My Husband Lives in a Painting - Chapter 7

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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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My Husband Lives in a Painting — Episode 7
To catch a tiger, you had to puff out your own mane just as magnificently.
I wasn’t sure if this would help, but I went behind the house, retrieved a shovel, and began digging the earth right in front of him with deliberate ostentation.
It was good exercise, at least.
Ten minutes into the silent digging, the man who had been lying there peacefully finally opened his mouth.
“But Aube. You don’t seem to understand my strength very well—a Rope this simple would come undone with just a little effort.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course. You tied it so carefully that I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so I just stayed put.”
Regardless of what he said, I continued with my digging.
As I worked, it became oddly engaging.
Moving my body made me feel refreshed and invigorated.
Since I gave no reaction, the man exerted himself with a grunt. “But… it won’t come loose. Hm. Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“……Hey, couldn’t you untie this for me? I feel like my arm is about to come off.”
Such dramatics.
I tried to brush past his plea without responding.
But then I remembered how, in my haste to bind him, I’d bent his arm halfway back, and I glanced at him again.
“Ah, it hurts…….”
Seeing Kamyu’s face twisted in pain moved something in me, but I steeled myself and replied coldly.
“I don’t want to.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t want to.”
……
His expression froze in an instant.
Wait—that was all an act!
As I recoiled in shock, the man stared at me as if trying to see through me. As though he were reading my very thoughts.
There was no hint of remorse in that gaze.
Convinced this wouldn’t work, I threw the shovel aside and crouched down in front of him.
“I’ll untie the Rope. But first, there’s something we need to settle clearly.”
“Settle?”
The man blinked innocently, feigning ignorance.
But I fixed him with a stern look and held up the Fish-shaped Cake Mold.
“If you lie to me, I’m going to hit you again.”
The change in the man’s expressionless face began right then and there.
“Wait, Aube. Let’s talk about this properly.”
“You remember how much that hurt, don’t you?”
The man bit his lip and nodded.
“You don’t want to get hit again, do you?”
Nod, nod.
“Then tell me the truth.”
“Tell you…what?”
With one cheek pressed to the ground, he swallowed nervously, his manner so harmless it was impossible to believe he’d been pressing me just moments before.
Anyone observing would have assumed without question that I was the one abducting and coercing him.
But it was only the two of us here.
I asked.
“You’re not my husband, are you?”
……
The man clamped his lips shut like a clam.
Watching his blue eyes dart about as though searching for an escape, I felt both a surge of vindication and, at the same time, a strange hollowness settling in my chest.
‘I’m the one who asked the question, so why do I want to run away before hearing the answer?’
As if giving voice to my confused heart, a breeze swept through the Flower Field, whistling softly.
“……Does it really matter?”
The man answered.
Though he’d intended to dodge the question, his evasion itself gave me certainty.
This man was not my husband. Never.
……
My hesitation stretched on. Indignation burned at the back of my neck, but my body had gone rigid as stone, immovable.
The fury with which I’d wielded the shovel—as though I might dig a grave—had been nothing but bluster. I didn’t have the spine to harm this man wearing Kamyu’s face.
‘If only I’d pretended not to know. Perhaps I could have had eternal peace.’
The moment a suffocating doubt pressed down on him, his body trembled slightly.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Sorry. Did I disturb you?”
His disheveled pink hair fell across his eyes, half-concealing, half-revealing them.
“To be honest, I laughed because I was enjoying myself.”
……
“I never dreamed I’d be caught off guard like this. I never thought you’d tie me up so thoroughly.”
“And?”
“And so… I think…”
A faint blush crept across the man’s cheeks.
“I think I’ve fallen for you.”
In that instant, my face twisted reflexively, without thought.
“Are you insane?”
But my reaction seemed only to delight him.
Bound entirely in Rope, he laughed until his whole body shook—a testament to his utter loss of reason.
The man, having regained his composure, narrowed his eyes prettily and continued.
“Aube. I’ll admit I was hasty. I apologize for frightening you.”
Yet his gaze suggested genuine incomprehension.
“But you had no lingering attachments to life anyway, didn’t you? I made the proposal because I saw and felt something in you. I’m the type to stretch out where I can rest comfortably.”
……
“So why did you refuse my offer?”
Suspicion flickered—perhaps this, too, was a spell meant to enthrall me. Yet I found no words to counter him.
The truth was, I didn’t know myself.
I held no great attachment to life, and if I vanished tomorrow, there wasn’t a soul who would search for me.
So why?
Over his blue eyes, as they met my wavering gaze, something strange bloomed.
……
He had been watching me in silence, as though working through a complex riddle, when his eyes suddenly widened with sudden comprehension.
“I see.”
In the next moment, his gaze softened.
“You want revenge on the one who killed me.”
“…What did you just say?”
The sensation of hair standing on end swept across my mind.
“Yes. I wondered why it was so easy… If you’re human, you’d harbor such a desire. Wouldn’t you?”
The man continued, as though speaking to himself, his lips curved in a languid smile.
“Especially you, Aube—you wanted to leave a mark of me so badly that you painted my Portrait directly. I understand the desire for revenge well enough.”
…!
The man had pierced through my heart with startling precision.
Since hearing of his death and completing his funeral rites until this very day, I had…
‘Never once accepted that his death was real.’
Kamyu took his own life that night—the very night he promised to show me the Studio.
No matter how I turned it over in my mind, it made no sense.
I had seen the anticipation in his eyes when he spoke of showing it to me. I saw it clearly.
Kamyu never made promises he couldn’t keep.
So his death could not have been by his own hand. It was the work of another’s touch.
“How about this?”
The man drew his upper body forward with a sharp flex of his abdomen, using only momentum.
With both legs bound, he knelt before me—a posture of submission. Yet between the disordered strands of his hair, his eyes gleamed with a chill that defied his helpless position.
“I’ll help you with your Revenge.”
“What do you—”
“And when all of your Revenge is complete, I’ll take your soul in return.”
His words flowed smoothly, without hesitation—as though he regarded this entire situation as nothing more than a light game.
“Once you’ve achieved your purpose of Revenge, there won’t be a single shred of attachment left in your life, will there?”
I neither refuted his words easily nor readily agreed.
The man’s low voice slipped into that silence like water through a crack.
“Aube. You don’t want to part from me like this either, do you?”
……
“I need you to settle my grievance. Yes?”
At his words, the most vivid of all forgotten memories surfaced like shards of glass.

