I Became My Ex-Boyfriend’s Concubine - Chapter 41

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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 41

All around was silent.
Hyeon’s gaze shifted to the side. Through Danbi’s parted lips, curled up in sleep, uneven breaths escaped.
The place where the poison had drained still throbbed, but what truly tormented him was something else entirely.

“I asked what you think of your king.”

At his quiet question, she had finally held her tongue.
Lips trembling faintly, eyes wandering as though they’d lost their way.
It was clear she hadn’t failed to answer—she’d evaded him. That fraction of silence scraped at his nerves in a way that was peculiar, almost maddening.
Born a king, he had never once coveted another’s gaze.
For one who stood above all others, eyes ought naturally to remain fixed at his feet.
Yet Danbi, even with her king so near, had dared to chase something beyond him.
The moment he realized that her desperate hands, cradling what she thought was his face, were in truth reaching for some phantom other than himself, Hyeon was seized by a displeasure he could not name.
‘Whose face do you see, to wear such anguish?’
How was he to define this strange, twisted sensation?
One thing was certain: he wanted to uncover, piece by piece, the identity of that “something left behind” that occupied her mind.
He could not bear how those eyes, failing to hold him complete within them, so thoroughly grated against him.
Hyeon slowly traced the furrow between Danbi’s brows as she slept, his fingers gentle against her forehead.
“……Something left behind, then.”
She said she had to go back.
Because there was something she’d left behind, she must return to the place she’d come from—and she’d wept pitifully as she said it.
Those words kept clinging to the edge of his hearing.
His gaze traced slowly through her disheveled hair.
Whoever or whatever it was, it concerned him not at all. She was merely a chess piece to be used and discarded—nothing more, nothing less.
Yet whenever his eyes met hers, why did his chest ache so piercingly in that one corner? He could not fathom the reason.
“You confuse your king, again and again.”
His own incomprehension was not new. From the moment he’d thrown himself before her mere moments ago, everything had already begun to slip from his grasp.
There was but one reason he had pressed the Short Sword into her hands.
To test her loyalty to her enemies—nothing more. If the blade’s point turned toward him, he would simply cut her down where she stood and be done with it.
His assumption had proved correct. The instant her fingers closed around the Short Sword, he’d sensed them turning toward his back.
Yet why was it so? Though her intent was clear, her hand—the hand that held the blade—trembled with hesitation. What could she possibly doubt?
Hyeon kept his eyes forward while his awareness never wavered from behind him. Should she lunge, he was braced to hurl her to the ground in an instant.
Shing—!
A sharp, piercing sound split the silence.
By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late. In the moment he understood that the Arrow released from the bowstring was aimed not at him, but at her, his body moved first.

“……Ugh!”

His eyes clenched shut against the pain lancing through his chest.
But more than the agony spreading like wildfire, what shocked him was the eyes of the woman trapped in his arms, crying out in alarm.
‘What have I done, I who am king?’
He could not comprehend it.
No logic. No calculation.
When he should have been distinguishing enemies, he had thrown his life away for a woman who might well have turned a blade against his back.
Hyeon gently shielded Danbi’s sleeping face from the moonlight with his palm.
Right after the Arrow struck, her desperate voice calling his name had echoed in his ears like a phantom sound.

“Hyeon……!”

Not the solemn name of a king, but simply the name of a man.
That call was so familiar, so achingly tender, that he nearly forgot the pain that had pierced his chest.
Come to think of it, she had always called him by that name. Not as his king, but as “Hyeon.”

“It seems you know your king quite well.”
“How could I not? I’ve clung to you for eight years, tedious as it’s been.”
“Eight years……?”

