I’m The Male Lead’s Biological Daughter, But I Want To Live With The Second Male Lead! - Chapter 34

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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 34
Above all else, his body gleamed faintly in the hazy moonlight.
Lander, reading Caesar’s thoughts, quickly added an explanation.
“There were water droplets clinging to some of the vines in the tree. When the wind caught them, they shimmered like the scales on a serpent.”
“……I see.”
Caesar’s voice, drained of tension, fell flat once more.
‘Of course Eschlid’s agent wouldn’t have followed me here.’
He’d grown a touch on edge at the thought of losing the goose that laid golden eggs.
Still, vigilance was essential.
“Set traps around the mansion, just in case.”
“Traps, sir?”
“Yes. Whether it crawls or walks, I want something sturdy enough to hold it fast.”
“Understood, sir.”
Caesar handed the vine back to Lander and brushed his hands together as though he’d touched something filthy.
“And tomorrow I’ll need to meet with the girl when she’s properly lucid. Tell the maid not to give her any sleeping medicine tonight.”
“Understood, sir.”
* * *
The following morning, finally restored to full consciousness, Maybel was able to leave her bed.
‘Good heavens—I’ve been ill for two days.’
Yet despite fasting for those two days, her hunger was less severe than she’d expected.
‘In the past, I’d go hungry for just one day and my stomach would be growling and carrying on constantly……’
Now that she thought about it, it seemed someone had fed her something while she slept.
Those cold hands that had felt so pleasant—could they have belonged to a maid?
But the maid wouldn’t even meet her eye.
‘Maybe I’m confusing it with the soup Aselt fed me in my dream.’
With such thoughts, she followed the maid and soon arrived at the Dining Room.
Inside, Caesar was waiting for her.
“Glad to see you’ve come to your senses. Come, sit.”
After that reunion in the carriage, this was the first time she was seeing him properly, and she hesitated.
‘No, he came by last night too.’
She hadn’t quite caught every word, but she remembered it was an apology.
‘Has Caesar truly changed?’
Still harboring doubt, the moment she spooned up the rice porridge, her eyes widened.
“What is it? Does it not taste good?”
Caesar, seated at the far end of the opposite side of the table, asked.
Maybel stared blankly at the bowl before her, then shook her head in surprise.
“Oh no, that’s not it.”
“My skill may fall short of the head chef’s. If you find it lacking, I’ll have him prepare another.”
At those words, Maybel’s eyes opened wide.
“This…… did you…… make this?”
“I did.”
Maybel spooned up the porridge once more.
The taste was identical to before.
‘It’s impossible……’
This was unmistakably the flavor of the soup she’d tasted in her dream!
“It truly doesn’t taste good, then.”
His murmur carried an oddly listless edge.
Maybel glanced upward, eyes only, studying Caesar’s expression.
Was it his tone and his words?
The stern face behind the black eye patch looked oddly anxious.
‘Then it really was him who fed me porridge when I was ill……?’
Maybel’s confusion deepened.
– I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Maybel.
Had the protagonist truly changed?
If he really had, what was she supposed to do?
She had no idea.
But one thing was certain.
There was one thing Maybel could know.
And that was—
“No…… it’s delicious.”
The rice porridge she was spooning into her mouth was remarkably delicious.
Maybel’s lips curved into a gentle smile as she looked at Caesar, and for a moment they seemed almost at peace.
But that peace was short-lived.
Once she finished eating, Maybel climbed the gentle hill alongside Caesar without delay.
In truth, she hadn’t fully recovered and would have preferred rest, but Caesar had cleared his schedule for today—she had no choice in the matter.
‘How did he know exactly when I’d be well enough? How could he have timed this so perfectly?’
It puzzled her, though she suspected that had she still been unwell today, Caesar would have spent the entire day nursing her in her room instead of venturing outside.
“We’re here.”
Just as Maybel felt her breath growing short from the successive climbs, Caesar’s footsteps halted.
She hastened to his side.
“This place is…”
A breeze sweeping up from below caressed her brow, where perspiration beaded like dew.
The ponytail Caesar had tied for her fluttered in the wind.
