Chapter 33

The meaning behind his words was almost brazen in its clarity. For reasons she couldn’t quite name, Adeline didn’t push him away. Instead, she simply gazed up at him, her eyes clear and searching.

After a brief, weighted silence, she finally spoke.

“Millein, then—”

“Oh my, who do we have here?”

A sharp, unfamiliar voice cut abruptly through the moment. The voice belonged to a young woman who wore her short, dirty-blonde hair in bold waves. She was no stranger to either Millein or Adeline.

Her name was Sophia Barrett.

With a subtle smile, Sophia snapped her fan shut with a sharp click and approached Adeline.

“Well, well, the princess of Froude Academy, together with the notorious flirt?”

Her words were laced with open challenge.

︵‿୨ ₊‧꒰ა ཐི༏ཋྀ ໒꒱ ˚₊ ୧‿︵

As Millein pressed his lips to Adeline’s left ring finger,

‘Just as I thought, he’s obsessed with the idea of marriage.’

What might have seemed a moment of pure romance to anyone else only filled Adeline’s mind with cool cynicism. Not that she was particularly displeased.

If anything, it was proof that everything was proceeding exactly according to plan.

Millein might claim that keeping a lover was a virtue, but did he realize those very words betrayed his own unease? Every creature, after all, tends to boast of what it lacks most. If he truly felt nothing for Jack, he never would have spoken of him at all. The fact that he did only proved how closely he was watching Jack.

Perhaps it was only natural.

Millein had proposed to her, and for a moment…

‘…It had almost seemed sincere.’

Adeline recalled the day Millein had asked for her hand.

—Millein… are you serious? You’re the eldest son of House Belov. What about your family?
—My younger brother will inherit the title. Don’t worry about it.

He had truly worn the look of a man untroubled by such things, as if he cared nothing for Belov Marquisate that would surely have been his, desiring only to marry Adeline.

—I want to marry you. I always have, since we were kids. There’s no one else for me but you…

How much of that had been sincere?

In the end, in her previous life, Millein had never inherited the title of Marquis Belov.

Contrary to what everyone had expected that Millein would naturally inherit the marquisate, it was his younger brother, Huberg, who ultimately received the title.

And that outcome wasn’t even distant.

‘It was barely five months from now that Huberg would inherit the Belov Marquisate.’

To claim the title, however, imperial approval must be secured at least six months in advance. In other words, while it had not yet been publicly announced, Huberg’s succession was already decided. And, as it happened, the timing aligned perfectly with Adeline’s graduation.

‘It was the very day Millein had proposed to me.’

This led to one possible conclusion, which was that Millein had given up his claim to the title for the sake of asking for her hand.

It was at this point that Adeline understood why he had orchestrated the downfall of House Zeller.

‘When I refused his proposal, he destroyed House Zeller to claim the title for himself.’

In the end, it all came back to marriage. His decision to bring down her family had its roots in that refusal. Perhaps it would be fair to say that Adeline’s rejection was the very spark that set everything in motion. And that was precisely what she longed to know.

‘If all Millein had ever wanted was the marquisate, there would have been no need for him to propose to me.’

It was almost an accepted truth that the title of Marquis Belov would one day be his, so why would he set it aside simply to ask for her hand?

In the end, there were only two possibilities.

Either Millein was too ambitious to be satisfied with the marquisate alone.

The other was quite simple.

‘He truly wished to marry me.’