Please Repay Me with Marriage! - Chapter 31

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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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Pay me back by marrying me!
Chapter 31
“Harry Miles fled with his knights. He didn’t offer a single word of apology in the end, but the young lady was quite pleased. Sir Hawk beat that bastard like he was shaking dust out of a blanket.”
“So… Zenis is safe?”
“Oh, absolutely. Lady Sara went along with her, so there’s nothing to worry about. By the way, my lord, is it true you’re holding the wedding in a month?”
“Ah… right. It turned out that way.”
Leonard nodded with an awkward expression, and Thomson let out a breath, as if a weight had finally lifted from his shoulders.
“Hearing that puts my mind at ease. The mercenaries vouched for Sir Hawk’s identity, but I still can’t quite believe it… Didn’t you say you were going up to sell the Reize Messer? How on earth did you end up proposing to the Marquis of Blair?”
“I was the one who got proposed to.”
“Huh?”
Leonard added, as though he were talking in his sleep.
“And I’m receiving five hundred million rarc in dowry gold.”
“Wh-what? Five, five hundred million rarc?”
Watching Thomson’s jaw nearly drop to the floor, Leonard sighed. Honestly, he was the one who felt like he couldn’t tell whether this was a dream or reality.
“For now… I need some sleep. I’m too tired to think straight.”
“Oh? Yes, of course. Now that you mention it, you do look exhausted. Won’t you eat something first?”
“Forget about food. I’m just going to sleep. Once I’ve rested, my thoughts should settle.”
Either way, Zenis was safe. That was enough. Now that he had confirmed it, he felt he might finally be able to stop having nightmares.
Leonard was too drained to make it to his bedroom, so he flopped onto the sofa and shut his eyes.
He hadn’t slept even ten hours in total over the past four days, and he sank into the swamp of sleep at once.
As expected, he no longer dreamed of Zenis dying, but instead, a new dream crept into his consciousness.

* * *
Those who had boasted about paying ten thousand rarc or a million rarc when drawing up a contract, only to turn their backs on it later, were hardly rare.
It must have been the same a few hundred years ago, which is why the Mercenary King Kan helped the First Emperor build the Empire.
Thanks to that, it became possible for even a lowborn mercenary to accuse a noble, but the rotten judges always sided with whoever slipped them bribes, so filing a lawsuit was worse than doing nothing.
After witnessing and suffering every filthy, miserable sight, I eventually came to understand.
That fists are closer than the law.
‘Boss, we’ve caught the messenger from Viscount Schultz. He’s carrying a complaint accusing our mercenary company, apparently.’
‘Are you an idiot? Even bribing judges depends on who you’re up against… Just let him go. Send him back with a complaint of our own, saying Viscount Schultz never paid our fee.’
‘Yes, Boss!’
‘Stop calling me boss.’
I couldn’t tell whether I was leading a mercenary company or leading a gang of street thugs in some back alley.
More than half of the newly recruited members came from the Back Alley Arena, which only made me feel that way more.
Leonard shoved aside that silver-haired head he was so sick of and strode down the corridor of Schultz Castle.
‘And the viscount?’
‘We’ve tied him up in the bedchamber. Along with his viscountess.’
‘His viscountess? Schultz had a wife? I heard she died.’
‘That was his first wife. He brought in this one as a second wife with a ridiculously large dowry, since she was so pretty, but apparently she wasn’t sweet or pliant enough. After a year, he tossed her aside and she was shut away in some back room.’
The viscountess’s circumstances, which the castle servant had described, were nothing short of pitiful.
Stripped of every duty and right as viscountess, she was all but locked in a storeroom, and from time to time the viscount would come by with a whip to vent his temper, or so they said.
‘Why did you drag that poor woman in with the rest of them? You should have just left her alone.’
‘But didn’t you tell us to hold everyone in the Schultz household, Boss?’
‘What inflexible fools.’
What crime could that woman have possibly committed to be abused by her husband and then humiliated like this?
Suddenly, the face of his younger sister, which he had buried deep in his memory, surfaced, and Leonard took a deep breath to hold back the anger rising in his chest.
Zenis.
Recalling that pitiful name, Leonard threw open the bedchamber door roughly.
And their eyes met.
A woman tied to a chair, lifting her head weakly.
Her blue eyes, staring blankly at him, were hollow, as though her soul had slipped out and left only an empty shell behind.
Though they were looking straight at each other, he got no sense at all that she was actually seeing him.
Perhaps that was why he had this thought. He wanted to see himself filling those eyes.

