My Ex-Husband Came Back Crazy - Chapter 38

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 38
Chapter 4. Omens (5)
Lucius had just caught a deer.
He found it harder and harder to watch the creature’s long, delicate eyelashes flutter as it writhed in agony. Without hesitation, he drew his blade and ended the innocent life.
Killing without purpose, treating death as mere entertainment—it didn’t sit right with him.
“I need to bag at least a few specimens. I’d prefer to be done with this quickly.”
That was when it happened.
An arrow sang through the air, its fletching whistling, and buried itself in the tree beside him with a sharp crack.
Lucius registered the arrowhead that had nearly grazed his cheek. He raised his hand to massage the bridge of his nose, then smoothed his expression as the sound of approaching hoofbeats drew near. He turned to face the newcomer.
Atop a snow-white stallion sat a man with features so similar to Celia’s that they might have been carved from the same mold.
“Sorry—I thought you were game.”
Evandor, a slight smile playing at his lips, waved his hand with a casualness wholly inappropriate for an apology.
“I’d prefer you refrain from that sort of jest.”
At Lucius’s reply, Evandor tilted his head and smirked at him as if amused.
“You were hoping I’d be courteous to you?”
His tone carried open provocation beneath its veneer of lightness.
Lucius exhaled shortly, making no attempt to conceal his discomfort.
He hadn’t expected relations with Celia’s family to be strained—this awkward encounter caught him off guard.
“If we’re both uncomfortable, wouldn’t it be wiser to simply go our separate ways?”
Lucius took a step back and yielded the path.
Evandor made no move to accept the graceful exit. Instead, he vaulted from his horse with surprising ease.
He landed lightly, and at this equal vantage point, two pairs of differently-colored eyes met.
“Normally, I would. Unfortunately for you, I have something to say.”
His tone was designed to assert dominance, his gaze angled slightly downward, yet Lucius remained unmoved. His tolerance stemmed from one fact alone: this man was Celia’s brother.
Evandor either didn’t know or didn’t care about this mercy. His expression darkened, and he ground his teeth before hurling an abrupt question. “Do you know a woman named Diana?”
“Diana?”
The name was unfamiliar.
For a moment, Lucius wondered if she might be someone from his lost memories, but he quickly shook his head with certainty.
“I don’t believe so. She seems a lady I haven’t met.”
“No wonder you don’t know her.”
His answer appeared to be correct.
“How do I even explain this?”
Evandor clicked his tongue. Raised under Edmund’s authoritarian hand, irritation seeped into the tail of his words.
“God, what a hassle.”
Lucius continued to observe Evandor carefully.
Though he had no siblings of his own to compare, Lucius noted how many ways Celia and Evandor resembled each other beyond mere appearance. That particular way of speaking—almost singing the words—was distinctly theirs.
“She’s just some woman trying to seduce you.”
Lucius did not react immediately.
His gaze lingered for a moment on the hunting grounds, where the wind combed through the leaves.
“I’m warning you.”
Evandor stepped closer.
“Don’t give that woman a second glance.”
“It’s an unnecessary concern.”
After considering the matter, Lucius turned his full attention back to Evandor.
“Nothing of the sort will happen.”
It was an impeccable answer. Yet the fact that *the* Lucius Windmere could speak with such certainty for Celia’s sake was unexpected. At this reaction, Evandor’s hand, which had been resting on his sword hilt, twitched slightly.
The emotion in Evandor’s eyes never wavered from beginning to end—a relentless contempt.
“…Fine. But if you get distracted by that woman and start spouting nonsense to my sister again, then I really *will* step in.”
“*Again*?”
Lucius hesitated, and Evandor’s mouth twisted into a smile.
Even that expression resembled Celia’s—only fractionally more immature, his feelings plainly visible on his face, betraying his hurry.
“Don’t you remember? When you took the Marquis House Larendel’s daughter’s side and insulted my sister.”
Evandor was deliberately goading him, despite knowing Lucius had lost his memory.
Larendel.
The syllables struck Lucius’s ear like a familiar chord, and his fists clenched. He never expected to hear that family’s name again—and certainly not like this.
“In any case, don’t tell my sister I said anything.”
Evandor kicked a stone at his feet and turned away.
