Dreaming of the Perfect Resignation
After a long and winding journey, the moment I finally reached a spot where I could see my bedroom window, all the tension drained out of me at once.
I quickly slipped into my room, eager to soak my body in warm water. The instant I quietly climbed through the window…
“My lady! Just where have you been and what have you been doing to come back looking like that?!”
What greeted me was the terrifying roar of my nanny, Marta, who was said to be even scarier than a plague-ridden tiger.
I hastily drew the curtains and gave her an awkward grin. It seemed fooling Marta was too much to ask after all.
Aaah. My soft, fluffy room after a whole month away!
I practically flew toward the bed and shook the dirt off my boots onto the Persian carpet. Marta’s face turned every shade of red and purple.
“Shh, Marta! Keep your voice down. If my eldest brother catches me, I’m really done for.”
“You should have been done for already! Just look at your hair. And what is that scratch on your cheek?
You said you were recuperating at the southern villa for a month—what on earth were you rolling around in to end up like this?!”
Marta exclaimed in horror and roughly yanked off my cloak.
Fooling the eyes of the woman who had raised me since I was a baby was, as expected, nearly impossible.
In truth, I was a sloth who loved lying in bed and doing breathing exercises, a glutton who devoured mountains of meat dishes, a contrarian who only ever did what she was told not to, and a walking disaster named Elinor Lucerne.
And every member of the ducal household knew that the elegant, haughty platinum-blonde princess the outside world saw and my real self were separated by about a million light years.
“Ugh, I don’t even know. I’ll explain everything later, so just get me something to eat first! For a whole month I only chewed on breadcrumbs and grass. My stomach is practically glued to my spine.
Please, a meat pie loaded with filling, Nanny!”
“Honestly…! Not until you wash up!”
While Marta clicked her tongue and headed for the bathroom, a black shadow suddenly sprang out from behind the thick velvet canopy of the bed.
“You made it back alive, our little one?”
The moment that sly voice hit my eardrums, the string of my sanity snapped clean in two.
The mastermind who had shoved me into that hellish inferno, the disgrace of the Lucerne family! It was my despicable second brother, Cassian.
“You…! You crazy bastard! Die! Just drop dead already!!”
Without hesitation, I yanked off my boot and hurled it at Cassian’s face with a full swing.
He lightly tilted his head to dodge, then hopped onto the bed and asked with an infuriating smirk.
“What? I just asked you to run a tiny little errand and you disappear for a whole month? Even the artifact’s location tracker wouldn’t work.
Do you have any idea how much I was sweating bullets? I couldn’t sleep a wink every night worrying that our eldest brother would find out!”
“Sweating bullets? I came face-to-face with the chariot of hell itself!”
I stuffed my mouth full of the cookies Marta had left out and spat out my resentment. Every bite felt like I was chewing on Cassian’s skull.
Who could have guessed that when I sneaked into the knight commander’s office, the mad emperor would be lounging on the sofa there of all places!
The playful glint vanished from Cassian’s face like an ebbing tide.
“Mad… No way. His Majesty was there?”
“Yes! That damn emperor kept me by his side for an entire month, calling me his ‘interesting little toy’ and tormenting me! Brother, you’d better prepare yourself.
Hand over a full year’s worth of guild profits. That’s my compensation for emotional damages!”
I also made sure to tell him that I had used my memory-erasing ability to shake off the knights after the artifact’s lifespan ran out.
Cassian’s face turned as white as a sheet of paper.
He seemed to finally grasp the gravity of the situation and roughly clutched at his own hair.
“Hey, you… have you completely lost your mind?! Why would you turn a simple task into such a huge mess?! If something went wrong, you should have contacted me!
Didn’t our eldest brother tell you never to use that power anywhere and everywhere?
And didn’t I tell you there’s exactly one person in this world that your ability doesn’t work on?!”
“What…?”
“You didn’t use it in front of His Majesty, did you? Please tell me you didn’t!”
The moment Cassian shot up from his seat in horror—
Creak—
The heavy door opened with a deep, grinding sound, and the temperature in the room plummeted in an instant.
The two of us sucked in a sharp breath like rabbits before a lion and whipped our heads around.
There stood my eldest brother Carlyle, the true ruler of the Lucerne family and its current head.
His icy gaze turned toward Cassian, radiating killing intent so fierce it looked like he might sever his neck at any second.
“Cassian. What kind of trouble have you caused this time to create such a commotion?”
At Carlyle’s low voice, Cassian staggered backward with a creak.
If that ruthless brother of mine learned the truth, I could bet a hundred percent that today would be Cassian’s funeral.
While I pondered this, Carlyle’s face, which had been glaring at me, melted away like a lie.
“Our youngest, Elinor. Yes. You wanted to go to the southern villa, so you rested as much as you wished and came back?”
The murderous aura that had been directed at Cassian a moment ago vanished without a trace. Carlyle spoke to me in his usual gentle tone.
