I Was Hired by the Black-Minded Prince for My Life's Ransom - Chapter 47

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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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Episode 47. Yurian’s Position
I yanked my hand from the bookshelf as though it had burned me.
Then I clapped both hands over my mouth.
I couldn’t believe it.
‘You came to rescue me…?’
[Then what am I doing in a place like this?]
What do I do?
My tightly pressed lips twisted and contorted despite my will.
I thought he wouldn’t come.
That’s why I burned through the rope alone, rifled through the ledger, and was searching for an escape route.
Because he would never come.
And yet.
[Vanillin wrote it down. If I’ve been taken, she asked you to rescue me.]
My vision blurred.
It was strange.
Until just a moment ago I wasn’t afraid, so why was fear suddenly washing over me?
[Are you all right?]
Tears threatened to spill over.
I was so happy that suspicion crept in.
‘What if this is all still a dream? What if I’m still bound up… and hearing voices because of the poison?’
What if all of this was just a phantom conjured by my desperate hope?
I rubbed my swollen eyes.
Yurian’s voice settled into something grave.
[…You were bound?]
‘I got free now.’
[What poison are you talking about?]
‘There was poison drifting in the air. I collapsed because of it earlier.’
But I’m fine now.
My heart trembled.
Even if this was a dream, it would be enough.
It felt as though he had come because he was worried about me.
I recalled what the Host had sneered at me earlier.
— You weren’t worth saving, it seems.
I’d ached because I couldn’t deny it.
[How dare you let something like this happen.]
If that were true, could I now hope that I’d become someone worth saving to Yurian?
[I’ll have to kill them all.]
‘…What?’
[Where are you now?]
My heart quickened—wondering if that anger was on my behalf.
‘I’m not sure of the location… but I think it’s the Host’s room.’
[The Host.]
Yurian repeated the name in a cold voice.
Then he spoke with deliberate calm.
[A room in the center of the first floor, then.]
I gaped at him—such certainty, without a shred of hesitation.
‘How did you know?’
[That’s the kind of man he is. He doesn’t dare go to the very top, content with a comfortable middle position.]
‘…You knew him?’
[He’s my brother, after all. For now.]
‘What?’
[Wait there. I’ll head over.]
‘No, wait—hold on. Your brother?’
[…….]
‘Your Highness? Your Highness?’
But Yurian didn’t respond any further.
He must have stepped beyond the five-meter radius where I could sense his thoughts.
I stood alone, blinking stupidly.
His brother? That meant he was the Fourth Prince? That man?
I’d suspected he might be nobility, but I never imagined he was a prince.
I never imagined that someone who called the Second Prince his superior could be his brother…
And his manner of speaking was strange too.
“So that’s why you said it that way. Content with a middle position, unable to reach the very top.”
It seemed the Fourth Prince had chosen to serve beneath the Second Prince rather than compete for the Imperial Throne.
But really, none of that mattered to me.
He had come. For me alone.
Overwhelmed by a reality too miraculous to believe, I sank to the ground.
The Account Book I’d dropped moments before struck against my foot.
Only then did my senses fully return.
‘Right—I was choosing a reconciliation gift.’
I’d been searching for materials that would delight Yurian.
Strangely, motivation suddenly welled up inside me.
I turned my attention back to the bookshelf.
I wanted to give him both an apology and a gift of thanks.
I was searching for a new gift after returning the unremarkable Account Book to its place when—
“Hmm…?”
The lowest shelf of the bookcase, tucked so deep in the corner that it wouldn’t be visible without bending down.
There was a very small Lever.
“Ah.”
My heart began to beat faster, harder.
Having worked as a problem-solver’s assistant, such mechanisms were hardly unfamiliar to me.
A common method used by the Nobility to conceal secret spaces.
‘Found it—the real gift.’
Without hesitation, I pulled the Lever.
* * *
Yurian was angry.
And that fact displeased him.
…….
As he walked down the corridor, he clenched and unclenched his fist absently.