“What do you think? You can see our mansion spread out below, can’t you?”
Caesar spoke with evident pride as he gazed downward.
Indeed, the entire Duke’s Household estate unfolded beneath them in a single sweeping view.
Behind the mansion—built in a three-sided square around a central courtyard—lay vast gardens she had never explored.
Maybel had only ever seen them from above; she had never set foot there.
‘The mansion is so much larger than I realized.’
Yet for all its vastness, the only place permitted to her was the corner of a filthy room.
Loneliness she had carefully buried rose up like lint through her chest.
As Maybel clenched her fists to bear her sorrow alone, Caesar spoke.
“Maybel, I truly love this mansion.”
Caesar’s voice drifted as he gazed across the estate grounds.
“From the time I was very small, I would come up here and vow that one day I would possess that beautiful mansion.”
But Caesar had been an illegitimate child, and before him stood accomplished legitimate heirs.
By all natural order, Caesar should never have become the Duke.
A turning point came into Caesar’s life around the time he turned six—and with it, fortune.
“Meeting your mother was… truly a blessing for me. She changed my entire life.”
After meeting Sophia, Caesar surpassed the legitimate heirs and succeeded in inheriting the title of Duke of Aschillonia.
It was all an achievement he had built together with her.
Caesar bent low to meet Maybel’s eyes directly.
Her pupils trembled slightly.
But Caesar seemed not to notice, speaking instead in a gentle voice.
“That mansion holds many memories between your mother and me. It is a very precious place.”
Then he reached out and gently cupped her cheek in his palm.
His dry fingers brushed the hollow cheek of the child, hollowed further by her illness.
“And from now on, it will become a precious place for you too. Because it is your home.”
A fresh breeze swept past again at that very moment, ruffling the hair of both Caesar and Maybel.
It was a wind as fresh and clear as Caesar’s smile as he gazed at her.
“I wanted to show you this place. Come then—shall we head back down?”
Caesar rose and turned first toward the descent.
His face looked remarkably refreshed.
As though he had disposed of some tiresome obligation.
Maybel lingered a moment longer, gazing down at the mansion, before following him.
She had not spoken a single word while atop the hill.
* * *
When Caesar brought Maybel to her room and returned to his study, Lander immediately asked:
“How did it go?”
“Hard to say. One meal won’t fill a lifetime hunger.”
Though Caesar’s voice affected an ease, his hands grew tense as he loosened his cravat.
Dissatisfied with the result, he irritably reached for a cigarette and lit it.
As Lander approached to light it for him, Caesar drew the smoke deep into his lungs.
The sharp irritation seemed to dull somewhat.
“This will take considerable time.”
“What should we do? Shall I have her given the sleeping medicine again?”
The reason Maybel had been unconscious for two days was partly her illness, but primarily the sleeping medicine.
They had used her sickness as a pretext to put her to sleep entirely.
In the meantime, Caesar had even visited her once to play the part of a remorseful father watching over his sick child, which he had expected would win her over easily.
“Yes. If it will interfere with my work, she should sleep through it.”
“You’re colder than I thought, miss. I was certain that once you tasted the rice porridge the master had made with his own hands, you’d open your heart right away.”
“That’s what I mean. You went to all that trouble preparing it, and it’s such a waste.”
Rice porridge made with his own hands.
Even now, thinking it over, I found myself praising Lander’s ingenuity—but then his expression grew strange.
“That is… didn’t you give orders about that, sir?”
“What? Me?”
“Yes, sir! This morning when the head cook went to the kitchen, it was already made. Since only you and the head cook have keys to the kitchen, he assumed you must have prepared it yourself. So I naturally thought—”
Bang!
“Damn it!”
Caesar’s fist came down hard on the desk as he spoke, fury flashing across his face.
“So that rat was hiding here after all!”
It hadn’t been a mistake—what he’d seen when Maybel collapsed with fever.
Lander’s face had gone deathly pale.
And at that very moment, the rat who had kindled Caesar’s rage was now…
“What is the meaning of this, Aselt!”
Finally stepping out into the open before Maybel.

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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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