Unbeknownst to Me, I am Secretly Dating the Emperor - Chapter 105

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Episode 105
“Thank you for checking on that for me.”
I offered Cynthia my gratitude with a calm, genuine smile—very different from moments before.
“It was nothing difficult, really.”
Cynthia hesitated briefly before asking her question.
“By the way, what’s Captain Rohas up to?”
Months had passed since Coni had come asking about Everett Rohas’s reputation, and now that I was asking about him again, she seemed curious.
“Well, it’s…”
Someone who appeared out of nowhere demanding to know if this was Everett Rohas—even I had to admit it was strange.
Since I’d been in a rush and hadn’t thought through the aftermath, I could only manage an awkward laugh.
Before the atmosphere could turn awkward, Coni stepped in.
“What we came looking for is a secret. You understand what I mean, right?”
Coni’s eyes glinted with playful winking.
“Oh! So the man you happened to bump into and thought was just your type turned out to be the same person you actually wanted to network with?”
Cynthia, satisfied with her own reasoning, looked at me with a gentle smile.
“Captain Rohas is easy to work with, and as a man, he’s more than respectable, really. I hear all sorts of gossip about the knights from working as an administrator, but not a single bad rumor about Captain Rohas.”
Cynthia squeezed both fists together, cheering me on.
“Don’t worry about keeping the secret—my lips are sealed.”
She reassured me while her eyes sparkled with genuine interest in my love life.
“Ah, yes. Thank you so much.”
“Well then, I should get back to work! And when there’s progress, make sure to tell me too!”
Cynthia, realizing she’d spent far more time with us than expected, hurried back to her duties.
The moment Cynthia left, Coni’s eyes fixed on me.
“I’ll go buy two sets of the Limited Edition Dessert. Will you give one to Cynthia?”
I avoided Coni’s gaze as I spoke.
Cynthia had no idea I was dating Everett.
So she seemed to have taken this whole exchange as simply confirming the identity of an ideal man I’d met by chance.
But to Coni, who knew the full story, something had to seem off.
“What’s the problem?”
Coni asked carefully.
With her playfulness stripped away, Coni looked so serious she wouldn’t laugh even if I confessed to some foolish thought.
In the end, I spilled the whole story.
“So, well, Rohas said he suddenly had to go away on a mission for a while and we wouldn’t be able to see each other, so I went to the Palace Guard just to see him one last time.”
I couldn’t say I went there to find out what mission he’d been assigned.
Instead, my visit to the Palace Guard was repackaged as a tender desire to catch a glimpse of a lover I wouldn’t be seeing for a while.
“But this Palace Guard knight I met there told me Rohas was on a Long-term Business Trip and hadn’t returned yet.”
“A business trip? And hasn’t returned?”
Coni, who’d heard plenty of date stories about Everett and me, tilted her head in confusion.
“Keep going.”
Coni spoke like an investigator on an unsolved case.
“But this Rohas, who’d apparently been given a Secret Mission so secretive he even had to hide it from his own Palace Guard colleagues, was meeting me casually every single day in the Imperial Palace.”
“Oh, so you met every day.”
Coni interjected with a meaningful tone.
If the story hadn’t been serious, she absolutely would have seized on that and teased me relentlessly about it.
Fortunately, Coni knew when to hold back her jokes.
She gestured for me to continue and pressed her lips firmly shut again.
I pressed on with my explanation, hoping Coni would forget about this soon enough.
“The problem is, that seemed strange to me. The Inspection Unit and the Palace Guard are right next to each other—how was he moving around? What if they’d run into each other?”
“Well, wasn’t it just that Rohas was being careful and meeting you secretly?”
Coni paused as she thought, then offered her hesitant opinion.
“You said last time he was even wearing a hood in this weather.”
“Ah.”
Now that she mentioned it, Everett did always seek out places with few people.
I’d assumed he did that because he wanted to be alone with me, but Coni’s guess that he was actually avoiding people’s eyes seemed plausible too.