Hyun remembered the day he first met Danbi with perfect clarity.
She had conducted herself as though she had known him for ages. Every word and gesture possessed an almost painfully natural quality.
In the glance they had shared moments before, Hyun had glimpsed the reason. Danbi was pursuing someone—someone behind his face.
“Did you call for me, or…?”
Hyun’s fingertips came to rest upon Danbi’s pale lips.
Even as he suspected she might be an assassin sent to end him, he had thrown himself in front of her Arrow without hesitation.
It was reckless—devoid of the justifications a king might marshal, stripped of the cold calculations reason would demand.
Hyun placed his hand slowly over his chest.
Beyond the hem of his Cheollik, a familiar scent seeped through. The sharp pain of the wound had begun to fade, yet his eyes, fixed upon her face, grew only darker and more distant.
“I told myself I wouldn’t care what you were hiding.”
His gaze drifted to the white curve of her neck.
He had believed that a mere gesture would give him dominion over her—that she would bend to his will as easily as he drew breath. Yet strangely, he found himself unable to raise his hand at all.
Why?
Unanswered questions swirled through his mind, leaving it churning. More troubling still was the creeping sense that she had come to hold sway over him instead.

“You’ll go whether you wish to or not. Even if it kills you, you’ll live through it.”

The words were audacious beyond measure.
Yet as her trembling hands gripped his shoulders, their fingertips pale and bloodless, Hyun found himself unable to speak.
He could not understand. What drove her to fight so desperately for his life? The lethal gleam he had seen in her eyes that day seemed almost like a phantom now.
No—that could not be. This had to be some calculated ploy to throw him into confusion.
Yet even suspicion crumbled to nothing before the Poison spreading through his veins.
‘The Arrow was laced with Poison.’
As the heat rising from his chest began to engulf his entire body, he lacked even the strength to steady himself.
His mind grew distant, his vision blurred beyond recovery.
In that moment, unable to discern whether this place was reality or a vicious dream—

A small sound escaped his lips.

An unfamiliar warmth touched the edge of his mouth.
Drawn by the strange breath pressing through the gap, he yielded to her advance. He was overwhelmed, helpless against her force as she invaded the depths of him without restraint.
The sharp herbal taste lingering across his tongue. Her breath, sticky and thick against his own.
As her warmth crept gently inward, all Hyun could do was seize the tip of the tongue that invaded his mouth.
A soft sound as their lips parted.
The moment they separated, a strange thirst rose sharply from the pit of his stomach. He nearly pulled her back toward him.
He was not in his right mind.

His breath came in ragged gasps.
“Hyun!”

His dulled senses began to return soon after.
The first thing to fill his vision was Danbi’s face—hovering above him as though she might collapse at any moment.
Her eyes, searching for signs of his breathing as she leaned close, flickered with desperate urgency.
In that instant, caught by her gaze, Hyun understood. He had crossed the Line of Death, guided by the hand of this woman.
The strange warmth lingering in his mouth and the pallor drained from her face told him everything.
Hyun turned his head slowly.
A small brown glass vial lay scattered on the floor. He reached out quietly and picked it up.
From the opened mouth of the bottle came a sharp herbal scent that pricked his nostrils—the same taste that had lingered on his tongue.
It was clear that the Poison burning through his body had subsided because of this.
It had to be an Antidote.
Hyun was bewildered. As if she had somehow foreseen such a calamity, she had drawn the vial from her breast without a moment’s hesitation.
Had she already known the Arrow was poisoned? Otherwise, there was no conceivable reason she would have prepared something so precious beforehand.
The conviction struck him that she was in league with those who had come. Yet if that were true, nothing made sense.
If she had joined hands with those sent to kill him, why would she sacrifice her own life to save him?
Had she undergone a sudden change of heart?
“Why did you save me?”
Hyun regarded Danbi silently. Her breathing was labored, heavy with exhaustion, filling the quiet room with its ragged rhythm.
After a moment, he spoke softly to her sleeping form.
“Who are you, truly?”
The unanswered question scattered quietly into the cold air.
That woman who had called his name with such ache.
Hyeon lingered over the warmth that remained on his own lips, his eyes fixed on her face for a long time.

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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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