Lady Cinderella - Chapter 2

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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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Lady Cinderella, Chapter 2

“Can’t we just have a go at her and sell her off?”
“She’s still a virgin, so she’s worth something! She’s young, and if we say she’s a Count’s daughter, we can get at least a thousand gold for her!”
“Who’s going to tell if she’s noble or common? If we go ahead and do it behind the boss’s back, he’ll just shrug it off as done and over with, won’t he?”
Thanks to all the hardship she’d endured, Ella was more common than noble by now. As she listened to the vile things they were saying, she slowly studied their faces.
She couldn’t beat them by force, so if things stayed as they were, something horrible might happen to her. Ella clenched her trembling hands tight and inched about, looking for an opening. She lay limp, pretending to have fainted, while the men were too busy arguing among themselves over whether to pounce on her or not.
When you can’t possibly win, it’s better to run, or so the saying went. Ella tensed her legs and slowly adjusted her position. She had to watch for a chance to escape somehow. Hidden in the dark of night, she stole a glance at the huge mahogany wardrobe loaded onto the cart beside her.
‘If I kick it with all my might…’
The two men were certainly big enough to be crushed by it. If that pinned them down and kept them from moving, she planned to jump from the cart and hide in the forest. While the men were bickering among themselves, the cart hit a rock, and the wagon lurched into the air with a *thud*.
‘Now.’
Ella’s foot shot out and kicked the swaying mahogany wardrobe with all her strength. The massive piece came crashing down on the two men’s bodies with a deafening clatter. Screams rang out, and the cart itself let out a splintering groan. There was only one chance. Ella summoned every last ounce of strength, pushed herself up, and rolled out of the wagon.
“What the—!”
As the other cargo tumbled off the speeding wagon, Ella’s body also rolled across the dirt ground. Before the wagon came to a stop, she dove as hard as she could into the underbrush and hid. The wagon halted for a moment. When the man turned around, the only things that had fallen onto the roadside were a few cheap wine barrels and some pots at most.
“You two, are you all right?”
“I’m going to die from this weight!”
“Hang in there. We’ll reach the village soon! That’s expensive stuff, so hold it carefully so it doesn’t get scratched!”
“What about the girl? Is she still there?”
“It’s too dark to see!”
With the two men pinned beneath the wardrobe, the cart rattled on and grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Listening to the voices fading away, Ella yanked at the knots binding her wrists with all her might, then ran back along the path she’d come, toward the light. Once they reached the village, they’d realize she was gone and come after her at once. She had to get away from this place as fast as she possibly could.
“Huff, huff.”
Gasping for breath, Ella was desperate to run. But soon, shouts from torch-bearing men echoed from behind her. She had been discovered far too quickly, and though she tried to hide in the bushes, the approaching firelight left her no choice but to run again.
‘…Mother.’
The happiness she had finally managed to grasp had shattered into pieces like this. When she looked around, she saw torches flickering in the distance beyond the trees.
The moon was unusually bright tonight, and it offered no shadows to hide in. Misery welled up in her, the sense that everything was over, and she began to cry. She shouldn’t, she couldn’t, or else she’d be caught by her pursuers and that would be the end of it all.
Following the scent of linden blossoms carried on the wind, she ran with the torchlight kept at her back, when an old building came into view before her eyes.
“This is…”
It was an old temple that appeared to have been left to ruin with no one caring for it anymore. Its exterior was nearly a wreck, but the space beneath the secluded altar looked just right for hiding her small body.
There was no other way. However vile and heartless those scoundrels were, they wouldn’t search this far. Ella didn’t hesitate for a moment and threw open the crumbling old door with all her might.
“Huh?”
In that instant, a blinding light engulfed Ella’s body.
She had no idea how long she had been unconscious, falling into the abyss. When she finally managed to open her eyes, her whole body was drenched in sweat. Ella woke on a hard bed, wrapped in a coarse cotton blanket.
“What is this.”
First she steadied her ragged breathing, then gazed at the pale girl reflected in the mirror. The figure was so much younger that it felt strange, and Ella looked over the calendar hanging on the wall.
Imperial Calendar, 421, July 10th.
Five years before the moment she had fled from those intruders.
Ella had gone from twenty-three years old back to being a girl of eighteen.