* * *
<From the Capital to Sierer in a single day. One month until the Gretchen Train Opening Ceremony!>
<Crowds gathering on Gretchen Street. At its heart stands the Blair Beauty Salon.>
<The Marquis of Blair’s ambitious new product. A whitening cosmetic that will make your face glow even brighter, launching soon.>
Though various press outlets cover Blair in all sorts of tones, the articles tied to Blair generally fell into just those two kinds.
Irene let out a low hmm as she flipped through the last newspaper.
“It’s quieter than I expected. I thought there’d be at least one headline asking whether Marquise Blair is being cast off by the Emperor.”
Marquise Blair’s influence doesn’t come from her vault. It comes from the Emperor, who dotes on her. So now that she has incurred his displeasure, this is exactly the moment the vultures would sink their teeth into her.
Surely the jackals lying in wait can’t be unaware of that.
Irene flung the newspaper she’d been holding onto the desk, her hand careless about it.
A newspaper she had already skimmed once lay scattered across her desk. Gathering each sheet and setting them in order was Kiri’s job.
“When you think about it, it doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. A month of confinement until the wedding day. In a way, it’s almost as if they’re giving you room to focus on preparing for the wedding, isn’t it?”
“That’s true, I suppose. Thanks to it, I could cancel all my scheduled audiences under that pretext.”
“Of course, there must have been some who tried to take a bite out of the Marquise while this opportunity lasted… but I suspect His Majesty held the articles back. After all, the Second Prince is tangled up in this too.”
“Right. And the Train Opening Ceremony is only a short while away.”
The railway platforms and track construction were among the national projects the Emperor watched over most closely. Naturally, it had taken an extremely long time just to lay the rails and choose the sites for the stations.
Once a railway was laid, the distance between that region and the Capital shrank to a day at the shortest, or three or four days at the longest.
It was a tremendous advantage and a tremendous drawback all at once. It meant it would be easier for the Emperor to keep watch over them.
Of course, the Emperor felt the weight of it just as much. Put plainly, what sort of uproar would the Capital suffer if a single train came rolling in packed with knights and soldiers?
That’s why the Emperor agonized over it again and again, finally selecting trustworthy nobles and picking their domains as candidate sites for the stations.
Unfortunately, they judged the drawbacks of having the Emperor at their backs to outweigh whatever gains a station might bring.
They deliberated among themselves and sent the Emperor a most courteous letter of refusal.
“Since this is a large-scale national project to be carried out over the long term, it would be best to begin it first in regions where circumstances are difficult.”
As if the Emperor wouldn’t know they hadn’t surrendered the sites out of goodwill.
The Emperor, who had meant to bestow his favor by offering a generous proposal, ground his teeth in resentment at their insolence.
And it was right at that moment that Irene quietly petitioned the Emperor. Would he please lay the railway through the south, where our territory is?
“Well, His Majesty does want to lay railways across the entire Empire, starting with the Blair Marquisate, after all.”
To manage that, at the very least she couldn’t appear to have fallen out with Blair until another station had been built elsewhere.
If he cast off the Marquis Blair whom he had favored so much the moment the station was completed, what would the other nobles make of it?
‘Just as I thought, the trains are surely being built to keep watch over the nobles!’
‘Still, give it just a year and everyone will be clamoring to build a station in their own territory.’
Though those nobles who had quietly padded their own purses out of the Emperor’s sight are dreading the day the Emperor’s inspectors slip into their domains without a sound.
Waindal Castle, where the first railway station was built, enjoyed an unprecedented boom, to the point it was called the second capital.
With the development of the Weinberg Great Forest having begun as well, merchant houses and every sort of business that couldn’t afford to set up shop in the capital’s prohibitively expensive land flocked there.
‘If Duke Baldwin had quietly agreed to build a station, the rails would have reached our territory too! What a fool of a man!’
Bang!
“Marquise?”
“Hm? …Ah, a dark thought just occurred to me, that’s all.”
The fist she had slammed down on the desk without thinking throbbed.
When Irene unclenched her hand and waved it, saying it was nothing, Kiri let out a small “Ah.”
“Come to think of it, it’s about time we heard from the Clio branch.”
“Clio… Right. That’s not like them to stay this quiet.”
The wedding preparations had already been set in motion from the moment she asked Selen to arrange her meeting with Leonard.
And the instant Leonard accepted her proposal, Irene sent out every wedding invitation she had prepared in advance. Of course, Viscount Kalio was not left off the list.
Still unable to give up playing the good uncle, he will be clapping with a smile at Irene’s seat as the bride’s guardian. No, he has to.
“Do you think Uncle has some way to ruin my wedding?”
“Perhaps he’ll try reaching for the future Marquis Consort?”
“Yes, with less than a month left until the wedding, that’s about the only option he has left.”
Yet Irene felt no worry at all about what tricks her uncle might play on Leonard.
‘That man would never break his word.’
Leonard always keeps the promises he makes. So long as Irene doesn’t break hers first, he will never betray her.
But…
‘I wish he would stay loyal because he loves me.’
When she didn’t see him at all, she could soothe herself, but now that she had faced him and talked with him, the desire she had pressed down so tightly swelled like smoke.
“I miss him…”
As Irene let out a long sigh, Kiri’s gaze settled on her.
Just as she opened her mouth to ask a question, a knock sounded at the door: tap, tap.

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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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