Revelations Beneath the Surface
Splash. Plop. For now, I submerged my body in the luxurious bathtub of the Grand Duke’s residence. The muscles that had stayed tense through the long night melted into a heavy, pleasant exhaustion. White steam curled above the water, and the soft spread of lavender scent eased—just a little—the stress of existing in this alien world. More than anything, it let me forget the tangled thoughts that had swarmed when I discovered the scars while undressing. Underwater, the marks were mercifully hard to see.
“Haa……”
I scooped warm water with both hands and wiped it down my face. The sensation still felt foreign. Leaning into that strangeness, I looked down once more at Sena’s naked body shimmering beneath the surface. I had been shocked even with the hasty glance in the mirror earlier, but touching the wounds directly, feeling them with my own fingertips, made their brutality far more obscene.
The sharp slash that ran from my right shoulder all the way to the collarbone. The crater-like scar on my left flank where something had torn out a literal chunk of flesh. The web of fine scratches crawling along my spine like spider silk.
What the hell… This body is a goddamn human weapon.
I murmured the words while carefully stroking each scar with a wet towel. In the original novel these had been nothing but light flavor text—Sena was simply the male lead’s swordsmanship instructor and nanny. At first I thought it was just a cheap way to underline that the male lead had two mothers. But standing inside the body, confronting the scars in the flesh, the sheer weight of that setting slammed into me like a hammer.
She was an orphan. On top of that, she possessed martial strength that completely eclipsed normal humans. The previous Grand Duke of the North must have noticed her abnormal talent and simply taken her.
The North was a brutal land crawling with monsters and nomadic tribes. Maybe only the previous Grand Duke knew where Sena truly came from. He had raised this gifted orphan girl as his son Lumikan’s personal maid and, in practice, his living shield.
The countless small scars etched into my skin were the glorious wounds earned while protecting him from assassination attempts and mortal danger as he grew into the ruler of the North—cuts and blows taken in his place.
“Yeah, that much makes sense. Childhood friend and guard knight is classic rom-fan bait. Nothing new.”
Anyway, it was my body now. The past wounds didn’t matter. I brushed the thought aside and moved the towel lower, toward my stomach and thighs.
Then my hand stopped dead below my navel.
“……”
I set the towel aside and traced the area with bare fingers. It was the enormous scar I had seen in the mirror. The depth of it, felt through touch rather than sight, was infinitely more horrifying. The skin was grotesquely puckered and gouged; when I pressed even lightly—
“Ugh……”
A sharp, electric pain reverberated from deep inside, echoing like a scream trapped in bone.
“Haa……”
I twisted at the waist and felt my back. Just as I expected. A scar of similar size sat directly opposite the one on my abdomen, perfectly aligned.
Complete penetration, front to back. Whatever it was—spear or greatsword—it went straight through the organs.
I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer vitality of this body that had survived such a wound. Even modern medicine would have called it unsurvivable. Perhaps recovery magic was the only reason this flesh still lived.
As I sat lost in thought, stroking the scar, the body suddenly convulsed.
“Huh?”
Completely against my will, Sena’s body reacted to my fingers on the old puncture wound with violent rejection. It was like waking from a nightmare. Every hair on my body stood upright. My eyes stung as tears threatened to spill.
And in that instant, one question cut through the haze.
Wait a second.
I stared blankly down at my own chest. Even after being ruthlessly suckled by baby Lucian since dawn, my breasts still throbbed faintly.
A nanny’s job is to breastfeed, right? But milk… doesn’t that only come after pregnancy and birth?
As a modern person I at least possessed that much biological knowledge. Of course, in a fantasy world they might have forced lactation with magic potions. But would the Gestein Grand Ducal family really go through that much trouble just for Sena? They could simply hire another wet nurse.
Which left only one answer. Sena had gone through pregnancy herself.
I spoke directly to the other presence still lingering inside this body—Sena’s own ego.
“Hey. Why the hell do you have milk?”
My neck locked up. The body began shaking its head violently left and right on its own.
“Goddamn it! Stop shaking! You’re going to snap my neck! I’m getting dizzy!”
It was as if a PTSD switch had been flipped. The body thrashed in fierce denial of reality. The room spun. My brain felt like it was sloshing inside my skull. I hastily grabbed my own cheeks with both hands to hold my head still.
“Stay still! Answer me. Were you stabbed? While you were pregnant…?”
“……”
The violent resistance suddenly died. Like a puppet with cut strings, the head slowly drooped forward in a nod.
“Haa……”
Lucian was one year old now. That meant the period when Sena began lactating would have roughly coincided with his birth. In other words, Sena’s pregnancy had overlapped exactly with the time when the legal wife, Carla, had been pregnant with Lucian.
Yet in the nursery there was only Lucian. The child Sena should have borne was nowhere to be found.
And that horrific scar that had pierced straight through the uterus, rupturing the organs.
The conclusion was obvious.
Miscarriage. Or perhaps deliberate murder by another’s hand.
That insane Grand Duke bastard……
I ground my teeth inside the tub. The man who ruled the North had impregnated both his legal wife and, at the same time, his childhood friend and nanny. Carla had gone mad knowing that the nanny feeding her own heir was her husband’s mistress.
The tear-stained confession Sena had written at the nursery desk rose in my mind.
I hurt my lady every night. I steal her place…… It feels like I’m suffocating under the weight of my own sins.
