That Bastard Is the Real Problem
Was it the baby’s instinct? Or did he remember the comforting scent of the milk he’d been drinking? The moment Lucian spotted me, his crying stopped so abruptly it felt like a lie. His tiny hands, which had been flailing in the air, reached out toward me with desperate longing.
“Abuu……! Mama……! Mmmma……!”
“……Ah.”
‘Oh shit, I’m so fucked. Like, right-before-getting-railed-by-the-Grand-Duke levels of fucked?’
I instinctively knew that Lucian’s single babbling word would become the fuse that blew Carla’s sanity to pieces. A baby who rejected the embrace of the mother who had given birth to him, desperately stretching his arms toward me, his wet nurse.
‘Ah, our madam’s yandere meltdown is about to go nuclear……’
I sucked in a sharp breath and tensed up. Should I rush forward and take the child? Or should I step back and watch Carla’s reaction? I couldn’t decide.
Carla’s head turned toward me with a slow, creaking motion. Her eyes were bloodshot from tears and sweat, and her lips were trembling violently. The look in them went beyond hatred for the mistress who had stolen her husband. It was now stained with the despair of seeing a succubus who had even stolen the love of her only bloodline—her son.
“Lucian…….”
Carla clung to the child, sobbing.
“Mommy’s right here…… Why are you looking somewhere else? Mommy will give you milk…… Please, look at Mommy, look at Mommy……!”
With frantic, desperate hands, she tried to turn the baby’s face toward her, hugging him tightly. Just then—
“Waaah! Ow! Waaah!”
Suddenly Lucian burst into tears again and began to thrash. The small but sharp jeweled brooch on the shoulder of Carla’s dress had scratched the back of the struggling baby’s delicate hand.
“……!”
A thin red scratch stood out vividly on the white back of the baby’s hand. Feeling the pain, Lucian completely rejected Carla’s arms this time. He looked straight at me and wailed as if the world were ending.
“Uwaaaang! Mama! Uwaaaang!”
“Ah, no…… Lucian, Mommy didn’t mean to…… Baby, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry……!”
The realization that her own frantic touch had hurt the child made her pupils lose focus and shake wildly. Only then did I snap out of it and step forward.
“M-Madam! Please hand the young master to me……!”
But before I could reach them, a bizarre sound leaked from Carla’s mouth.
“Heh…… hehehe.”
She was laughing. While Lucian was crying. At the fact that Lucian had cried while looking at me, Carla let out a strange laugh mixed with a fleeting moment of twisted satisfaction.
He cried. He cried for that detestable Sena.
That thought. That tiny wish had come true, and she had laughed. But that laughter quickly turned into hollow, empty chuckles.
“Haha…… haaa……”
She had hurt the child she had suffered to give birth to. As a mother, she couldn’t hold him properly, couldn’t feed him, and instead had made him cry by injuring him. Carla stared at her own trembling hands.
“What…… have I done……”
As if she had given up completely, all strength drained from Carla’s body. She no longer held onto Lucian. Mary, who had been standing nearby, quickly approached and carefully took the crying baby from her.
With her arms now empty, Carla hugged her own hollow limbs and bit down hard on her lip. Suppressed sobs leaked through lips bitten so fiercely they drew blood.
“Hic……”
Without looking at me or at Lucian in Mary’s arms, Carla staggered like a ghost toward the nursery door. Seeing my madam’s utterly broken back made my own insides feel like they were burning up.
‘Ha…… This is seriously driving me insane.’
I sighed and stepped aside to let Carla leave the nursery. A wounded person needs time alone. Right now, no matter what comfort anyone offered, it would sound like poison in a mother’s ears.
The moment tear-streaked Carla was about to cross the threshold in silence—
Thud.
A heavy footstep shook the floor, and a massive shadow fell across the open doorway.
“……!”
Standing at the entrance to the nursery was that damnable Northern Grand Duke, Lumican—the same bastard who had just been kicked out of the bathroom. Thankfully, this time he was properly dressed. In one hand, he held a small, unidentified transparent glass vial.
‘Ugh, it’s the Grand Duke asshole again! Can’t he read the fucking room and just disappear?!’
I clutched the back of my neck, screaming internally. Of all times, right when everyone’s mental state was shattered, this husband of hers shows up to rub salt in the wound!
Lumican sharply blocked Carla’s path as she tried to slip past. His eyes were fixed solely on Carla—not on the crying baby Lucian, not on the frozen me.
“You.”
Lumican growled in a low voice.
“Did you eat this?”
He thrust the empty glass vial right in front of Carla’s eyes. Her shoulders jerked slightly. The moment her pupils landed on the vial, they began to tremble uncontrollably. Carla couldn’t answer. Her lips, drained of color, quivered as she tried to turn her head and avoid the Grand Duke’s gaze.
“Move……! I’m right now……!”
The instant Carla tried to push past him—
Grab—!
“Where do you think you’re running off to!”
In front of all the servants inside the nursery, Lumican violently seized the wrist of his own lawful wife, Carla.
“Kyaaak!”
“Answer me! I asked if you ate this!!”
Lumican’s rage had crossed every line. He forcibly restrained her, then grabbed the front of her lavish dress with one hand.
“W-What are you—!”
Riiip—!!! Schrrrip!!
The tough fabric of the dress and the corset strings were mercilessly torn apart. Lumican had ripped open the front of Carla’s bodice.
“Crazy……!”
Tearing a noblewoman’s clothes? No—his own wife’s? And doing it so violently in front of all the lower servants? But Lumican’s madness didn’t end there. Before she could even defend herself, his large, powerful hand clamped down hard on her exposed breast.
Squeeze!
“It hurts!! Lumican, stop it!! Let go!!”
