Or Shall I Call You Bishop
Duke Gerard murmured under his breath.
“I suppose I ought to send someone to the palace.”
There was no one in sight fit to attend a princess. It was almost strange, considering the throng that had once trailed her like shadows during their Academy days.
Theophany glanced around with easy composure.
“Whatever for? It isn’t as though this is a one-time visit. I’ve known these people since I was a child. They’re familiar enough.”
Once the tea service had ended and she was preparing to leave with the head maid’s assistance, Theophany—who had offered Kayla no greeting whatsoever—turned back to look at her.
“And where are you staying?”
Kayla hesitated, reluctant to answer, so the head maid spoke quietly in her place.
“She is in the late young mistress’s chambers, Your Highness.”
In that instant, rigid red eyes bored into Kayla as though they meant to pierce straight through her. The weight of what it meant to occupy that room settled over her anew.
In the space left behind as the crowd poured out after Theophany like a receding tide, only an uneasy silence remained.
Kayla bowed her head toward Duke Gerard, who had taken a seat and was lighting a cigar.
“I beg Your Grace’s pardon for calling without leave.”
A haze of smoke and a sharp, acrid fragrance filled the room.
“Did you receive the documents?”
“The signed papers are with Mr. Carlo. You’ll be able to review them shortly.”
“Your address!”
“...Pardon?”
“From now on, choose your honorifics with care.”
“I will keep that in mind.”
“Even for a single year, a marchioness is a marchioness. Bear that well. Nothing is more humiliating than idle talk among the servants.”
The mother of Marquis Niguel had been a princess of the neighboring Desante Empire. She had thrown herself onto the battlefield to nurse the allied forces, met Marquis Matherson at a field hospital, and from that legendary romance Niguel had been born.
Tragically, after a belated wedding, the couple’s honeymoon carriage was overturned by rebels, and husband and wife lost their lives on the same day, at the same hour. The incident had nearly ignited a war.
Fortunately, Kayla’s father, Boris, had swiftly suppressed the uprising and punished the instigators he rooted out, preventing the affair from souring into a diplomatic crisis.
Bolstered by that background, Marquis Niguel had been welcomed as a diplomatic envoy in every nation he visited. After six years abroad—combining state visits with colonial inspections—he had finally returned, only to refuse a princess and enter a contract marriage with a middle-class commoner.
Even if necessity demanded it, Duke Gerard’s distaste for her was only natural.
“I heard nothing of this from Boris. I should like to hear it from you directly.”
“...”
“That day—was there truly nothing?”
There had been another girl who escaped the bunker before Kayla. But years later, that girl had taken her own life.
The body of the girl found collapsed in the street had been horrific from the aftermath of the violence. And still she had fled—eyes covered, arms bound behind her back. Without a scrap of clothing on her.
Worse still was that such an image had been printed in the newspapers without a single detail filtered out. It had helped them identify the murdered victims, but the girl herself had withered further with every passing day.
The crushing certainty that the Bunker Breeder would find her and kill her at any moment, compounded by the sexual scandal—she had been forced to fight it all alone.
Knowing this, her father Boris had endured the internal wounds and buried Kayla’s case, cutting away with his own hands every vile label that would have clung to his cherished daughter for the rest of her life.
That was what Duke Gerard was asking now. Whether those men had truly never laid hands on her body.
The question—and the experience behind it—were not unfamiliar to Kayla. She had been asked the same thing tens of thousands of times, even by her own mother. No matter how often she repeated the identical answer, Lady Jenma had obsessively washed her body again and again.
Owen’s question about whether it had been a “smoke screen” had come from the same place.
And so now, Kayla put on a hard mask, purged every unnecessary emotion, and made herself numb.
“There is nothing for Your Grace to be concerned about. And even if any residual worry remains, as the signed agreement states, any child’s status will have no connection to House Matherson.”
It did not seem to be the answer he had wholly wanted, but it was enough. Duke Gerard exhaled a long stream of smoke and waved her away.
Kayla quietly withdrew, leaving the deeply weary duke behind her.