His knuckles had gone white with the force of his grip.
Why did it irritate him so much?
It had been an ordinary day like any other.
Himself waking as he always did, and Vanillin chattering away beside him as she always did.
— I was so scared. He suddenly just leaped at me like that….
If anyone else had said it, he would have smiled pleasantly and dismissed it with feigned concern, but why—
—with Vanillin, he could not manage it.
‘Because she’s mine, perhaps.’
Mine.
Yurian turned the unfamiliar word over in his mind.
Not his parents, not his siblings, not anyone.
There had been no one wholly his own.
Those who watched for opportunities to kill him and cast him down—they were hardly his allies.
But Vanillin.
Only that small, rabbit-like maidservant was different.
— Can you become wholly my ally, Your Highness…?
— I… I was so worried….
— I don’t want to see you come to harm… because I’m on your side.
That small frame, fearlessly blocking his path, stirred something in him.
What made her turn her back so openly to him?
Did she truly believe he could never drive a blade between her shoulders?
‘No.’
Yurian shook his head.
Even if he did, she would accept it.
She would open those round eyes wide and make some foolish sound like ‘Huh…?’
Was this what it meant to have someone who was yours?
He had never had one before, so he could not know.
The door swung open.
“I heard you summoned me, brother.”
“You’re here.”
“Have you been well?”
When I smiled with my eyes as if I knew nothing, Kitten’s expression twisted.
Perhaps he was thinking of the land that had been taken from him.
“How have you been?”
“I haven’t felt this good in quite some time.”
Yurian sat naturally across from Kitten at the table.
Kitten picked up his teacup as if nothing were amiss.
He concealed it desperately, as though determined not to show it, but he couldn’t stop his lips from trembling ever so slightly.
Yurian read every one of those unspoken signals and simply laughed.
‘How foolish.’
In any case, the next emperor would be himself.
All his plans were unfolding smoothly, and both Kitten and the emperor were nothing but pieces on an enormous chessboard.
And that also meant that everything Kitten possessed would soon become his own.
Valenta had been merely the beginning.
“Will you have some tea?”
“No, thank you. My palate seems particularly sensitive today.”
“A shame—the fragrance is lovely.”
Thus began the Second Prince’s discourse, which droned on endlessly without ever quite concluding.
The movements of the nobility, recent border tensions, Valenta’s business plans….
All things he already knew.
‘Utter rubbish.’
It was neither something he was curious about nor something he wished to hear.
And the Second Prince, too, showed no inclination to truly speak.
There was something scheming in the air.
Yurian considered this at leisure, tilting his head slightly.
Even as he did not drink, his teacup was refilled endlessly, mixed not with tea leaves but with poison plant.
Given that the dose was not lethal, the purpose was less about killing him than prolonging something—buying time.
‘So he means to make me lose consciousness and search my chambers.’
He had expected retaliation for the Valenta affair, after all.
As always, Kitten would scramble desperately to find some weakness.
But today would prove difficult for him.
Because Vanillin would be in that room.
‘Vanillin.’
His thoughts turned to her once more.
Was she blaming herself by now?
― Are you very angry with me…?
The anxious face with which she had asked returned to him.
The expression as though she might weep at any moment.
…….
Again. Without reason, anger flared, and something twisted in his chest.
An unfamiliar, unpleasant sensation.
The image of her in tears was not something he found palatable.
‘How irritating.’
All the more so because he couldn’t explain why.
Yurian closed his eyes slowly.
He knew how to dispel this feeling.
He need only see Vanillin and confirm that she was not crying.
Then, as though it had never been, he could shake free of this unpleasantness.
…But.
“Now that I think of it, I brought back a gemstone we mined in Valenta as a gift.”
Because he refused to acknowledge that his emotions were being swayed by the actions of a single woman.
He opened his eyes wide, feigning ignorance.
Had he known that in the interim his small handmaiden was being abducted, he would never have worn such a face.

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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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