the first time he smiled after their marriage. It was absurd that she had practiced drinking just to drink with him. Love, he realized then, was not something you take—it’s something you want to give.
She never bothered him. She was simply happy even if he did nothing. So after a while, he thought maybe this marriage could continue like this. She was always happy. He didn’t have to do anything.
But gradually, he began to fear that she might grow tired of him.
And that fear slowly became reality.
For a while, Scarlet remained the same—attending gatherings, smiling when she returned home.
But one day, she stopped saying she was happy.
Then one day, she said she was unhappy.
And eventually, she handed him the divorce papers.
Scarlet thought he had signed them without thinking, but he had his reasons.
His wife had been unhappy. And he did not know how to make the Scarlet Dümfelt who had grown tired of him love him again—or become happy again.
She had been happy doing nothing for him. If she still loved him but her feelings had faded, what could he possibly do?
In the end, even in his own reasoning, divorce was the only solution.
As he had first assumed, he was not suited for marriage. The only miscalculation was that Scarlet Dümfelt said “I love you” too often—and that the idea of her being just one of many beautiful women in the world was wrong. She had been uniquely beautiful to him.
Even when she handed him the divorce papers, she was painfully beautiful. Even when she left with nothing but a single suitcase, as stated in the contract, she was so beautiful it almost drove him insane.
Even after the door closed behind her, he thought divorce was nothing.
He had never truly understood what it meant to become strangers with Scarlet Dümfelt.
Once she was gone, the house turned barren like a desert—and so did his life.
It had to be her fault. Otherwise, she would feel no guilt and never return to him. He needed her guilt.
He stared at her wrist for a moment, then brought medicine and applied it to her wound. She flinched slightly but did not wake.
He bandaged it, then frowned at how messy it looked.
“…I’m terrible at this.”
He had never done something like this before, so the bandage was sloppy. He considered redoing it, but worried she might wake up, so he left it as it was, picked up a book, and leaned back against the bed to continue reading.
