For the Lady's Wise Regression - Chapter 3

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 3
She hadn’t spoken the rest aloud, but now I understood what would have followed.
‘That I don’t seem to love you.’
Vanessa nodded slowly.
“I understand.”
“…So a girl who understands I oppose this marriage stays out all night?”
“I told you. Going out showed me it was nothing but hardship.”
Father looked as though a single day constituted real suffering, but Vanessa had been away for over fifteen years before returning.
She’d already drowned in regret—wondering if things might have been different had she spoken with him more.
When she could have undone it all by opening her heart while the person who might have listened was still alive, why had she pushed forward with a marriage he opposed?
The moment the wedding ended, she’d been confined to a newlywed home far from the capital, far from the Sharoze estate itself—and out of cowardice, she’d never found the courage to return to him.
‘I married him, so why do you keep calling him “that man”? He didn’t deserve such treatment from you!’
She remembered how fiercely she’d quarreled with her father afterward, when he spoke ill of Calleil.
‘I don’t know who gave me this chance…’
But she could not squander it. She would not repeat the mistakes of her former life.
The Leonard Marquis House—those who’d crippled her and stripped the Duchy of everything.
This time, they would not gain a single thread of what they desired.
Yet even that was a mercy almost too great for them.
What difference would it make if she merely kept what she’d lost, rather than watching it taken away again?
No. This time, she would take everything they possessed.
And she knew precisely how the Leonard Marquis House had built its wealth and power—she’d watched it all unfold before her eyes.
So destroying it would be difficult, perhaps, but not impossible.
‘Devil or angel matters little. Calleil Leonard—if only I can sever our cursed bond with these hands.’
Only then would returning through time be worth the cost.
Vanessa’s smile deepened as she turned to her father, and she bowed low.
“Since you came to find me, I should at least show my face.”
***
Calleil Leonard.
The eldest son of the Leonard Marquis House, and in her former life, her husband.
‘Calleil, what do you love most about me?’
She remembered it as a day before the wedding. It had been a fashionable question among the nobility in those days.
Some answered beauty, others kindness. Some spoke of hands, others of feet.
She’d committed each proud answer to memory, waiting for his reply.
‘Sharoze.’
Calleil Leonard had answered without hesitation. Without doubt.
‘I love that you are Sharoze.’
Back then, foolish as she was, Vanessa had believed he meant not her eyes or beauty or figure or slender ankles or graceful fingers, but herself alone.
What he truly loved was that she was ‘Sharoze.’
She learned the truth only much later: he had never loved Vanessa at all—only the House of Sharoze.
He’d sought her out deliberately, the Empire’s only daughter of a ducal house, to seize power for himself.
And she’d been too stupid to see it until her final breath.
Fortunately, she’d been given another chance, and now it was time to repay the debt.
‘That he pursued my house means, in essence, that he rejected it.’
Calleil Leonard.
What expression will you wear when you realize you will never have Sharoze, and must live instead as the Young Marquis?
Perhaps your mother will be pleased.
She grasps so fiercely at the title of Marchioness that even with succession within reach, you’re still called the Young Marquis—more fiercely than she’d cling to you.
A woman who never tires of spending money would find a wealthy commoner’s daughter far easier to control than a noblewoman of higher rank, no matter how rich.
When she demanded you take a business partner now that you’d gained your title, and brazenly placed that woman at your side—
‘Mother, with Vanessa present, I fear I might inadvertently violate Imperial Law without realizing it.’
He’d played the obedient son who couldn’t defy her, watching carefully for her reaction—yet he’d clearly been pleased.
Whether he still was, she didn’t know.
‘Am I to hear that my husband walks about town arm-in-arm with another woman? With all the enterprises and mines you took from the Sharoze Duchy, how can you do this? If you love that woman so dearly, then divorce—!’
It had been their first anniversary.
