Rewriting the Trash Ending - Chapter 47

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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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47.

***

Underground, where sunlight never reached.
Magda shivered in the damp cold darkness.
A sodden, freezing floor; a coarse, foul-smelling blanket; thin gruel that reeked of fish, fit only for commoners’ teeth.
Whether a day had passed or four, she couldn’t say—and this was all she had been given.
Ash-gray fury glinted in Magda’s eyes.
‘They want to erase Mober from the Noble Registry?’
Reason told her it was a hollow threat.
To strip her maternal family’s title for tricking one Imperial girl—it was absurd.
Clearly it was mere intimidation, meant to force an apology to the Grand Duke’s wife.
No matter how incensed they were, there was no precedent for stripping a family’s rank over a single woman’s slight.
If she just held on, they’d eventually yield, feigning they couldn’t break her resolve.
But her husband, drowning in drink as he was, was one thing—what troubled her was that her nephew had shown no sign of response.
It shouldn’t happen, but if she died in this vast stone tomb where no one would think to find her…
A chill raced down her spine.
‘Yes, even one-in-a-million things do occur…’
If she clung stubbornly to her pride now, she might rupture things entirely with her nephew—and that was unthinkable.
Magda decided, for the moment, to set her pride aside.
She hated the thought of bowing her head to the girl who had mocked her, yet she couldn’t sacrifice her relationship with her nephew just to preserve her dignity.
‘Once I weather this storm, everything will work itself out.’
An old woman’s apology, a few shed tears—surely he wouldn’t turn his back on that.
She was scanning the door anxiously when it swung open.
The Grand Duke’s wife entered.
“Captain Kaiden, wait outside for a moment.”
“Your Grace, but—”
“There are things I need to say to her alone.”
“Very well. I’ll stand guard outside. Should anything happen, please call for me at once.”
Kaiden withdrew, his warning crackling with barely veiled menace.
“Your… Your Grace…”
Magda lifted her head, feigning weakness.
Nearly starved, her voice came out hoarse without any pretense.
“I… I was entirely at fault. My concern for His Grace simply overwhelmed me, and I spoke terrible words to Your Grace. I know I’ve caused you pain—please, I beg your forgiveness…”
Lumiere was silent for a long moment before she spoke.
“I’ve heard such words countless times since I was born, right there in the Imperial Court.”
“Yes…?”
“A dancer’s bastard child? A breeding mare? Such words cannot hurt me.”
She had witnessed too much to react to each insult, to let each one wound her.
A laugh escaped her lips.
“You said you’d bite your tongue off?”
“That was only because I wanted to beg Your Grace’s forgiveness—”
“No.”
“Yes…?”
“If you’d truly grasped your wrongdoing, you’d never have dared summon me with threats of death. You’d have waited meekly for your sentence.”
Besides, if she’d had any genuine remorse to begin with, she never would have harbored such plans to desecrate her husband’s grave in the first place.
“I… I truly meant nothing of the sort—”
“If I hadn’t come, you were planning to use my husband as leverage that way, weren’t you?”
Magda’s face went rigid.
Lumiere let out a hollow laugh at the sight.
Just as she’d suspected.
“That’s why I came myself.”
She had to crush any false hope—ensure that her words couldn’t wound her husband.
“It’s a misunderstanding—!”
“I cannot forgive you.”
Her voice fell like the blade of a guillotine, severing all pretense.
“I don’t care what lies spill from that filthy mouth. But it defiled my husband’s ears.”
Not once, but twice.
At the Gohui Banquet, and then in the reception room.
She had torn open the scars her husband had carried his entire life—not once, but twice.
“…You’re someone worthy of being given only precious things, and yet how am I to forgive you?”
Lumiere turned away as though she had nothing more to hear.
It was only then, watching that indifferent back, that Magda understood.
The Grand Duchess had never intended to forgive her from the start.
She had come only to announce the end.
“Your Grace!”
Magda scrambled forward on her knees and seized the hem of her dress.
Her mind insisted that if she could only turn her nephew’s heart, all would be well—but her instincts screamed otherwise.
Even if her nephew forgave her, this woman before her would find some way, any way, to bury her in the mire.
Looking back, everything that had befallen her was because of the Grand Duchess.
The slip of the tongue at the Gohui Banquet, the ladies who had fawned at her feet suddenly turning their backs overnight, even her imprisonment.
There was no doubt—this woman had orchestrated it all, had deliberately driven her into this abyss.
Otherwise, how could her nephew have appeared at precisely that moment?
Magda fell to her knees at Lumiere’s feet.
It shamed her to kneel before one so much younger, clutching at her skirts, but she could not let it end like this.
She could not become a commoner, stripped from the Noble Registry, the contemptible thing she had always despised.
To live out her days doing menial labor beneath others’ boots, stripped of her estate and fortune both—to become that common wretch?
“If I… if I spend my life in silence, never showing my face at the Grand Duke’s Residence again, would that not suffice? Your Grace, I beg you, take pity on this old woman…!”
But the hem slipped through Magda’s fingers like water.
“Whatever happens inside these walls from now on—tell no one.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
It was a declaration that she would not care whether Magda lived or died.
After speaking those words to the guard, Lumiere turned and left with Kaiden.
As the door closed, suffocating despair swallowed Magda whole.
“No, no! How can you leave like this? Your Grace, you must come back, you must!”
Clang, clang.
Her desperate shrieks echoed after them as she shook the bars, but Lumiere did not look back.
And the moment her presence faded into distance, a dark shadow emerged from around a corner deeper in the corridor.
….
Akside stood silently behind for a long while, watching until her delicate silhouette disappeared up the stairs.

***

Fear. Awe. Avoidance.
For a long time, these three reactions encompassed nearly everything people felt toward Akside.
The Grand Dukes who had guarded this harsh land across generations were revered for their power—greater than any other—yet every single one of them had called forth their mother’s death.
So no one sought his company.
Those who did were careful to avoid the position of Grand Duchess, hoping instead to become his concubine.
But he bore them no ill will.
He was born at the cost of his mother’s life, a bloodline continued through another woman offered as sacrifice.
Every year his body grew bestial and degraded in rut.
If he himself loathed the blood flowing through his veins, how could anyone wish to stand at his side?
It was a natural resolution to end this cursed bloodline in his generation.
And yet.

“…You’re someone worthy of being given only precious things, and yet how am I to forgive you?”

When he received word that she would meet with the Countess and went down to the dungeon.
At the moment he heard those words, he could do nothing but stand there for a long time.
In her voice, he had felt something deep and blind—a tender affection.
Their bond was one born of political necessity, and she had no will of her own in this marriage, and yet….
Why did her heart feel as though it had been built and fortified long ago?
The study, suffused with pale moonlight.
Akside, sitting at his desk and quietly raising his glass, let out a soft laugh.
It amused him that he had unconsciously tried to interpret her feelings in the direction of his own desire.
Tender affection—impossible.
She, like him at the beginning, likely felt only a sense of duty to this marriage, whatever its political origins.
But even such a small measure of warmth was enough.
What she had said to Mober’s wife had become solace for a heart worn thin by self-loathing.
The mere thought of those words kindled a gentle heat in a corner of his chest.
Akside set down his glass and rose from his seat.
He could not bear it any longer—he had to see her face.
His feet carried him without hesitation toward the bedroom.

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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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