The Obsessive Male Leads Want to Eat Me Alive - Chapter 109

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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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Chapter 109
‘The young lady of this house…?’
Bewilderment struck me first.
Was I truly the daughter of this family?
The notion that I had a family felt impossibly foreign to me.
A strange tremor and overwhelming emotion swept through my chest first, followed by a torrent of confusion.
―I’d simply lived as a bread-and-butter nobody until now.
Or perhaps as an orphan.
In this novel, I was nothing more than a nameless extra.
I’d believed I’d lived an entire existence devoid of presence.
From the moment I died as an orphan, struck down by a drunk driver on a motorcycle, and even after possessing this body—all of it.
That was the sum of my life.
‘…And yet, I have a mother waiting for me, and I’m nobility of the highest rank.’
Moreover, everyone welcomed me with such warmth.
‘This doesn’t feel real at all.’
I gripped the locket in my hand, frozen in place for a moment.
The moment I stepped inside, I feared I’d be scolded for coming to the wrong place and cast out.
It was then.
A gentle voice reached me, as if pushing softly at my back.
“You may enter now, Miss Anette.”
Kyle’s warm hand guided me forward.
When I met his gaze, eyes as verdant and fresh as new leaves smiled down at me.
It was a familiar, reassuring smile.
“Yes, Kyle.”
I followed the path the servants and butlers had created, finally stepping inside.
The interior was so lavishly decorated that I gasped the moment I entered.
Expensive carpets covered the floors, the tapestries adorning the walls were exquisitely detailed, and mysterious artifacts decorated the space.
And the chandelier on the ceiling!
I forgot entirely why I’d come to find my mother, my eyes fixed in wonder on the ceiling.
Beneath a ceiling fresco bearing the unmistakable mark of a master craftsman, an enormous chandelier hung like a diamond, glittering brilliantly.
―It was probably real diamond.
The head butler, his gloved hand gesturing toward the inner staircase, spoke with measured courtesy.
“This way, if you please.”
Overwhelmed by the aura of the Duke’s mansion, steeped in generations of history, I found my voice becoming smaller without realizing it.
“Th-thank you.”
“―Please call me Victoria, Miss Anette. And speak freely with me.”
Victoria, whom I’d thought stern and sharp, gazed at me with unexpected warmth.
“I am your lady’s maid, after all.”
“…!”
I managed only a slight nod.
“Would it be alright if I ease into the formalities after a bit of adjustment? I’ve only been a lady of the household for a minute, having lived as a commoner until now.”
Victoria smiled softly at my words.
‘So she does know how to smile.’
“As you wish, my lady.”
“Thank you.”
She seemed kinder than her appearance suggested.
Or perhaps she reserved her kindness only for those she considered family—her demeanor at the entrance had been frankly terrifying, like a lioness.
As I climbed the spiraling, ornate staircase, large framed portraits came into view along the walls.
Without thinking, I stopped in my tracks and stared at them blankly.
―Were these portraits of the successive Dukes?
Indeed they were.
“These are portraits of the Dukes of Valienne, my lady.”
“….”
Looking at those portraits, something finally felt real to me.
Every Duke throughout history—whether male or female—possessed the same honey-blonde hair and pale green eyes.
I pointed to the most recently hung portrait of a woman.
“…Is that perhaps…”
“Yes, my lady.”
Victoria gestured toward the portrait with an expression brimming with pride.
“This is Derchis Valienne, the Duchess. Your mother.”
I could tell from her expression alone.
How deeply the head steward trusted and revered her master.
“She was a most admirable woman, worthy of great respect. She was compassionate to those beneath her and always wise.”
A hint of longing flickered in her brown eyes.
My gaze lingered on that portrait for a long time as well.
‘She looks like me.’
I wondered if I might come to resemble her as I grew older.
“…She’s resting in bed now, isn’t she?”
Deep sorrow filled the steward’s eyes.
The way she looked at me,
that’s when I recognized it as pity.
I was confronted with a shocking reality.
“The Duchess passed into eternal rest this morning.”
* * *
The room was filled with fragrant flowers placed in tribute to the deceased.
I approached the bed with a face devoid of all sense of reality.
There lay a woman with honey-blonde hair arranged neatly, sleeping peacefully with a serene expression.
She truly looked as though she were merely asleep.
This woman―
‘…is my mother.’
Her face was noticeably thinner than it appeared in the portrait.
That fact made my chest ache strangely.
A mother I had never seen before, yet here she was.
Kyle squeezed my hand tightly.
The butler standing behind us spoke to his former master.
“Your Grace, your daughter has come to see you.”
But there was no answer from the dead.
A hollow emptiness descended.
Piercing through that emptiness, the butler spoke with measured respect.
“We servants have cared for you with the thought that you might pass at any moment.”
….
“You endured longer than we expected. Each day you grew weaker.”
So that was it.
The servants didn’t appear particularly grief-stricken because they had steeled themselves for their master’s death over many days.
Yet contrary to my expectations, the butler’s eyes—whom I had thought coldly composed—suddenly reddened.
“If only you had held on just half a day longer.”
….
“You might have been able to greet your daughter.”
There seemed to be emotions that, no matter how many times he composed himself, simply could not be suppressed.
