VWTI 11

Chapter 11

“Hah, where did you hear that…?”

With a slight scrunch of her nose, Yulan twisted one corner of her mouth roughly upward.

But she wasn’t scared or frightened at all.

She had already sorted out her feelings, and now that things had come to this, she was even filled with the determination to succeed no matter what.

Yevgenia, who was looking him straight in the eye, snorted and asked,
“You’re not going to tell me that his esteemed highness, the prince of our great Artrux Empire, was actually a princess, are you?”

The answer to her provocation soon came in the form of action.

The hand that had been quietly resting on the bed had, before she knew it, moved onto her thigh.

“Ngh…”

The sensation of the large hand gently kneading her thigh made her skin crawl.

Should she call it a genuinely strange feeling?

It was a sensation she found utterly impossible to describe in any language she knew.

It was ticklish, and the parts it touched strangely seemed to grow hot and feverish…

“Hey, stop that…”

“Why? Does it feel bad?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just weird…”

The bold attitude from moments ago had long since vanished.
As she spoke in a voice that had shrunk considerably, a rough “Ha,” of laughter erupted from the head of the bed.

‘Did I… say something funny?’

Her face flushed bright red with shame.
What was she supposed to do, having never experienced a situation like this in her entire life—no, in both her lives?

As she gnawed on her lip, she felt the hand gripping her thigh tighten its grasp.

“Princess.”
“Huh…?”
“…Zhenya.”

It was a nickname she hadn’t heard since she was very young, an age when she didn’t even know what dukes and marquises were.

In this… kind of situation… did it sound incredibly… indecent? Or was it just her being strange?

As she firmly pressed her lips together, Yulan’s hand began to gradually move upward.
The hand touching her through the thin chemise felt even more secretive than if it were touching bare skin.

Her neck instinctively shrank back at the touch of the hand gently rubbing her waist.
Just when she couldn’t bear it any longer and squeezed her eyes shut, praying for all of this to pass quickly,

“Open your eyes, Zhenya.”
“…Ngh.”
“Even if it’s an act without affection, isn’t it proper manners to look into each other’s eyes during a kiss?”

The hesitant Yevgenia slowly opened her eyes.
Her long, trembling red eyelashes revealed just how much courage she had mustered.

Unable to bear the shame, she started to chew on her lower lip again when a cold finger rubbed over it.
“You’ll hurt yourself.”

A low voice and the sensation of something softly brushing over her tender lower lip…
She was so overly conscious of Yulan that even his gaze felt palpable against her skin.

The gaze that had been examining her lips rose and met her eyes directly. In that instant, unable to withstand it any longer, she sharply turned her head away.
“…D-don’t look at me like that.”
“How exactly am I looking at you?”

His question held a faint hint of amusement. She strained her voice to answer.
“You’re… staring right through me.”
“Shall I wear an eyepatch? Is that your preference?”
“You’re… insane…”

Had she perhaps made some colossal mistake?
Even so, how could a prince possibly utter such… vulgar words?
Had the empire truly reached its time of ruin?

“Ah…!”
“Focus, Zhenya.”

Yulan, who had uncannily noticed her distraction, grasped her waist tightly.
Startled, she looked at him. He had somehow closed the distance between them and pressed the tips of their noses together.

They were so close she could feel each other’s breath. Had they been exchanging glances like that for a while?
Something soft touched her feverishly heated lips.

It was the beginning of a long night.

“You should lie down a bit longer. You probably don’t feel well yet.”
“…Don’t you think it’s rather unconscientious for the very person who made me feel unwell to say that?”

Holding her aching lower back, she barely managed to sit up.
The moment her feet touched the floor, the legs she thought were fine trembled like a newborn goat’s.

In her utter panic, she was about to slump down without even bracing herself on the bed. The one who caught her was, unconscientiously, the very person responsible for her state.

“See? You can’t even walk properly.”
“And whose fault is that…?”

The hand that naturally supported her waist and politely escorted her to the sofa was exceedingly courteous.
It was to the point where one wouldn’t think it belonged to the same brute who had just… well, worked her over like a beast… not long ago.

Managing her entire body, which felt heavy and sluggish as if after intense exercise, she half-lay on the sofa.
While rubbing her warm forehead to collect her thoughts, a sudden question made her jerk her head up.