“What is this? A red ribbon?”
“It’s a substitute for holding your hand. You dislike being touched by me, after all.”

There was a time when that simple man had brought a red ribbon for me, who once recoiled from his touch as though it were a sickness.
He’d tied one end around his own wrist and placed the other in my palm, his light joke easing the tension that had seized me in that moment.
“Ah, I wonder if it might look too much like I’m walking a dog? Since you carry yourself with such grace, it might appear that way.”
“…What? What do you mean—”
“If it’s going to look that way regardless, why not loop it around your neck instead?”
He held the crimson ribbon against his pale throat, laughing again in that playful manner.
I couldn’t look away. The delicate curve of his neck, the prominence of his Adam’s apple beneath it—and in the moment the red ribbon touched that skin, I swallowed without thinking.
“You’re… really going to put it around your neck?”
“Ah.”
Only then did I come to my senses, heat rushing to my face. To hide the embarrassment that pricked at me, I turned on Kamyu sharply, as if placing blame.
“Kamyu, that’s enough.”
“But your eyes were shining strangely just now.”
“Mine? You must have seen wrong.”
I turned away curtly, and moments later came the sound of him stifling laughter in his throat.
“If that’s what you say, then that must be it.”
‘What kind of expression was I making then?’
I’d certainly turned away with my arms crossed, looking cross—yet somehow, without meaning to, I’d found myself laughing.
My guard had always crumbled just like that, undone by a few words from Kamyu.
“Aube.”
Clouds gathered without warning, blocking out the warm sun.
A chill began to settle low across the earth, where a deep shadow had fallen.
“You’ll make a contract with me, won’t you?”
“……”
This is clearly a devil’s whisper. There’s no doubt of it.
Another voice within me was screaming a desperate warning from the depths of my chest.
I knew better than anyone that this choice was wrong.
But the face of Kamyu that surfaced in that moment, the hand of his I’d failed to hold—
they blinded me.
‘I must atone.’
For myself, who had realized love far too late.
As a final apology offered to a husband who had already departed.
“…I will.”
In that instant, the wind began to blow.
The man before me wore a smile of breathtaking beauty—one I had never seen before.
And at the same time, a smile so perfectly sinister it sent a chill down my spine.
“An excellent choice, Aube.”

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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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