Carla screamed and struggled in pain and humiliation. But when he pressed down firmly on her breast—
Splurt— Gush!
“……!!”
From between the torn fabric, breast milk the same color as human flesh began to spray out. Even for a woman suffering from flat-chest syndrome, this was by no means a normal amount. For someone as busty as me, it should only come out in tiny squirt amounts to be normal. This wasn’t a trickle—it was shooting out like an open faucet, soaking Lumican’s huge hand completely and dripping heavily onto the floor.
“Huk…… Hic……”
The bizarre and horrifying sight made everyone forget to breathe. Even setting aside the question of how milk could suddenly come from a woman whose breasts had been dry, everyone’s eyes were lost at the Grand Duke’s outrageous behavior.
The answer to the abnormal amount of breast milk came from Lumican’s own mouth. He grabbed the struggling Carla’s chin, forced her mouth open, and shoved the milk-soaked fingers from his hand inside.
“Mmph! Uuup!”
“Taste it for yourself.”
Lumican’s eyes were filled with contempt. But did that bastard even realize? The servants in the nursery were looking at him—the one constantly crossing every line—with far more contempt than at Carla, whom he was berating.
“Doesn’t it taste foul? Bitter and disgusting, doesn’t it?”
“Ugh……!”
Carla gagged at the taste of her own breast milk forced into her mouth. As she coughed and retched with tears streaming down her face, Lumican mercilessly roared at her.
“This drug that forcibly twists the body’s energy channels to produce milk has deadly side effects that eat away at a child’s nerves! That’s why its production was banned throughout the empire! It’s trash that only circulates in the back alleys!!”
Lumican hurled the empty glass vial onto the floor, shattering it into pieces.
Crash—!
“And yet…… because of your pathetic greed, because of your worthless inferiority complex! You still swallowed this poison and tried to feed it to Lucian?!”
The Grand Duke’s lion-like roar shook the entire nursery. The aura he emitted was so overwhelming that Mary, the assistant wet nurse, collapsed to the floor while holding the baby and trembled violently.
Lumican’s rebuke seemed perfectly justified. From the outside, he looked like a resolute father punishing a foolish mother who had resorted to a forbidden drug for the sake of her child and the heir’s safety.
At least on the surface.
But.
“…….”
Carla slowly lifted her head. She no longer held back. Without even bothering to cover her torn bodice, in that miserable state with white milk dripping down, she raised her arm.
And then—
SLAP—!!!!
A sound even louder than the one from when she had slapped me last night split through the nursery. Carla’s slender palm struck the Northern Grand Duke Lumican’s cheek with ferocious force. Though his head didn’t turn, a vivid red handprint bloomed clearly on his pale cheek.
Carla’s voice flowed out as if she were vomiting blood.
“Greed……? Inferiority complex……?”
Tears fell from her eyes in heavy drops.
“You…… who have never once been a husband to me because you’re obsessed with that vulgar wet nurse bitch! Do you even have the right to speak to me about greed……?”
She had never been loved as a wife. Her very qualifications as a mother had been denied. And the man who was the root of it all had dismissed her misery—having to swallow a forbidden drug for her child’s sake—as mere “pathetic greed.”
The humiliation made her transparent tears seem to gradually turn red.
“Uwaaaang!! Uwaaaang!!”
Startled by his parents’ fierce fight and raised voices, baby Lucian began shrieking again in Mary’s arms. The sound of his crying struck her ears, and Carla’s shoulders, which had been rigid with humiliation, flinched hard.
Lucian’s cries acted like a spell that broke the hypnosis gripping Carla. Only then did she seem to come to her senses. She looked down at her torn dress and her milk-soaked breasts.
“Ah……”
Carla hastily covered her exposed chest with both hands.
“I’m sorry……”
Then, with her head bowed low, she muttered in a wretched voice.
“I’m sorry…… Lucian…… Mommy’s sorry, Mommy’s so sorry……”
“Uwaaaang!! Mama! Uwaaaang!!”
Leaving behind an apology so small it was drowned out by Lucian’s cries, Carla fled the nursery as if escaping. Clutching the torn edges of her dress, she disappeared down the corridor. Her figure looked like a ghost that had lost its light and shattered into pieces.
And in the nursery, Lumican stood motionless with the mark of the slap still on his cheek. Mary remained collapsed on the floor, trembling as she tried to soothe the crying child.
I watched this entire scene.
‘Yeah, this is a mad scene. A complete fucking spectacle. The way everything’s spiraling into insanity is exactly what you’d call a spectacle.’
Standing there witnessing it all, I slowly clenched my fist. Hard enough for my nails to dig into my palm and draw blood.
I was furious. So furious that I felt ashamed of my past self who, while reading the original story, had cursed that yandere mother-in-law with ‘That crazy bitch is so fucking annoying.’
Of course, Carla’s actions—taking a forbidden drug and trying to force-feed the baby—were undeniably wrong. The method was twisted and dangerous.
But.
Why had Carla been driven to such an extreme choice in the first place? Why did the wet nurse Sena, whose womb had been pierced, have to write tearful confessions every night? Why did every woman in this household have to go insane, fall ill, and break apart?
My gaze bored into the back of the Northern Grand Duke Lumican’s head as he casually brushed his slapped cheek as if nothing had happened.
‘No matter how I look at it……’
That bastard is the problem.
Cheating without a shred of shame. Instead of comforting his wounded wife, he berates her and humiliates her. A disgusting hypocrite who obsesses over his first love, a maid, yet refuses to take any responsibility.
‘That Grand Duke fucker is the biggest problem of all.’
Even if it wasn’t for my own freedom, I would make sure to break that arrogant bastard’s nose at least once.