“Nox, you lied, didn’t you?”
“Hm? Me?”
“I may not know much, but you seemed the same way.”

She hadn’t sensed anything particularly strange about the kiss.
After all, it was her first time too, and she was so distracted trying to endure that… squishy… anyway, that peculiar sensation.

But after that, well, what can she say, his movements felt like he was applying theory in practice for the first time.
Touching here and there, observing or checking her reactions…

She became sure during the main event.
Narrowing her eyes, Yevgenia asked while staring intently at Yulan’s back as he poured tea.
“You were a virgin too. Why did you lie?”

For a moment, his broad back seemed to flinch.
But not long after, when he sat down with the tea set, not a single ripple of disturbance could be found on his face.

As she silently watched him with her arms crossed, he poured tea with perfect etiquette and offered her a cup.
“How about having some? Your throat might be sore by tomorrow.”
“……”
“My, what a demanding guest you are.”

Finally raising his hands in surrender at her adamant stance, Yulan shrugged his shoulders and confessed obediently.
“You’re right. So what?”
“Hah…! How shameless. To lie because you had nothing to lose…”
“Now that’s an interesting thing to say.”

Without making a single small sound, Yulan picked up his teacup and crossed his legs.
His words were spoken with an endlessly high-handed attitude and posture.

“If I had said I was a virgin, would you have trusted and given yourself to me?”
“Well…”
“This is more important than that, isn’t it?”

The jet-black eyelashes that had been staring down at the teacup disappeared as if a curtain had risen, revealing the gleaming jade-green eyes beneath.
Under that gaze that seemed to see right through her, her hand instinctively reached for the teacup.

The moment she hastily took a sip,
“You’re not going to say you didn’t enjoy it, are you? You liked it so much you ended up scratching up my back.”
“Cough, cough, cough!”
“Thanks to you, Princess, I found out. That I had talent in this area…”
“S-stop it. I get it, so stop!”

Her face turned crimson red.
It was because the moment when she had clung to his back in her hazy memories came flooding back.
The texture of his smooth skin and firm muscles…

‘Get a hold of yourself, Yevgenia Rose Martyr! If you keep this up, it really will look like I’m infatuated with his body!’

She bit the tip of her tongue secretly inside her mouth, barely managing to regain her composure.
After downing several sips of tea in a row to calm her pounding heart,
she spoke with the most serious expression she could muster.

“…You’re not going to say something like I took your virginity so I should take responsibility, are you?”
“Hah! Who do you take me for?”

His tone, which sounded somewhat displeased, actually made her feel more at ease.
Yulan was handsome, but that fact simply meant he was ‘handsome.’
Once she got rid of Raymond, she was determined to enjoy her life without even looking at XY chromosomes.

“Ah, the name! Check if it’s been erased for me.”
“Ah… Right, the mirror…”
“No, you can just look and tell me. Hurry up.”

With her flushed face, Yevgenia swept the hair scattered near her collarbone to the opposite side and then pushed her shoulder toward Yulan.
With her movement, her gown naturally gaped open.
In that instant, a courteous hand immediately straightened the hem of her gown.

“It’s definitely gone. Though it was just the letter ‘L,’ this should be enough, right?”
“Really? Completely enough! It’s fortunate the previous wound healed well. It would have been annoying if a scar had covered it.”

If it had disappeared so cleanly that a glance was enough to tell, it was the perfect excuse to bring up the myth and request the annulment.
Moreover, she had been so out of it during the pain of the name’s erasure that she could barely remember it—it was truly… unfair, but he had done well—so it could only be seen as a satisfactory transaction.

‘Come to think of it, what happens to my lifespan now?’

In the original work, it was clearly stated that erasing a name painfully shortened one’s lifespan by three years per character.
So what happens when it’s erased through this kind of… moderate… method?

She was curious, but she couldn’t ask openly.
It wouldn’t do any good to reveal that she knew too much.

‘Just because we spent a night together doesn’t mean I can trust that man.’

Yevgenia’s eyes turned cold for a moment.
After looking down at the teacup showing its bottom for a while, she asked as if it were nothing.

“Being able to erase a name without pain is truly amazing, isn’t it? It seems like a method with no drawbacks at all… There aren’t any, are there?”