I Became the Daughter of a Disgraced Duke - Chapter 13

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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 12
Anne Marie once told me that.
Family isn’t determined by blood alone.
If you love each other, even friends can become family.
‘So let’s be a family—you, Dad, and me!’
Maybe my desperate wish became a prayer and came true.
Freeze.
The monster man stopped swinging his legs.
The voice demanding I let go vanished, and silence settled in.
An air so eerily calm it transcended mere silence pressed down around us.
Huh?
When I lifted my head, my gaze locked with his—those golden eyes fixed upon me.
They shone bright as the sun, yet somehow they looked as dark as a moonless night.
Before I could help myself, my shoulders curled inward, and I burrowed my face into his leg, speaking in a voice barely above a whimper.
“Dad…”
I felt him flinch.
He must have hated it.
Sniff.
I swallowed the runny mess and quietly pulled away from him.
‘Goddess, you idiot.’
You’re an absolute fool!
A piece of dirt!
Rotten!
Worthless!
This wasn’t the birthday gift I wanted!
I asked for a dad, not just any man!
I was wiping my eyes with my sleeve when it happened.
“Uh… uh?”
I couldn’t breathe.
My heart pounded like thunder.
It felt just like when the bed monster appeared…
The world spun, and my body went limp.
My vision blurred.
“Uh… uh…”
“Hey! Small Child! Small Child…!!”
The monster man’s panicked face was my last memory.
* * *
Scorching sunlight, ripening leaves, thick humid air.
Cassian had disliked summer for as long as he could remember.
He sweated easily and loved the night, so the long daylight hours of summer felt nothing but tedious.
That preference remained unchanged even as the boy grew into adolescence and shot up to tower over most adults.
At the threshold of that very summer, news arrived of Iris’s birth.
The scorching sunlight seemed to bless the child.
The lush leaves appeared to shield her from the oppressive heat.
Because summer stretched the days long, he could read the letter over and over again.
He imagined and reimagined the daughter as her mother had described her.
「You have golden eyes just like yours. Strangely, your expression in her eyes—your brother’s, actually. I gave birth to her, but I’m a little jealous.」
「Her hands are barely the length of my finger joint, yet I can already see that little pinky finger of yours bent just the same.」
「She’s absolutely precious. Truly, so very precious. You’ll fall head over heels the moment you see her.」
She was right.
The daughter he met during a brief leave earned through valor in war was truly…enough to make his heart feel as though it might fall from his chest.
“This child… is my daughter?”
“Hold her quickly.”
He awkwardly received the tiny girl, supporting her head that couldn’t hold itself up, her thin limbs fluttering.
She appeared in his eyes, and she flooded his vision completely.
In that moment their gazes met, Cassian understood something with sudden clarity.
I could surrender my very life for you—he realized.
In that instant, a new world was granted to him, one in which he cast off a life lived like a beast and swore to become anew.
He was too young to be a father, yet that day the boy became a man who understood paternity.
He wanted to give her everything in the world.
For the child’s sake, he would have given his heart, his very soul.
“Wa, wa-waaaa!”
“Oh, she’s crying. Quick, take her. It’s my fault. I don’t know how to hold her properly.”
“Try holding her like this. Don’t do it with your hands like that—support her neck…….”
The child who had wailed at the sight of her young father the first day gazed at him blankly the next, and the day after that, she touched his cheek with fluttering fingers.
It was less touching than patting—rhythmic, clumsy little taps—but Cassian offered his face willingly, holding her gaze and smiling.
Overcome with joy, he rubbed his face against her small hands and kissed her all over.
“Iris. I would give my life for you.”
So I’ll protect you. I’ll make you happy.
The day after he made that vow.
Four days after they met, the child had captured him down to the last fragment of his soul.
With a single word.
“Dada!”
Cassian’s eyes, standing at the threshold between boyhood and manhood, widened like a child’s.
“Did, did you just hear that?”
“My goodness. What a world.”
“She called me Dada! She said Dada to me! Didn’t she? She did, right? Ha! She knows I’m her father!”
Cassian pulled the child close, brimming with delight.
He bumped his forehead against her tiny one with a soft thunk, laughing as openly as she did.
The child responded with delighted giggles.
An infant’s laughter is so pure that no adult could ever mimic it.
Though he had proven himself on the battlefield in a year, slain countless Demon Beasts, and bore the marks of it still, pure joy flooded into Cassian’s boyish face.
“Say it again. Dada. Daa—da.”
“……da! Da-a!”
Her small fluttering hands patted his cheeks rhythmically.
He turned his face to her, beaming.
“My daughter must be a genius. She’s already calling me Dada! Thank goodness she doesn’t take after me. If she did, she’d be hopeless.”
“Iris. Try saying Mama too. Ma—ma! Maa—ma!”
“Da-a-a. Ba-ba-ba! Ma!”
Do you know how perfect a happiness so pure can be?
That brief leave was the happiest time of his life.
Summer became the most precious season to him, and that day became the reason for his existence.
Driven solely by the resolve to see his child again, he clawed his way through the battlefield, staying alive against all odds.
Desperate to give her the best life, he pursued glory on the field with ferocious ambition.
After years of struggling through war, when he finally returned home, his daughter’s funeral was being held.
“This is a dream, isn’t it? Henrietta. This has to be a dream, right? I must have fallen into a nightmare after being cursed by an Evil Spirit.”
Just as he had sensed on the day he first met his daughter that his life had changed, on the day he saw her off, Cassian understood that his life had died with her.
The days that followed were no longer living—his heart, torn to shreds, bore witness to that.
And so Cassian came to despise small children.
They had killed his life and trampled his heart.
This was the price he paid—not for protecting a child, but for living in the grief of having lost one, even as the agony never ceased.
For this reason, he could not bear the sight of the Small Child who resembled him.
He didn’t even want to know her name.
If he learned it, he might grow fond of her.
Seeing her would bring Iris to mind.
And it would make the childless world feel all too real.
He knew he could not forget, but he wanted to.
That was why he lived drowning in drink.
To quiet the churning in his gut that flipped a dozen times a day, he smoked acrid cigarettes; to escape the crushing sorrow, he chased pleasure wherever it led.
Yet there was no escape.
Even when alcohol blurred his mind, the presence of the lost child pursued him still.
He had scraped through each day by sheer will, thinking death would be a mercy—and then this cursed child had to look so terribly like Iris.
Speaking with a face that mirrors Iris’s exactly.
“Dada!”
It was an incantation.
Perhaps a curse.
A curse born of love too profound.
Cassian held himself rigid, swallowing hard.
When he lowered his eyes, he saw the child’s small head.
She was a different child from the Iris he remembered—not just in appearance, but in age entirely.
The only resemblance was her black hair and yellow eyes, yet the moment the child called him father, something in his chest plummeted.
Strangely enough, the only word for father that Iris had ever heard from his lips in life was “papa”.
“Father…….”
The word father struck deep into his chest. That single word shook Cassian from the depths of his soul.
The strange intuition seized him that the moment he abandoned the child, his own life would become irreversible.
Though his life was already beyond redemption.
Since the moment Iris died, he had been drowning in the abyss with nowhere left to fall.
In that instant, dizziness clouded his mind as he struggled to comprehend the emotion welling within him.
“No……?”
The child collapsed limply to the ground.

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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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