Yet while he departed lightly, Lucius was left churning through those words over and over again, lost in torment.
Deep into that late night, still.
“The Marquis House Larendel’s daughter….”
Lucius emerged from his brooding, covering his tired eyes with his palm.
If Evandor’s words were true, what on earth had he done to her in the past?
He could no longer avoid the question he’d been dreading. “Was she truly my lover? My mistress?”
A woman he knew before marriage.
A woman he’d defended even while belittling Celia, someone with whom he’d tried to maintain relations even after marriage—speaking of a shared “future.” He’d even attempted to purchase a separate manor in her region.
These were choices he would never have made for someone who meant nothing.
Revulsion rose in his throat like bile.
‘If there really was another woman, I need to… resolve this.’
The more he learned, the more he understood why Celia despised the man he used to be.
From what he’d pieced together, his past self had displayed an abnormal obsession under the guise of love, stacked layers of infidelity and scorn on top of it—a figure he could barely recognize.
‘What was I even doing?’
When he’d last seen Celia standing over Diana, her face had seemed calm, yet her eyes held a weary disappointment and resignation.
‘Did she think I wouldn’t help her?’
What was he to do now?
He murmured softly to himself, retracing each remnant of his past self’s legacy one by one.
……
Not long after, he rose from his seat. At the sight of Celia breathing peacefully in sleep, a calm he’d forgotten returned to him.
“Mm….”
With that, he could reach one resolution. This time, he would investigate his past connection with the Marquis House Larendel’s daughter. And if it truly had been an improper relationship….
He pressed his hands down on the bed as he stood.
‘How do I resolve this?’
A fleeting, cruel, immoral thought bloomed in his mind, wrapping him in guilt. Yet something far more selfish than remorse barely kept him standing.
‘How can I make sure I don’t lose Celia?’
His face bore the look of one who had stepped back from the threshold of hell. Even his breath rose cold, like winter’s frost.
“…Lucius?”
“…Shh. Go back to sleep.”
He concealed that darkness, pressing his palm against Celia’s eyelids as she began to stir awake, her eyes opening into narrow slits.
***
While Lucius and Celia were away at the hunting competition.
Eleanor, the Duchess of House Windmere, paced through her chambers without rest.
Her steps traced no steady path; they faltered again and again. Each time her skirt brushed the corner of a piece of furniture, she startled as though shocked, her breath catching.
“My lady.”
“Just a moment, just a moment, Lina. Please, I beg you—be quiet.”
When her lady’s maid approached cautiously, Eleanor flinched backward with a tremor running through her frame.
Her pallid face buried itself in her hands as she swallowed her shaking breath.
“You must prepare yourself now.”
Yet small hands could hide nothing.
“The Duke has returned.”
At those words, Eleanor’s face drained of all color.
Her husband, who had gone to the western region on business, had come back. Yet there was no gladness in her expression—only a deathly pallor, over which she had layered a facade of composure by force of will.
“Yes, I must greet him. I must greet him properly.”
She tried to appear unmoved, but she bit her lips so hard again and again that deep wounds formed.
“Calm yourself. It will be fine.”
“But Lina… he doesn’t yet know that Lucius has lost his memory.”
Lina rushed to steady her, but Eleanor clung to her like a drowning woman, crying out. “I’m afraid! I’m terrified! How could the Lucius he sees now possibly please him?”
Her pupils trembled with anxiety as the past overlaid itself upon the present.
“What if he tries to manage the boy as carelessly as he did when he was young? What if he raises his hand again under the guise of ‘education’?”
“My lady…”
“If he tries to lay hands on him once more…!”
Eleanor’s words caught in her throat, and she fell silent, stiffening.
It was as though some terrible possibility had only now taken solid form. Her pupils dilated slowly.
“Surely not….”
The whisper escaped her lips.
“Would he do the same to Celia?”
A cold silence fell over the room.
Lina and the other ladies’ maids who had served Eleanor for many years fell silent in perfect unison.
“He wouldn’t… Lucius losing his memory—he wouldn’t blame Celia for it. Surely he wouldn’t go that far—.”
She could not finish the sentence.
A hairline fracture was spreading across the fragile peace they had barely maintained.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————