I Bought the Villains With Money - Chapter 16

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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 16
“You’re being annoying.”
Casion pushed me away.
Whether he liked it or not, I fidgeted beside him like I couldn’t sit still.
Even his gruff dismissal felt precious. I was simply happy he’d woken.
Watching a child who needed care lie there unconscious, moaning fitfully—it had been agony.
And I carried guilt toward Casion on top of it all, which made it worse.
In my past life, I’d turned away from him. Not intentionally, but seeing his condition now, the guilt was unavoidable.
I visited him because of the marriage, but beneath that lay an apology for my sins.
‘But I can’t claim it wasn’t deliberate with any confidence, can I?’
I knew Casion was kept inside the Royal Palace, and that Julia and Dayson held him in poor regard.
‘I was exactly the same.’
I too had wielded violence against Casion. Turning a blind eye to violence is just violence by another name.
“How does your body feel? How are you?”
I replaced the wet cloth on his forehead and asked. Casion said nothing for a while.
Had he fallen back asleep?
His eyes were squeezed shut.
I reached out carefully and peeled away the strands of hair clinging to his forehead one by one. Each time my fingertip grazed his brow, his eyebrows twitched.
“You’re doing a terrible job of pretending to sleep, you know. Should I stop talking? Is it bothersome?”
“…No…”
Casion answered belatedly.
“How long have you been here?”
He opened his eyes properly now, his voice hoarse as he asked. I sat up straight in my chair and smiled brightly.
“About half a day?”
The sun was already rising. When I’d arrived, it had been night. Somehow I’d spent the whole night in Casion’s quarters.
“You nursed me?”
“I changed the wet cloth, gave you medicine. I suppose you could call it nursing.”
“Medicine?”
Casion immediately grew wary. Even though he’d regained consciousness after taking it, meaning it couldn’t be poison, he bristled with suspicion like a cat meeting a stranger.
“It was to bring down your fever and protect your body. The fact that you’ve woken tells me it worked perfectly.”
Casion seemed astonished to learn there was medicine that worked on him. Then he muttered something with an unreadable expression.
“Thank you.”
“Pardon?”
Had I just heard what I thought I heard?
“I won’t say it again.”
From Casion’s reaction, I’d heard correctly.
“Did you just… thank me?”
Casion’s lips pressed shut, and the tips of his ears flushed crimson.
How adorable. So embarrassed he won’t repeat himself, yet still grateful to me?
I felt like a mother who’d drilled a child who couldn’t do basic math until they scored a perfect hundred.
Oh, how sweet. Should I pat his head?
I reached out, then dropped my hand. Casion was different from Robert.
Unlike Robert, who enjoyed being fawned over, Casion made a face like he’d swallowed spoiled milk every time I cooed at him.
“Well, I did do something worth thanking me for. I hired an excellent physician for you, after all. And I’ve been by your side all night, changing your wet cloth and keeping watch.”
“You didn’t sleep at all?”
Casion glanced sideways at me. A hint of concern leaked through, and I couldn’t help but smile.
Though I was two years older than Casion, I was still just a child myself. A conscientious person would naturally worry and feel sorry for such a child who’d stayed up all night.
“No, no. They say beauties are sleepyheads. I tried not to sleep, but I couldn’t help it. I dozed off here and there. Right beside you.”
“What? Beside me? My bed? Here?”
Casion sprang up like a coiled spring. His movements were surprisingly nimble for someone who was ill.
“No, here.”
I spoke seriously and pointed to the chair I was sitting in. His bed was large with plenty of space, but I wasn’t shameless enough to covet a patient’s bedside.
Casion exhaled with visible relief, a long and deep breath.
Did sharing a bed bother him that much? Apparently he had more attachment to his belongings than expected.
“But really, is your body truly all right?”
I found myself asking the question I’d posed at the start.
While he was up, Casion leaned his back against the headboard and felt his body here and there before nodding slowly.
“It seems so. Surprisingly.”
Robert’s medicine was remarkably effective. I’d have to tell him when I returned.
“Will you be able to talk?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
Casion drank the water. He wanted cold water to clear his head completely, but I stopped him, so he had to settle for lukewarm.
“Your Highness, do you often lose consciousness like this?”
“Sometimes.”
Casion spoke as though it were nothing.
“Sometimes for more than a day?”
Casion nodded in confirmation.
This wasn’t something to brush off!
“I do my best to be careful, but when something unexpected happens……”
“What happened?”
If he collapsed when something unexpected occurred, then he must have experienced something unexpected just before I arrived.
I needed to know.
“But why did you nurse me? You could have left me sleeping.”
Casion was subtly trying to change the subject. But that wasn’t the point.
“How could I leave a sick person behind? What if you’d died? Last night, Your Highness, you looked as though death wouldn’t have been surprising.”
“What does it matter if I die?”
“Good heavens! Listen to yourself. Death is natural, something everyone faces, but at our age, isn’t it a catastrophe? Your Highness, think about your age.”
Here was an eleven-year-old speaking like a wizened elder who’d seen the whole world, and I was hardly thirteen when I rebuked him for it.
“Neither of us is going to stay young. We gave up on that long ago.”
Casion’s bitter tone shattered my effort to keep the mood bright.
I swept back my disheveled hair lightly.
“You’re right. Whether it’s you seeking revenge or me trying to protect our house any way I can, we’re hardly children anymore. But still, when you’re hurt, you ought to say so and rest. So rest today, won’t you?”
This little rascal.
I pressed my finger against Casion’s forehead. He scrunched his face in protest and looked up at me with his eyes.
“Lie down. Or should I lie down with you? Sing you a lullaby?”