The Sharoze Duchy’s wealth was squandered beyond counting through failed ventures. And that was only the beginning—the Knight Order founded under the Sharoze name was busy tarnishing its reputation day after day.
Unable to bear it any longer, she’d spoken out when she saw Calleil grown close with the Merchant’s Daughter.
Before she could finish, the sound of heels striking the floor echoed from beyond the door—as though something were about to shatter.
Crack!
A thunderous rupture tore through the air before she could even identify who’d arrived.
‘How dare you speak to a husband like heaven itself? You know what marriage means under Imperial Law, yet you dare mention divorce? You’ve ruined my son’s prospects, and you think you can live at peace?’
Vanessa stared blankly at the torrent of abuse raining down on her, clutching her burning cheek.
‘So a little money means he can say whatever he wants to his wife. Calleil! Is this the disrespect I endure whenever I’m not around? What’s so extraordinary about a wife supporting her husband’s business that he’d speak to me like this now……!’
‘Please, Mother. Vanessa must have misspoken. Vanessa, let’s forget I heard anything about divorce. I apologize.’
That day, something inside Vanessa snapped with an audible break.
That was when regret began. Regret over marrying him.
But regret changed nothing. Everything was already damaged beyond repair.
‘It’s your birthday. I’m sorry we spent our first anniversary like this. I told my mother—the Marchioness—not to visit the mansion anymore. It wasn’t that I had different feelings for that woman. You know how it was—she was someone Father introduced for business, and it felt wrong to refuse, so I only had dinner with her a few times.’
Half a year later, even Calleil’s belated apology did nothing to stir her heart.
‘You said you wanted to see the Pideulo resort. The roses should be blooming soon—why don’t we go on a date after all this time? I’d like it if you wore those High Heels I bought you.’
Foolishly, his words had softened her resolve a little.
Because he still remembered a place she’d mentioned only in passing early in their marriage.
Because some stupid part of her thought perhaps he had loved her from the beginning, and still did.
Perhaps that was why it happened.
‘Calleil! You can’t just leave without telling me where you’re going. Ardelian has been waiting for two hours now……!’
Or perhaps it was a mistake—stepping onto the staircase in those high heels Calleil had given her while dismissing her mother-in-law’s tiresome complaints about the Merchant’s Daughter on this bright day.
‘You……! How dare you leave while I’m still speaking, you disrespectful girl!’
A push.
It was almost an accident.
But if the hand that brushed against her was Calleil’s, perhaps it was intentional.
He had always struggled to defy his mother,
so his body turned abruptly as he climbed the stairs ahead. And in that violent pivot, Vanessa fell.
But neither of them caught her as she plummeted.
Not Calleil. Not the Marchioness Leonard.
Calleil merely watched the hand she reached out to him. He did not grasp it.
‘Vanessa―!’
Crack! The sound of her leg breaking was terrible.
Only then did Calleil cry out.
But not a word while she was falling.
‘Call the physician at once, hurry!’
From that day forward, she became a crippled woman.
‘I never sent you to marry into that place.’
Her reunion with her father—whom she had been estranged from since her marriage to Calleil Leonard—came in those words.
He had not reached out when their daughter handed the family fortune to a worthless man, nor when her successive business ventures crumbled, earning her ridicule from the Sharoze Duchy House—which mocked her for being incapable rather than unwilling to conduct business, unlike her father who never touched it at all. He had sent no word through all of it.
But on that day, for the first time, her father wept upon seeing her crippled legs.
Yet Vanessa could not bring herself to return to him.
She had married against his wishes, stripped the family fortune away, and now—broken and useless—how could she show her face? How could she go back with empty hands?
So she remained at the Marquis House, hoping to recover at least some portion of what had been lost, though she despaired of reclaiming everything.
Even that small hope was undone in a single conversation—falsely accused of adultery with Ian Ruscliffe, divorced without a single coin to her name, stripped of her title. If she had known then, if only she had known——
‘I would have done something. Anything. I would have died trying.’

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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