I Became the Daughter of a Disgraced Duke - Chapter 20

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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 20
‘Why do I keep seeing Iris in this child?’
If our Iris had lived, she would be sleeping with a face just like that.
With every moment, he saw his already-dead daughter in the girl, and his head throbbed with the ache of it.
Cassian pressed his forehead against the corner of the bed.
If only this child were Iris.
Alcohol, tobacco, gambling?
He could cut through any of it in a heartbeat for Iris’s sake.
He could cleave the world itself asunder if she asked.
If she demanded his life, he would give it gladly.
But death was another matter entirely.
Iris was dead, and that fact was an irrevocable reality.
‘And yet, because you’re here…….’
After Iris died, what terrified Cassian was not his own death but forgetting.
He had talked of wanting to forget Iris, but it was all lies.
He prayed every day.
He begged that even if the anguish of not forgetting Iris drove him to death, he would never lose her memory.
He lived in dread that one day her face would simply vanish from his mind, that the sound of her infant cries would become nothing but silence.
In that sense, he was grateful to the child.
At least when he looked at her, Iris’s face came back to him whole and complete.
Cassian stroked the girl’s hair.
He wondered sometimes if it was ethically sound to care for a child as a patron, a substitute for one already dead—but that was philosophers’ work, not his.
He was Cassian.
A street thug, a brawler, a wretch, garbage—without conscience or sense.
A wretched life where only the happiness of the moment mattered, wasn’t it.
A rotten existence; there was nothing to be lost by sinking lower still.
‘Forgive me. That such a man should be your guardian.’
But he could not bring himself to send the girl who so resembled Iris to the orphanage.
Not because of some strange intuition that the child was like the dead Iris.
Unless Iris returned to him alive, he could never escape this hellish life.
Yet looking at this child made it seem like he could breathe, at least.
He wanted to live now.
Cassian suppressed his urge to drink and kept vigil at Iris’s side through the night.
Unaware that he had understood part of what the girl had said.
* * *
“My dear. Take care now. Come play again next time. I’ll have some candy and chocolate waiting for you that you’ll love.”
“Uncle! Don’t go. Let’s make that spicy chicken dish together before you leave.”
Cassian returned home after being seen off by Barelmore and Edrian.
In truth, there were more questions he wanted to ask Zenobian, but they felt like questions he wasn’t yet ready to face.
The moment Cassian came back and began clearing out the small storage room, he understood.
‘Have I lost my mind? To raise a child in this state?’
His house was nothing but a garbage heap.
The floors rotted from lack of maintenance, the walls were thick with mold, and the cracked windows wouldn’t even open, for reasons unclear.
‘Is it right to give her this room? Actually, I think the problem is the whole house.’
In truth, Cassian knew well. He was in no position to take in a child.
Never mind that the place became a sty within days if the housemaid didn’t come; he had no profession, and he didn’t even know where the fief the Emperor had granted him was buried.
He’d even gambled away the mansion he’d received as a reward.
All he possessed were debts and various addictions—and now child-rearing?
‘Are you sane?’
The rebuke came unbidden.
He couldn’t even manage his own wretched life, and yet he spoke of raising a child.
As he heaped curses upon himself, the inner demon whispered.
Why not just live like this—
“Ahhhhhh!”
The realization that he had gone mad tore a scream from him.
To know the taste of a depraved life and then abandon it was too cruel.
That filthy, lawless, base existence of a beast—it had no dignity, but it held no discomfort either, no displeasure.
If anything, it overflowed with dopamine.
That was when it happened.
Patter-patter-patter!
Footsteps echoed, and the little one who’d been playing alone in the living room came running.
“(Oh, oh mister! I’ll protect you!)”
A creature the size of a pea protecting him—the thought was absurd.
Yet seeing Iris’s fearful face with her small fists clenched so tightly, he couldn’t help but laugh.
Only a few days had passed, but already he could read her like an open book.
Unlike the calm but steely Barelmore, or the reckless, stubborn Edrian, Iris was timid—a worrier through and through.
“Oh? You sound confident.”
“(As long as there’s no b-bed monster, I can, um, ask people not to fight and help them make up and shake hands!)”
After he’d patted her head a few times when she said she was scared, something had shifted between them—she’d grown warmer than yesterday, more at ease.
Winning a child’s affection might seem like nothing much, but it had kindled something warm in his chest.
Cassian stuffed the torn wallpaper into a burlap sack and brushed his hands clean with a sharp clap.
“Let’s go. We need to buy you some clothes first. You’ve been wearing those for over a week now. You look like a beggar.”
Anyone who saw her would think she had no parents.
For the first time in his life, Cassian stepped into a Children’s Clothing Store.
* * *
Ding—
The bell above the shop door chimed.
Cassian walked straight to the counter and stated his business immediately.
“I’d like to look at children’s clothes. She’s three years old.”
He glanced at Iris as he spoke.
“How about this one?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s pretty. I’ll take this one, then?”
Cassian took the dress the clerk offered and held it up against Iris.
The garment was far too small for her.
“This is for a three-year-old?”
“Yes. Thirty-six-month-olds usually wear that size comfortably.”
“Really? Listen, little one—you may not throw a punch, but for a three-year-old, you’re quite tall. You won’t get looked down on anywhere, will you?”
“Oh? Is this perhaps for your daughter?”
“Not my daughter, but she’ll be wearing it.”
“The child looks at least five years old, though…”
The clerk’s eyes darted back and forth between Iris and him.
Then her gaze settled on him.
That look was, indeed, what he’d expected.
The look of a clueless guardian with a stray child.
Here I go again… or rather, if they’d called me a vagrant, fine, but I’m not a stray, am I?
Cassian felt wronged.
“Not my d-daughter.”
If she really were his daughter, he’d accept getting smacked on the back of the head and called an idiot without complaint, but he was something the doctor had officially certified: completely sterile.
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
Once again, the unfairness of it all rankled. What a pathetic wreck I’ve become, Cassian thought bitterly.
The clerk, now emotionally checked out, turned her attention back to Iris.
“Little one, which dress do you like best?”
“(I do, a princess dress like that! I like that!)”
“Oh my, she speaks in a foreign language.”
While the clerk held Iris’s hand and showed her this dress and that, Cassian found a One-piece Dress in a similar size and held it up to her.
“Alright. That’ll do. Go change into this and let’s go.”
“(Mister, this isn’t my style. I like black, I do. Pink! Bubblegum pink is the best! With ribbons and ruffles!)”
“Sorry. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“(No, wait. I like pretty things…)”
“Listen, little one. The world doesn’t work the way we want it to. Sometimes you have to wear clothes you don’t like. So go change now. Excuse me. Could you help the child, please?”
As the clerk was taking Iris’s hand toward the fitting room in response to Cassian’s request—
“Oh, my daughter looks so beautiful! Like a real princess in that! Shall we get this one?”
A mother and daughter who’d come shopping together appeared.
Iris’s footsteps stopped at that moment.
Her gaze locked onto the pair of them.
Cassian, watching Iris, found himself unable to speak.
It was far too lonely an expression for such a small child to wear.
Iris stared at the mother and daughter with longing eyes, then slowly bowed her head.
In her slumped shoulders and downturned face lay all the melancholy a child could feel.
In that instant, a strange flame flickered to life deep within Cassian’s heart.
He couldn’t bear to see that pathetic, defeated look any longer — the thought that he’d go mad if he just stood there gnawing at him — and his reason snapped clean in two.
So he shouted without hesitation.
“That’s enough. Just give me everything from here to there! And that too! Whatever that little one is wearing!”

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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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