2. Returning to Eighteen

The face she saw, so long unseen, felt almost like a stranger’s. Seeing her childhood self, now just a memory, made her heart ache. Back when Mother was still alive, her silver hair had shone endlessly, but by now it had long since turned dull and rough, the color of ash.
When she looked at her reflection, her face still holding a trace of youthful softness, tears welled up before she could stop them. Still, her golden eyes, which had once sparkled, had not lost their luster at all.
“Could it be that I’ve actually gone back to the past…?”
Her room, so full of memories, looked quite unfamiliar. It was shabby and sunless, a miserable little room, but this was undeniably the Lloyd Count Family’s mansion, where Ella had been born and raised. Suddenly alarmed, she yanked open a drawer.
When she was little, she had carelessly stashed things away in drawers, only to have her new older sisters steal everything. Emerald earrings, a sapphire necklace, and even the brooch Mother had left her last. Thankfully, it seemed nothing had been taken yet, so Ella hurriedly checked her surroundings.
“I have to hide them.”
All this time, she had been pitifully used without even knowing what kind of treatment she was receiving. So she didn’t want to have anything else taken from her. Instinctively, Ella hid only the brooch, her mother’s keepsake, on her person, then nudged the bed aside and shoved the rest of her things into a hidden compartment that had appeared behind it.
“Ella!”
As she searched for more things to hide, a shrill voice struck her ears. It was her sister Kate, whom she found dreadful even to recall.
‘So it was today.’
It was today that Kate had come into Ella’s room and taken all of Mother’s precious keepsakes. Ella hurriedly tidied up the room and tossed off her clothes. Just as she was halfway into a new dress, as if she had overslept and was rushing to get ready, Kate flung the door open without so much as a knock.
“Ella, what on earth are you doing!”
“Eeeek!”
A piercing scream rang out through the entire building. She had made a deliberate scene to draw attention, and the Count himself came down from the upper floor.
“What’s going on?”
“Well, it’s Ella…”
“Ella?”
Whenever something threatened to become even slightly bothersome, Father always passed it off onto his wife, so the stepmother and stepsisters had been free to bully Ella without restraint. But at the sound of the commotion, the Count had come down in person. He looked at his daughter, who was sitting in the small side room usually reserved for maids, and frowned in bewilderment.
“Why is Ella here?”
“Well…”
“The room upstairs is under repair, so we had her use a room on this floor for the time being.”
Patricia, her stepmother, rushed in after belatedly hearing the news, pushing aside the flustered Kate. Baron Lloyd, who had never shown the slightest interest in household affairs, studied Ella’s room with a displeased expression. At the sight of her disheveled hair and her worn-out maid’s uniform, he could not hide his dismay.
“Fine, the room being under repair I can accept, but why is she dressed like that?”
“I’m sorry for being late, Mother. I’ll go to work right away.”
For all his neglect of his children and his womanizing, he was still a man who cared about his own standing. He would not stand idly by while his only real daughter was treated this way. Beyond the door, the whispers were growing noticeably louder. Ella thought back carefully and realized she had certainly returned to the age of eighteen, three years before she had married that madman of a husband.
‘I might be able to get word to my mother’s family.’
If so, there was still hope. Ever since her father’s remarriage, Ella’s ties to her mother’s family had been quietly severed. Her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness Ruth, had longed to see the only remaining blood relative of her youngest daughter, but Baron Lloyd had drawn a firm line, insisting that since he had already become a stranger to them, he would never give up his daughter.
Things she had not understood as a child began surfacing one after another. If she stayed here any longer, she would truly be finished. Ella ran out to the main street in her shabby clothes. When she searched her pockets and found a few coins, she managed to hire a hackney carriage.
“Take me to Planning Avenue, please!”
Her family was hopeless. But her maternal grandmother, who had always doted on Ella, would surely help her. The route from Planning Avenue to the Ruse House was quite a distance, and she had to stop a passerby to ask directions before she finally arrived.
What should she even say first? She had not been able to visit since her mother’s funeral, and she was only a granddaughter now, but apart from her grandmother’s kindness, there was no one else she could lean on. Ella brushed the dust from her skirt and approached the manor’s front gate. The house, with its white ribbons tied at the entrance, had an unsettling atmosphere.
“What on earth is this…”
People dressed in black were filing in one after another. Ella stepped into the crowd without knowing what was happening. Someone was wailing, and white flowers adorned the place. A guard seized Ella as she wandered in confusion.
“If you’ve come to beg, today is not the day. Go home.”
A terrible foreboding crept over her. No, it couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.
“Grandmother, I’ve come to see Grandmother!”
Seeing her silver hair and golden eyes, the hallmarks of the Ruth family, the guard clicked his tongue. Though the resemblance was certainly there, judging by her shabby appearance, she must be some impostor pretending to be of the Ruse bloodline.
“The Dowager has passed, and now every strange creature comes crawling out of the woodwork hoping to get a share of the estate. Get out of here!”
The guard shoved Ella roughly aside. Her ears could no longer catch what he was saying. Hearing about the disturbance at the entrance, an elderly man came out to check. Ella saw the figure of her uncle, a man she had not seen in a very long time and who, by age alone, was nearly old enough to be her grandfather.
“You… surely you’re Elladis?”
“Uncle Clyde.”
Clyde Ruth, who had inherited the title after their grandfather, looked at his shabby niece. Only this morning, his mother had breathed her last, still anxious to the very end about Ella, who had been left entirely alone.
The shameless niece, who had shown not a trace of herself when they had been desperately searching, now turned up on the very day the deceased had departed, and worse, dressed in a beggar’s rags that brought nothing but shame.
“Did your father send you here to collect the inheritance?”
“That’s not it at all. I only…”
“You shameless creature!”
Was this really the end? Under the flood of her uncle’s cold words, Ella could not find anything to say, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight. The relationship between her father, Baron Lloyd, and her uncle, Marquis Ruth, was at its worst.
His younger sister had been frail, and giving birth to Ella had further undermined her health, which ultimately cost her life. Even their mother, the Dowager, had called for nothing but Ella up until the moment she closed her eyes. He blamed all of these misfortunes on his niece. Moreover, even though the Dowager had searched so desperately for her in her final moments, Baron Lloyd never once allowed Ella to see her.
If they were going to cut ties like this, they might at least have lived well. Yet her father had taken a stepmother, and Ella, who looked so much like her late youngest sister, was dressed no differently from a servant. Clyde was suspicious of the motive behind sending her out in such a state.

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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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