‘It wasn’t that they weren’t sad.’
They were all forcibly holding it back.
They must have grown more attached to the Duke than even I, his daughter, could.
“Would you like to… hold her hand?”
At Victoria’s suggestion, I slowly reached out and took my mother’s hand.
―That was all.
I felt only indescribable emotions, but no particular tenderness or sorrow.
I only felt the strangeness of her cold body temperature.
So this is what it means to meet your mother for the first time. Even though she was the family I had longed for so desperately.
“Could you perhaps tell me how I came to be separated from my mother?”
An only daughter. The first child. I had never borne a child myself, but I could imagine how precious her existence must have been.
She could not have parted with me easily.
“My mother seemed to have anticipated the separation. She even purchased a locket at an auction beforehand and placed it in her daughter’s cradle.”
Victoria’s eyes widened briefly in surprise.
“…That is correct, my lady.”
She spoke.
“Duchess Valienne knew in advance that there was a danger of her child being ‘taken’ from her.”
“…!!!”
Taken from her?
Not abandoned or lost due to circumstances?
“She often spoke of someone targeting her child. That is why, as her delivery approached, she suffered a nervous breakdown.”
A shocking revelation followed.
“However, even after the safe delivery, the Duke remained conscious. In fact, even after the young lady was ‘stolen,’ she retained her full faculties for an entire day. During that brief window, she prepared many things.”
“Stolen, you say…?”
“Yes.”
There was no other way to describe what happened to the infant except as being ‘stolen.’
Victoria’s brown eyes grew distant, as though gazing into a far-off past, her focus blurring.
“That night, someone infiltrated the Duke’s Mansion without anyone’s knowledge. Despite posting double and triple guards to prevent the young lady from being taken…”
“….”
When moonlight began to spill into the chamber where the mother and child rested, a ‘shadow’ appeared, she said.
That shadow had coiled around the child with its body and stolen her away.
―That pitch-black Black Snake.
“The perpetrator was identified as the ‘Black Snake.'”
“…!”
The Black Snake? That wasn’t even human.
Perhaps precisely because it wasn’t human, it could pierce through the formidable defenses of the Duke’s Mansion and steal the child away.
“All the guards protecting the birthing chamber were found dead.”
“….”
“Had the Duke not hidden a ‘locket’ inside the young lady’s swaddling clothes beforehand, we would never have found her again.”
As I listened, something struck me as odd. I asked quietly.
“I understand you announced to everyone that the child was ‘stillborn.’ Why did you do that? …If you had said I was lost, perhaps you would have found me faster.”
“We feared that whoever took the young lady would hide her even deeper, making her impossible to find ever again.”
“….”
“So it seems the Duke conveyed a message of abandoning the child. But then her health deteriorated so severely…”
“…!!!”
Without thinking, my lips pressed together. I felt Kyle clench his fists beside me.
To have hidden a locket in the cloth wrapping the child beforehand—it must have been born from an obsession, almost a compulsion, that the child might be stolen.
Who could it be?
The cruel person who had terrified my mother and even forced her to convey a message of abandoning her own newborn child.
“Do you happen to know who threatened to take the child from my mother?”
Victoria spoke the name as though it pained her even to pronounce it.
“It was Gerard, the Imperial Prince.”
“…!”
The puzzle pieces, which had been subtly misaligned, suddenly snapped into place with a decisive click.
My head spun.
―The perfect Imperial Prince, against whom my mother’s cries of having her child stolen would leave not a single blemish.
Gerard….
He had been targeting me since I was in the womb!
I had thought my mother was a stranger, my feelings toward her dull and lacking warmth.
But the vivid fury flooding my mind burned far too intensely.
‘It was all because of Gerard.’
I sent trackers to Bayonere Island to harm the people I love.
And as if that weren’t enough—the person who stole me from my mother.
When I first went out for socialization training in the Forest, meeting you was no coincidence.
My bitten lips tasted of iron, and my fingertips trembled uncontrollably.
“The Duchess left a letter while she still had her consciousness.”
Victoria presented the letter to me on a tray, wrapped carefully in cloth.
I tore it open with shaking hands.
「 My daughter.
I don’t know when you’ll read this letter.
I’m sorry.
You must have lived a terribly lonely and difficult life before finding your way to my Mansion.
It’s all Mother’s fault. I’m truly sorry.
My beloved child.
Those ten months carrying you were the happiest period of my entire life.
My other self, my daughter, my first love.
The fact that I never got to nurse you even once, that you were taken from me—it pierces my heart.
Even as I’m dying now, I have only one wish.
In whatever moments my life allows, I want to see you one last time, just once.
…Will my wish come true?
My heart’s own child.
I will always be by your side, so that your life is never too cold or too lonely.
I will always… 」
The letter ended there. I understood why.
The consciousness of the person who wrote this letter must have faded soon after. As the lines continued, the handwriting grew fainter and more unsteady, as if strength were draining from her hand.
Plink, plink—
Only after hearing something fall did I realize I was crying.
Overwhelmed by vague longing and surging sorrow, I pressed my face against my sleeping mother’s hand. Her warmth carried the scent of sunlight.
It resembled the fragrance of an old, aching longing.
“Mother….”
I was a daughter deeply, abundantly loved.

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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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