My Ex-Husband Came Back Crazy - Chapter 9

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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 9
Chapter 1. The Fissure (9)
Celia had always been confident.
Until now, she had always managed to endure him, and sometimes even prevailed.
So she was certain that even if Lucius tried to intimidate her with a force she couldn’t possibly withstand, she would not back down.
But she had never imagined anything like this, and so she had no idea what to do.
She was not naive, and he was not someone who had offered his heart to her, yet it was happening all the same.
Under an assault she had never experienced before, she was completely helpless.
She couldn’t bear the heat creeping into her face. Her pale hair couldn’t contain all of his words—it shattered. Her eyes stung at the tingling of his fingertips and the scraping softness of his voice.
“I’m curious, Celia.”
While she floundered, he seized the opening like an opportunity.
In this room that belonged entirely to her, he—a man who could never truly be hers—curved his cruel lips and manipulated her with his base words.
“Fill in the moments I can’t remember.”
His thick tongue, bearing its marks, traced across her reddened lips.
“So I can reach you the way I did before.”
His eyes gleamed with pale desire.
In those green eyes, the red light of longing reflected something foreign. His fingertips trailed across her skin, leaving a chill in their wake. His breath circled near her temples, exhaling long and slow between his teeth.
Hot and low.
His longing leaked out raw—in breath, in trembling.
‘Really…? He really wants me?’
Even if his memory of her had faded and his feelings had disappeared, this could not be.
This was never an emotion that Lucius Windmere could harbor for Celia Brickwell.
In this moment, Celia alone remembered the resentment between them.
The memories of misunderstanding, neglect, competition, and insult they had accumulated over more than a decade had become sedimentary layers of hardened feeling.
Lucius should not be this way toward Celia.
He should never be this way toward her.
They were symbols to each other of everything they must not become. The memory that only she now possessed still clung vividly somewhere in Celia’s throat.
What if everything in that head of his had drained away and a cunning goblin from a fairy tale had taken its place instead? What if that goblin were whispering to Lucius about the most effective way to torment Celia?
When Lucius clashed with her, he had always used every trick except brute force to overwhelm her. The man called the greatest gentleman of the Abilante Empire often behaved like a male animal that had lost all restraint in her presence.
But because she refused to yield easily and insisted on perching atop his head to mock him, he was finally trying another tactic.
Her pupils trembled in convulsion, and cold sweat rolled down her spine. Tension spread to her fingertips, making her grip the fabric she was holding even tighter.
“Please… stop.”
The broken sound tore through the air like a dissonance.
A Lucius who wasn’t cruel felt foreign to her—as if he were an entirely different person—and she couldn’t find the words to scratch at his depths the way she normally would.
Her mind had gone blank, and she had missed the chance—the chance to hurl curses at this man who was as much her enemy as anyone could be, to call him a rutting beast with an empty skull, to shove him away and finally bring him to his knees beneath her.
Or rather, she hadn’t missed it—she was surrendering it, pleading with him to stop.
Lucius’s smile, which had been there as he actively pressed against her and laughed, finally faded.
Instead, he studied the trembling Celia closely. His eyes, which had held greed, traced relentlessly over her hunched, pitiable shoulders as she clutched her skirts and shrank away from him.
“You said it’s been about two and a half years since we married, didn’t you? And I’ve known you for over a decade.”
He murmured something quietly after that, but Celia didn’t hear it.
The eternally long silence passed swiftly.
His hand withdrew from her back. In the place the warmth had been, the summer night air—which she sometimes loved and sometimes hated—drifted gently against her skin.
At the sound of his movement, she reacted keenly. Like a squirrel caught gathering acorns, Celia’s whole body jostled.
After a long moment of searching for words, he finally opened his mouth.
“It’s gotten late, hasn’t it, Celia.”
At his tender, gentle voice, her eyes finally moved.
It was a voice that the real Lucius would never let her hear.