“No!”
Casion yelped in alarm and dove under the blankets.
One moment like an old man, the next a child.
“The Deposed Queen visited.”
Casion finally found the will to speak and opened his mouth.
“I see.”
I replied as indifferently as I could. If I showed too much interest, I feared Casion would clam up.
And I didn’t want to rake up painful memories. I was afraid that if he recalled them while finally finding stability, he’d lose consciousness again.
“You don’t have to say anything. Your Highness, focus on resting.”
“……Can you buy one?”
Casion cut me off.
“Pardon?”
A thin voice emerged from the pile of blankets.
“Can you……buy me a house?”
“……!”
Casion had said something I could scarcely believe. He was asking me to buy him a house!
This was an opportunity.
I wanted to hear in detail why he was making such a request of me, but first I had to seize the moment.
Even if it was difficult with my own strength, I had to see it through. I clenched my dress hem and smiled brightly.
“I could buy ten if you wanted.”
***
I’d spoken confidently to Casion, but the house he wanted wasn’t something I could purchase right away.
The mansion Casion had asked me to buy was the house he’d shared with the Deposed Queen. A place known by another name: the Twilight Mansion.
After Casion entered the Royal Palace, the mansion had been left abandoned, but for some reason, it had recently come up for auction.
“The Queen has her eye on it, I hear.”
And that mansion was being pursued by Julia, Dayson’s mother and the current Queen.
Why would she want to buy the Twilight Mansion—the house where Casion had lived as a child—when she despised him?
“The way the Twilight Mansion came on the market doesn’t sit right either.”
Cho continued speaking as I flipped through papers. The documents contained information about the Twilight Mansion that Cho had investigated.
“And what about you? Why suddenly do you want to buy the Twilight Mansion?”
According to Cho’s report, the Twilight Mansion was a historic building, but buying it would yield no profit whatsoever.
The location wasn’t even good.
“It’s an engagement gift.”
“What?”
“I told you. That I’m going to marry His Highness Casion. His Highness wants that mansion.”
Cho let out a long, exasperated sigh before dropping into the chair across from the desk. She swung her legs idly, studying me with those sharp eyes.
I ignored her gaze and turned my attention to the documents—specifically, the circumstances that had brought this house to auction.
The Twilight Mansion, left behind by Violeta, the Deposed Queen, should have passed automatically to Casion upon his majority. Yet somehow it had appeared on the auction block.
“Violeta borrowed heavily from the banks?” I asked aloud. “Even with the ongoing stipend from the Royal Palace?”
Violeta had been deposed for failing to bear children—a fate sealed less than a year after King Karman obtained Dayson from Julia. The cruel irony was inescapable.
Violeta’s family had abandoned her the moment she lost her crown. Cast out by her own blood, she faced isolation without a single patron to cushion her fall.
It was at the precipice of that descent into destitution that Karman intervened.
The King had changed the law itself, mandating a stipend for the Deposed Queen.
‘Did His Majesty truly love Violeta?’
The sudden shift in law, followed by Casion’s birth—all of it pointed to the same conclusion.
It was evidence enough that King Karman had loved Violeta.
‘Then what of his easy manner with Julia?’
Yet Karman’s actions remained a riddle I couldn’t solve. I set aside the unanswerable questions and returned to the report.
“She wasn’t known for extravagance, though, was she?”
“No. The pittance the palace provided, she saved by keeping barely any attendants at all,” Cho confirmed.
“So why would she need such a sum of money?”
“Medicine for the boy?”
That wasn’t the answer either. Casion’s medical expenses were handled separately by the palace, distinct from her living allowance.
Though Casion was born of the Deposed Queen, he carried the King’s blood—and the palace had always seen to his care.
“There must have been somewhere else she needed it.”
Cho shrugged it off without concern, but I felt the prickle of instinct—this was where the real digging needed to begin.
“Something’s wrong about this,” I said quietly. “This is where we need to start.”
“Are you really going to buy the Twilight Mansion?”
“Of course.”
“The Queen won’t sit idle, you know. Didn’t I tell you what kind of person Julia is?”
She had. It was the night I’d told her seriously that I intended to marry Casion.
Cho had casually suggested I consider marrying Dayson instead.
If this marriage was merely to preserve the family line, she’d argued, then Dayson—Julia’s bloodline, commanding such formidable power—would be the far more advantageous choice.
I’d refused. When I asked her not to press for reasons, Cho had brought up Julia instead.
An abnormal temperament.
Doting on Dayson to an unsettling degree.
Acting as though Dayson were already the crowned king.
People around her have a way of vanishing without explanation.
A beautiful flower, but one that secretes poison.
Whether credible accounts or baseless rumors, the facts they all pointed to were consistent.
Julia was a dangerous woman. Crossing her would cost me dearly.
I knew this myself—far better than Cho, who had only heard the tales. I had lived it.
And because I knew, neither Dayson nor Julia could even be considered as alternatives.
I Bought Out the Villains (Serialized)
Author │ Lee In-hye
Publisher │ Kim Ju-hyung
Published by │ J Plus Media Co., Ltd. – Tiramisu
Marketing │ Han Jae-hyuk
Address │ 1101, 33-gil Digitanil-ro, Guro-gu, Seoul (Guro-dong, Ace Techno Tower 8th, 11th floor)
Email │ [email protected]
Website │ http://blog.naver.com/jayplemedia1
ⓒ Lee In-hye 2021
※This work is published by J Plus Media Co., Ltd. under a contract with the copyright holder,
and may not be used in any form or by any means without the permission of the publisher and author.
Violation of this may result in criminal and civil legal liability.

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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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