Since It's My First Time Being a Lady, I'll Cause Some Trouble - Chapter 28

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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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A Lady Does This for the First Time – Episode 28
Rosemay fixed me with a hard stare and whispered urgently.
“You’re lying. Lying, lying. A barefaced lie!”
I shrugged at her as if to say: believe it or don’t.
Miranda shoved Rosemay aside and hung against the bars again.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry for everything! Please, just get us out of here! You know as well as I do that Penli the Marquis doesn’t have the mind for treason!”
“Mother!”
“He was just a puppet. There’s someone else behind this—the real one! And they haven’t even been caught yet!”
Miranda shrieked as if seized by hysteria. It echoed all the way down the corridor, yet Gordon remained silent. He seemed to have surrendered to his fate.
“Then who is it?”
She was just about to open her mouth.
A commotion erupted from down the hallway. A guard hurried into one of the cells without hesitation.
It was near Gordon’s cell.
“Fetch a physician at once!”
At his command, another guard scrambled into motion. The guard left in the cell shouted to rouse the prisoner.
“Wake up, Gordon!”
Miranda and Rosemay’s faces went ashen.
“Father? Father, are you all right? What’s happening right now?”
“Husband! Can you hear me? Is anyone there? Get me out of here! I need to see my husband!”
I ran toward Gordon’s cell.
A guard tried to block me and hide the interior, but his body couldn’t shield the entire barred door.
Gordon lay collapsed on the floor.
The physician who had rushed over checked his pulse, then shook his head slowly. He was already dead.
In the shock of it, I fell silent.
‘Did he take his own life under the weight of the execution sentence?’
But why so suddenly?
As questions piled up, a scream pierced the air from where Gordon and his daughter were held.
The Countess, pale as a ghost, was frantically waving the guards over, motioning them to hurry.
Sensing something was gravely wrong, all but one guard rushed toward them.
Miranda was coughing violently, cold sweat pouring down her face. It was the same terrible cough I’d heard from Gordon earlier when he seemed to be trying to silence us.
Her body convulsed sharply, and blood trickled between the fingers pressed to her lips. Then she collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Rosemay screamed and shook Miranda. A guard held her back to let the physician examine her mother, but she was inconsolable.
Just as with Gordon, the physician shook his head. She too was dead.
“Mother! Mother! Mother, wake up!”
Rosemay’s cry was one of disbelief. Tears streamed down her cheeks, falling one after another.
Her knees buckled beneath her. Her breath grew ragged through her sobs. Then she began to cough.
The way her body convulsed was deeply wrong. It was exactly like Miranda in the moments before death.
I wasn’t the only one who sensed something amiss.
The physician quickly took Rosemay’s pulse and examined her eyes and mouth.
“She needs to go to the Medical Quarters immediately. Her condition is grave.”
A guard lifted Rosemay into his arms and hurried down the corridor with the physician.
With each step he took, her head lolled helplessly.
I don’t recall how we returned to the Marquis Residence.
All I remember is being ushered into the carriage by the guards as if being driven out.
Though the Gordon family had appeared sickly, they weren’t the sort to collapse and die so swiftly. No matter how I turned it over in my mind, the whole thing felt unnatural.
It was as if someone had killed them to silence them. No—it had to be. Miranda said there was a real mastermind behind all this.
And that person hadn’t even been caught. They were still out there.
‘Did Rosemay survive?’
She was probably dead too.
‘She was wretched, but not deserving of death.’
And from what I’d seen of her behavior, she didn’t even seem to know about the treason.
‘Will we be safe?’
If the entire Gordon family had been murdered for silencing, then what of the Countess and myself, who had witnessed and heard everything firsthand?
“…Damn it.”
I almost laughed at the thought of it.
I stopped a rebellion and saved the nation, so why does everything turn out like this? Why do I have to be punished as a reward?
My teeth ground together.
“Whoever you are, I don’t know your name yet—but if I ever catch you, I’ll kill you.”
* * *
Dante felt a chill spreading through his chest.