He lifted her hand slightly. Since she did not permit bare skin contact with anyone but a fiancé or husband, she wrinkled her nose at the unfamiliar warmth passing from his hand to hers.
Lucius guided her small hand gently.
“Should we go to bed before it gets any later?”
“Sleep… together?”
He bit his lip slightly and released it.
“No. I just want to watch you fall asleep, then I’ll leave.”
The word of refusal came to her lips and then fled.
She didn’t feel like adding anything more, and besides, she had the feeling that even if she kicked him out with her heel, he wouldn’t go.
In the end, she was dragged along like a reluctant thing and found herself lying on the bed.
To avoid him sitting perched on the edge of the mattress, she turned and lay facing away.
She wrapped herself in the blanket like a caterpillar, drawing her knees tight to her chest.
The air in the room with him was uncomfortable. Everything felt like thorns pricking her. Celia squeezed her eyes shut and recited the few prayers she had memorized silently in her heart. She needed to find peace of mind.
But even the sacred prayer couldn’t untangle her twisted mind.
How long had it been like that?
Once Celia’s breathing had stabilized and he judged her asleep, he soon rose.
The bed dipped where his weight had been.
His footsteps—slow, rhythmic, controlled—echoed quietly through the room, unchanged even though he had lost his memory. He opened the heavy door carefully, then closed it without a sound.
Only then did true peace return.
Celia pulled the blanket over her head.
Disagreeable, arrogant, infuriating Lucius Windmere.
Yes, I’ll let you have this one because you’ve lost your memory.
But you don’t know, do you, now that you’ve forgotten?
That if you come at me with a method I’ve never seen before, I’ll endure it once—but never twice.
We have waged small wars in front of people’s eyes and hidden from them alike, but until now, neither of us has ever seized victory.
“Today’s insult… I will absolutely… never let it stand.”
Celia muttered through gritted teeth, her blanket bunched in her fists.
***
Damned Lucius.
Cursed Lucius.
“You’re useless to my life!”
Early the next morning, Celia, who had been awake all night, clenched her fist around the pen in her hand as if to snap it.
“No, this must be a trial sent by God to temper my loosened spirit.”
Last night she had been too startled, too swept up.
Because he had acted like a stranger, she had certainly lost her composure.
Otherwise she could never have been so foolish with him.
If he were a stranger she didn’t know at all, it would be different—but the face sitting atop that neck was unmistakably Lucius, and the low voice that settled into her ears syllable by syllable was his, and the annoyingly refined manner of speech was his, and the large hands and a frame nearly twice the size of her own were undeniably his.
In the end, she hurled the pen she had been holding to write a letter to her father onto the table and cried out:
“Divorce is something I can manage one way or another—I have all my fingers. And I have the contract he and I signed, so what does it matter? Whether his mind is broken or whatever, I don’t care.”
It frustrated her that he was making baseless assumptions over there, and it frustrated her even more that she was caught up in it.
“I was just too startled yesterday.”
In High Society, intimate contact was not permitted except with a fiancé. And Celia had never had a fiancé before marrying Lucius—she had only ever had candidates.
To be momentarily startled by an attack she hadn’t anticipated was simply human instinct.
As she was justifying this to herself, a maid slipped into the room.
“Madam, you have a visitor.”
“A visitor?”
If she stayed quiet in the room, hardly anyone sought her out.
The Duchess certainly wouldn’t have come. And if it were Lucius, the maid wouldn’t have announced him that way.
“Yes, the young master has arrived.”
There was only one person the maid she had brought from Brickwell would call “young master.”
‘So Evandor’s come.’
Why so early in the morning? A headache was already pressing in.
“…Show him in.”
The door opened gently, and a shadow damp with morning sunlight slowly slipped inside.
Perhaps because it was early morning, he was dressed quite casually, and he yawned without any propriety as he sauntered closer.
“Sister, did you sleep well?”
Watching Evandor smile and wave his hand loosely, she remembered that Lucius was not the only presence in this house that scraped her down to the very bottom.

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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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