But his sharp eyes meticulously scanned my disheveled hair and ruined appearance.
“However… it seems the journey I sent you on to rest for a month wasn’t very comfortable. Your face looks terribly pale.
Almost as if you were up to something behind my back without me knowing.”
Unlike Cassian, Carlyle had no blind spots, so from this point on I had to tell the story very, very carefully.
The Cassian standing beside me had already gone deathly pale.
I spun my brain at full speed. I obviously couldn’t say I had been captured by the emperor.
“Haa… Brother, please don’t even get me started. That endless debutante preparation!!”
I let out the deepest sigh in the world and flopped down onto the bed.
“As you know, the etiquette teachers who are overflowing with affection for the Lucerne family kept saying that the daughter of Lucerne must be perfect, nagging me so relentlessly I couldn’t even breathe. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I ran off to the southern villa for a while.
You’ve been so busy, eldest brother, that you probably didn’t notice, but thanks to our relatively free second brother Cassian handling the aftermath so well, I was finally able to catch my breath and return!”
It was the perfect frame-up—laying a bit of guilt on Cassian while also making him my accomplice.
I felt a surge of pride in myself and vowed to charge him interest on top of it.
Taking advantage of the moment Carlyle’s eyebrow twitched, I drove the nail in deeper.
“By the way, Brother, the outer walls of the southern border were incredibly noisy because of monsters. If the south is in that state, I was so worried about the north that I couldn’t sleep at night.
Aren’t you staying in your office these days because of that very issue?”
The instant I repositioned myself from ‘the sibling who caused an accident’ to ‘the thoughtful sibling worried about the family,’ Carlyle’s terrifying aura completely disappeared.
My victory.
“…The north is stable. Still, I didn’t expect you to concern yourself with such things.”
Carlyle gave his youngest an enigmatic look at the unexpected words of worry, then finally withdrew his gaze. He grabbed Cassian by the scruff of his neck like a piece of luggage and dragged him out of the room so that Elinor could rest a little more comfortably.
In the 0.5 seconds just before the door closed!
I rubbed my thumb and index finger together at the vanishing Cassian—scritch!—and sent a very clear signal that read ‘Prompt payment required.’
He shot back a murderous glare that seemed to scream, ‘What nonsense! You’re the one who should be preparing for your funeral,’ with tears of blood practically welling in his eyes.
But I responded with the most pitiful and elegant smile in the world, gently waving my slender fingers.
Take care~ My dear one year’s worth of guild profits that will soon be deposited into my account.
Finally the door closed, and silence descended upon the room.
The taut string of tension snapped, and only then did every muscle in my body start screaming.
I collapsed right where I was, sprawling out like a starfish on the fluffy carpet right beside the bed.
“Haa… Now I finally feel alive.”
When I thought about it, I felt like I might cry.
Because of that damn man, I hadn’t just suffered unnecessarily—I had gone through something far worse, and only now had I barely managed to escape that Black Imperial Palace.
My mother and father had always worn worried expressions while they were alive, repeatedly warning me that my memory-erasing ability must never be revealed to others.
But what could I do? I had nearly died.
Come to think of it, I missed my parents.
If they were still alive, Mother would surely have held me tight.
I closed my eyes tightly, wanting to feel my mother’s embrace even for a moment.
After staying like that for a while, I tried to organize my thoughts.
It seemed I had overcome the immediate major crisis. My eldest brother’s suspicions and my second brother’s silence had been handled perfectly.
But Cassian’s ominous, unfinished warning kept ringing in my ears.
‘There’s exactly one person in this world that your memory-erasing doesn’t work on?’
“Aish, no way. It can’t be.”
I shook my head vigorously.
When I had been sprinting down the imperial palace corridor earlier, I definitely hadn’t seen even a shadow of that mad emperor, nor had I caught the refreshing forest scent that was unique to him.
Honestly, no matter how crazy he was, there was no way the busiest man in the empire would chase after a single servant all the way to that forest.
Besides, my ability was perfect. At least until now, it had never once failed.
“Right. From now on, it’s goodbye to the imperial palace forever.”
I glared at the ornate chandelier hanging from the ceiling and made a firm vow.
Starting tomorrow, I would return to being the elegant, noble, and endlessly lazy princess of Lucerne.
There was absolutely no chance I would ever get entangled with that mad red-eyed emperor again.
…Or so I believed.
Never dreaming that my so-called perfect resignation party was actually the opening act of stepping into his hunting grounds.
“The little rat that ran away… was the flower of Lucerne.”
In the dark office of the imperial palace, Kaelus Esterion quietly gazed out the window toward the northern sky where the Lucerne ducal mansion lay. He murmured in a low voice.
Among the knights whose memories had been carved out, he alone stood perfectly fine. He stroked the single platinum-blonde hair and the artifact fragment left in his palm, wearing a smile so beautiful it sent shivers down the spine.
The Mad Emperor’s smile deepened as he looked at the evidence in his hand.