The moment Dante returned to the Prince’s Chamber after finishing business elsewhere, the first thing he saw was the Empress.
Though she maintained an expressionless facade, Dante caught the displeasure simmering beneath.
What had transpired during his absence was obvious enough.
‘I understand a mother’s desire to see her son prosper, but…….’
Everyone was singing the praises of Jereon’s achievements — thwarting the rebellion, apprehending the sprawling criminal organization.
The Empress would not have missed this opportunity, and had surely moved to expand her faction’s support behind Jereon.
But the crucial matter was that Jereon himself harbored no interest in the Imperial Throne.
“I have returned, Your Highness.”
Dante entered the chamber with deliberately light tones, masking the heaviness in his heart.
“As you commanded, I conducted a thorough investigation of the domestic placement agencies, and irregularities surfaced. Apparently the brokers enticed young women with promises of employment even without letters of introduction.”
Jereon’s face darkened as Dante laid out the details of the human trafficking scheme.
Though Dante concluded by noting that the brokers and agency directors faced inevitable severe punishment, Jereon’s expression refused to brighten.
His voice, when he ordered Dante to focus on victim restitution and commended him for his efforts, was mechanical to the point of lifelessness.
His gaze remained fixed on scattered books across the floor.
Dante picked up one of them.
*Moan! Oh, mistress, not there! ~The Maid’s Tale~*
The cover alone screamed third-rate erotic fiction, yet the contents were dense with Military Science.
Jereon studied Imperial Studies in solitude — not to become emperor, but because a territorial lord required the same capabilities as a sovereign.
The reason Jereon resorted to this elaborate deception was the Empress. He knew precisely how events would unfold if she caught sight of him studying.
‘If only His Highness the Prince shared Her Majesty’s ambitions.’
If Dante were honest, he wished Jereon coveted the throne. Not that he harbored any grievance against the Crown Prince, but Arca struck Dante as fundamentally suspect.
He seemed to follow a predetermined path while harboring entirely different thoughts beneath.
“Something on your mind?”
At Jereon’s words, Dante felt caught, heat creeping up his neck.
“The Guild commission fee, Your Highness.”
He blurted out whatever came to mind.
“You promised additional payment upon successful completion — how much should we offer? I’d think at minimum double the initial advance, wouldn’t you?”
“Ah.”
Light returned to Jereon’s eyes. Right. That was so. The rebellion’s failure had come about because the Guild had successfully completed their commission.
‘And part of that success was mine.’
That night had been eventful in ways he could tell no one. Having been blindsided from the start, any man with a shred of dignity would keep his silence.
“Not much time has passed since then. Call it interest — make it triple.”
Jereon’s gaze fell upon the Evening Newspaper atop his desk, which carried an analysis of the late Marquis Penli’s failed rebellion.
Experts had offered various opinions beyond the bare fact of his discovery by the Second Prince — insufficient justification for the revolt, disagreement among conspirators, the location where rebels had been harbored.
The article also covered Ulfina Nezer’s role. According to one analysis, her undermining of the Marquis’s reputation had disrupted the cohesion of his co-conspirators.
“Hmm…….”
Jereon still could not believe it.
The person who had sought his aid and spent the entire day at his side had not been Ulfina Nezer at all, but a Guild operative.
“Two people equally violent and reckless? How is such a thing even possible?”
“Pardon?”
“Merely thinking aloud. And throw in the Diamond I received from my aunt last month.”
At his words, Dante’s expression turned grave.
“……Your Highness. That is genuinely expensive.”
“I’m aware.”
“Not merely expensive, but truly, genuinely expensive.”
“I know it’s truly, genuinely expensive, so just give it.”
Dante let out an exasperated sound.
“Do you have money to spare? You’re offering that extraordinarily costly piece as the commission fee?”
Jereon made an even louder exasperated sound.
“If we’ve prevented a rebellion, that much is only fitting. And here you are quibbling over value?”
Dante was exasperated — all the more so because Jereon was right.

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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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