Up to here it’s the kind of plot you’d see in a morning drama, so I can stomach it…
The real problem was that Sena had been attacked by an unknown assailant, her uterus pierced, and her child ripped away. She had to live on, breastfeeding the child of the man who had taken everything from her. And that same man still visited her bedchamber every night to slake his lust.
“Ha…… This is actually going to drive me insane.”
I let every muscle go slack and rested my head against the rim of the tub.
“If you wanted her that badly, just make her your official mistress. Take responsibility. What kind of twisted logic is it to knock her up and then keep her as a guard knight and nanny? Are you a fucking pervert?”
It must have been the hazy steam. I had thought I was alone, so I let the complaint slip out loud.
That was the mistake.
Bang—!
The bathroom door flew open.
“……What?!”
I shrank back against the far edge of the tub. A massive silhouette stood in the misty doorway. Black hair swept back, deep crimson eyes gleaming. Lumikan von Gestein. The very same bastard I had been cursing with every profanity I knew was standing there completely naked, without a single thread covering him.
“Bath……”
Lumikan stepped slowly inside. Splash. Splash. The sound of bare feet on wet tile rang out like horror-movie sound effects.
“Shall we bathe together, Sena?”
Fuuuuuuck!!
I hastily crossed both arms over my breasts in an X. From the crack of dawn. The Grand Duke had come straight from his morning erection to get his dick oiled, and the sight genuinely made me fear for my life. Even running into a friend at a same-sex bathhouse would be mortifying, yet here was a lunatic who looked at me like a bitch in heat, walking toward me completely naked.
“Your Grace! You mustn’t do this first thing in the morning……!”
I retreated desperately and snapped at him. In Lumikan’s eyes my resistance apparently looked no different from a lovers’ spat.
“I heard you weren’t feeling well. They said you collapsed this morning.”
The Grand Duke sat shamelessly on the edge of the very tub I was soaking in. Above the hot water, his massive thigh muscles and the heavy presence hanging between them were blatantly visible.
My eyes are burning, fuck! Don’t look, eyes, don’t you dare look!
I fixed my gaze desperately on the ceiling and fought down the urge to vomit. Lumikan mistook my reaction for shyness. He reached out a large hand and gently cupped my shoulder.
“I’ll massage you. Your muscles must be terribly knotted.”
Massage? Massaaaaage?
This Grand Duke bastard can’t be older than his mid-twenties, so why the hell does he talk like a sleazy uncle?!
Whether it was romance fantasy, political fantasy, or modern fantasy, the trope was ironclad: the male lead enters the bath under the pretext of washing the heroine, then uses a massage to initiate sex. The original novel had been rated fifteen-plus, so it always danced along that razor’s edge—suggesting but never showing. Even then, because the possessed heroine held the dominant “refreshing daughter-in-law” position, she usually kept control of the bedroom scenes……
But this was the unseen backstage of the story, a past timeline never described in the novel. And the northern Grand Duke bastard standing in front of me right now was nothing but a beast in heat, eyes fixed on one thing only.
“I don’t need it! Leave immediately!”
I violently slapped his hand away and shouted. Lumikan simply withdrew the rejected hand and gave me a languid, disgustingly relaxed smile.
“Don’t be so cold, Sena.”
His crimson eyes slid stickily across the water’s surface right where my scar lay beneath my navel.
“I overheard you earlier. Outside the door.”
“……Pardon?”
“Didn’t you say I should take you as my mistress?”
The smile on Lumikan’s lips deepened. It was the expression of a scholar who had finally received the answer he had waited years to hear.
“Have you finally changed your mind, Sena?”
“……!”
Sena was the one who kept refusing? And more importantly, the usual ‘why isn’t this working’ with this bastard doesn’t apply. They’ve already done it, the son of a bitch.
No matter how obsessive or deformed the attachment, the Grand Duke had loved Sena. He had tried to install her as his official mistress. But Sena herself had rejected the position, claiming she was nothing but a vulgar orphan maid. Despite receiving the Grand Ducal family’s grace, she could not threaten her lady’s place, and had stubbornly drawn the line until the end.
So instead of the safe protection of a mistress, she had insisted on remaining a vulnerable maid who could be attacked at any time. That sliver of loyalty and guilt might have been one of the very things that drove Sena into the nightmare of a penetrating wound.
You stupid bitch. Why didn’t you just close your eyes and seize the mistress position? Why keep your useless conscience and suffer like this?!
Resentment toward the past Sena surged up, but whatever the truth was, what mattered right now was the fact that this insane Grand Duke had misinterpreted my solitary complaint—“just make me your mistress then”—as Sena finally agreeing to become his woman.
“There. You can throw away that pointless resistance now. You’re mine, Sena. You always have been.”
Splash—!
Lumikan finally slid his massive frame into the tub. Water surged violently in the narrow space, rising all the way to my chin. The heat suddenly felt like it was boiling.
I was fucked. Completely and utterly fucked.
At this rate I was going to be helplessly impaled by the northern Grand Duke’s cock.
And it’s huge, you bastard. It’s actually making me feel inadequate.
I was one step away from becoming a total bottom. Should I hand control of the body back? Order Sena to strike the nape of his neck and knock him out?!
My mind spun frantically. But the idea was rejected at once. It was bright daylight, not the middle of the night. Both of us were completely naked. If I knocked the Grand Duke unconscious and dragged him out, every servant in the residence would witness the spectacle of a naked nanny carrying a naked Grand Duke. The resulting scandal would be impossible to contain.
Not to mention it would only make Carla’s already unhinged yandere condition even worse……
I had to talk my way out of this. Somehow. I needed to find a way to deflect or persuade him with words.