“But that’s… well…”
Maybe it felt more convincing because I wanted to believe it.
But I had another doubt bothering me.
If Everett had indeed been pushing himself to move around the Imperial Palace just to see me, there was one question that absolutely needed to be resolved.
“Last time, when the Holy Maiden went to the Poor Relief Institute, he went with her.”
“Oh, so when you’re alone with him, you call him ‘Ed.'”
Coni inserted yet another strange remark.
She made a peculiar face, as if barely suppressing a laugh.
Fortunately, for Coni, friendship mattered more than her sense of humor, so she let it pass this time and refocused on our conversation.
“That is strange, though. I thought he just needed to avoid being seen by the Palace Guard he’d supposedly left on a trip, but then he goes and shows his face in front of the Palace Guard again.”
“Exactly—it’s like Everett Rohas could exist in multiple places at once.”
“Is Captain Rohas using the Body Duplication Technique or something?”
Coni ran through increasingly wild speculation before deciding that couldn’t be right and fell silent.
I’d entertained that thought myself, if only slightly, so the silence stretched between us.
“Isn’t it more realistic that the Palace Guard knight simply didn’t know Rohas had returned?”
Coni pulled herself back from the realm of fantasy to reality and offered another guess.
“Then what about him telling me he couldn’t see me for a while?”
No matter how I tried to puzzle it out, every possible explanation had a hole in it.
Coni’s expression grew increasingly grave.
“I really thought he was a good person this time…”
The thought escaped her lips before she could stop it, and Coni caught herself too late.
Then she looked at me with pitying eyes.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
I wanted to know why, to understand before receiving her sympathy.
“It’s nothing. It can’t be. It’s nothing at all.”
Coni drew out her words in an unusual way, brushing it off as insignificant.
It was exactly the kind of tone that made someone anxious and uneasy.
“Just tell me that speculation. You’ve already got me curious, and now you won’t tell me? It’s driving me crazy!”
I grabbed both her shoulders and shook her, pressing for answers.
Coni went completely limp and let me shake her for a while before finally opening her mouth.
“Just hear me out—it’s just a thought that occurred to me, so take it with a grain of salt.”
The long preamble made me nervous.
Coni didn’t drag it out any further and spoke her suspicion carefully but directly.
“What if it’s… two-timing?”
“What?”
It was so unexpected that I wondered if I’d heard her correctly.
“Because his behavior pattern reminds me of something I’ve seen before.”
Coni was a devoted fan of mystery novels and melodramatic romance, with a particular weakness for gossip.
The source she was referencing probably wasn’t a fairy tale.
“Like, the trip is actually five days, but he tells his girlfriend it’s six days, and then he uses that extra day he created for another girlfriend. That kind of thing.”
Since Coni couldn’t logically explain the gap in Everett’s schedule, she seemed convinced he was hiding something.
Like, perhaps, the existence of another woman besides me.
“No way.”
I immediately rejected Coni’s suspicion.
“Ed” was a tender and passionate lover.
He wasn’t cunning enough to be able to fake being in love that convincingly.
And it was impractical.
We were both fairly busy people.
We managed to carve out seven meetings a week despite that, and another woman on top of it?
Unless Everett had forty-eight hours in a day, there was no way he could find time for someone else.
“Besides, Cynthia just said his reputation is good.”
But it was precisely at this moment that a scandal from my Academy days suddenly surfaced in my mind.
One of the Liberal Arts Department professors—who taught a required course for new students and was well-liked by both students and staff because of his warmth and kindness—had been dismissed for having an affair with his sister-in-law.
Even after that professor was fired, everyone kept saying, “I never thought he’d be the type,” over and over again.
Why am I even thinking about this now?
I tried to brush away the stray thoughts crowding my mind.
I trusted Everett, but the small moments of dissonance I’d felt lingered stubbornly in my memory.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————