It felt as though a hand were closing around her throat.
Instead of returning to the room assigned to her, Kayla went outside without any destination in mind.
How long she wandered the vast, ocean-like garden, she could not say. By the time a chill had begun to creep over her, a rustling commotion rose from somewhere near the fountain, among the swan-shaped topiaries—bushes being thoroughly thrashed about.
Grr, grr.
A low animal growl and the sound of excited breathing came in succession, and Kayla’s steps quickened.
Into her hurried footfalls as she rounded the swan topiary came a low voice laced with laughter—so much like the low laugh she had once heard at the hideout.
“Come on. Harder—harder!”
She recognized the marquis’s voice a moment too late to stop.
Marquis Niguel was locked in a tug-of-war with a sleek white hunting dog, both of them gripping a wooden stick. At the sound of her approach, his head turned slowly.
With a faintly startled expression, he looked her over from head to toe. There was nothing impure in that gaze—nothing directed at her body as a woman’s.
Kayla flushed, suddenly conscious of the worn shoes that clashed so badly with her fine clothes.
In that brief opening, the white dog seized the stick in its jaws and shot off somewhere at a dead run.
As Kayla’s eyes followed it, a shadow fell across her head. When his broad shoulders straightened, the air around them seemed to tighten all at once.
It was an unexpected encounter. Just as he had said, she had expected to see him only at the ceremony, and the shock of it was considerable.
Her gaze drifted naturally to the medical bandage on his hand, and the words left her mouth without passing through her mind.
“The wound must be rather serious.”
He glanced at the palm where her eyes had settled and answered as though it were nothing.
“Eight stitches.”
That many? Her eyes went round. She still could not quite believe she had been the one to inflict it.
Hoping to smooth over the awkwardness, she offered the next remark as casually as she could.
“The princess is here... There was an accident.”
She found herself speaking in a faintly peevish tone, as though all of it were somehow his fault, and a dry laugh colored his voice.
“Now you sound like yourself.”
Had she misheard? Her lowered eyes flicked up.
A flicker of mischief crossed the marquis’s face as he regarded the long hair that fell past her shoulders.
“You seemed so determined not to be noticed.”
Only then did she become fully aware of her appearance. This time her face burned like a brazier.
“I was rude. I only learned later that it was Her Imperial Highness’s dress.”
The marquis gave a knowing little laugh and nodded.
“So you’re using the inner chambers.”
“If it bothers you, I’ll move at once.”
“What for?”
“...?”
“You’ve familiarized yourself with what Carlo gave you?”
“Of course. More than that, Your Grace—”
“Niguel.”
Kayla nodded blankly, about to say something more—and then froze where she stood.
“No. A nickname would be better.”
“...What?”
He undid a button of his double-breasted coat and took a step closer.
Kayla’s height reached only to his chest; to look at him she had to tip her head back further still.
“Nigel... Nick works too.”
He draped the jacket he had removed over the shoulders of a still-hesitating Kayla.
At the sudden demand and the unfamiliar warmth of clothes heated by his body, her shoulders had only just begun to draw in when his low voice brushed her ear.
“And you are Ila.”
The nickname only her father had ever used seemed to slip from his lips—and then a whisper thick with mockery followed hard upon it.
“Or shall I call you Bishop?”
Kayla went deathly white, unable even to draw a breath.
When the hand that had caught her collar pulled, her stiffened body tipped helplessly forward.
He lowered his head, and without warning those blue eyes filled her vision completely.
His breath touched her skin. At that impossible distance, her lashes trembled.
“Don’t make that face. You’ve given up less than I have—you can at least cooperate this much.”
The moment the words ended, he set the dazed woman upright again. Then, with perfect courtesy, he offered his arm.
She stood frozen, too busy trying to calm her startled heart to grasp his intention—until the man who had told her not to frown frowned himself.
“Take it.”
A thoroughly gentlemanly manner, and a thoroughly ungentlemanly tone.
After a brief daze, Kayla quickly composed her expression and linked her arm through his with both hands, as though holding on for dear life.