IDIBC Chapter 68

Summer Hunt (6)

It was petty. Disgustingly petty. You saved me, brought my family to me, even got engaged to save the family you brought, and came to get me wherever I was.

Why are you always the kind of person who consistently breaks my heart?

“Why? Is there some rumor that the saintess is incredibly beautiful?”

“What?”

At my obstructive words, Ricardo narrowed his eyes and soon let out a laugh as if finding it absurd. His chest heaved as he chuckled, and I felt worse and worse.

“What’s with that laugh? Is there really such a rumor? Is that why you push me away so coldly?”

“Let’s go down now. Before it gets any darker.”

Ricardo skillfully changed the subject. He said “that’s enough” in an attractively low voice and walked away without hesitation.

He’s leaving again. Leaving me behind like that.

I know why the name Ricardo always comes with a feeling of hurt.

Because he doesn’t love me, because even though time passes so quickly, he has no intention of loving me.

You know it and I know it. Why we take this long detour when there’s a shorter path.

Your feelings when you can’t open your heart but can’t push me away when I come close, the reason your lips always tremble when they barely touch mine.

Unable to bear Ricardo’s avoidance any longer, my emotions welling up, I shouted at the back of his head.

“Why, are you afraid I’ll die?”

Ricardo stopped dead in his tracks.

“Afraid I’ll burn to death? Afraid I’ll turn to ash and disappear without a trace? Is that why?”

When he suddenly turned around, his horse naturally turned as well. For the first time, the composure completely disappeared from his face and his eyes filled with doubt.

“What on earth… are you talking about?”

“I heard I could be accused of being a witch and burned at the stake. If I insist on staying by your side, Young Duke.”

“Don’t speak carelessly, Lienne. That will never happen.”

Suddenly, a foreign color swirled in his eyes. That mysterious light gave me certainty.

“You’re scared, aren’t you? Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

His eyes looking at me clearly twisted.

“Those purple eyes of yours—they change like that whenever you’re afraid. Rica.”

On the way here, I thought endlessly about it. All those moments when Ricardo’s pupils turned purple.

Joy, sadness, anger, even sometimes hate or love can be hidden.

But what about fear?

“Isn’t it?”

‘El Liade.’ Even at the moment he spoke the name of the god that says we’re alive here and now, Ricardo’s eyes took on a purple hue.

We were clearly alive here, so why were your eyes saying something different?

As I pondered it over and over, I could feel it clearly.

On that day that disappeared from Ricardo’s memory, even when he awakened, he trembled while kissing. His eyes full of anxiety.

The emotion Ricardo felt every time I suddenly approached him was anxiety close to fear.

“You’re right.”

‘Huh?’

The answer came back so simply it was deflating.

“Even if that’s right…”

He slowly turned his back to me again. ‘Nothing will change.’ Muttering somewhat affectionately.

He didn’t forget to tap his forehead as if he had a headache.

I was so dumbfounded I let out an empty laugh.

If he was going to reject me so firmly, why did he come all the way up here? Was he going to push me hard off a cliff, slam my heart to the ground, then suggest we go down together having a friendly chat?

I jumped down from the horse.

I didn’t want to go down with Ricardo, and my backside had been throbbing for a while now, making it impossible to sit any longer.

I got off the horse and patted my back and waist. With both hands on my waist looking up at the sky, amid all this, the crimson sunset was quite a sight.

Making a person’s heart even more troubled.

“What are you doing, not following?”

Ricardo walked much further before noticing I wasn’t following and stopped.

“I wanted to rest a bit. I think I used muscles I don’t normally use, everything’s aching. Go ahead. I’ll catch up soon.”

Right now I didn’t want to walk alongside him, but I also didn’t want to be left alone in this deep forest where some beast might appear from anywhere.

I really planned to rest just briefly and maintain enough distance that we wouldn’t have to talk.

But Ricardo didn’t seem to agree with my plan and started walking back toward me.

That’s when it happened. Something flew toward me like lightning. No, it wasn’t like lightning—it was an actual arrow that had been shot.

The arrow seemed to be aimed at my horse, specifically at me sitting on the horse, but it cut through the air and flew past.

Ricardo moved as if he had seen the exact moment the arrow flew. He ran so fast that the arrow that flew past hit the horse he had been riding.

Neighing loudly and rearing up, the horse suddenly began galloping forward.

‘Ah, if it goes like that, it’s a cliff…’

The moment I realized that, my body moved first. I grabbed my horse’s reins and mounted it. There was no thought, no calculation. Just the instinct that I had to follow him.

But I soon had to admit it. The fact that I had never properly stopped a running horse before.

“Lienne…?”

Already having jumped off his horse, he looked bewildered, staring blankly at me as I galloped past him toward the cliff.

‘What have I just done?’

Did I really think someone who awakened the power of Rochester couldn’t escape from a mere rampaging horse and would die?

‘Ah, far from saving you, I’m going to die first.’

The horse carrying me couldn’t stop and extended its legs into empty air. The horse that floated up kicked futilely in the air a few times, then began falling below the cliff.

Splash—the horse made ripples on the water’s surface first, and just as I was about to fall into the water too, I felt someone suddenly embrace me.

‘It’s Rica.’

He and I simultaneously gurgled and were sucked into the lake. Our bodies, which had been plunging straight down at high speed, shot back up when they reached a certain point.

“Puha!”

Immediately pulled up, I clung to his neck, and Ricardo swam silently and slowly made his way to shore.

I coughed violently for a while, exhausted but not collapsing and losing consciousness. Sitting slumped on the ground, I raised my dazed eyes to look up at where I had been standing.

From below, it was a dizzyingly high cliff.

“You have no fear?”

Soaking wet, Ricardo swept back his hair and looked down at me with dark eyes.

Though he asked with anger cold enough to feel the chill, I couldn’t respond at all. Because the moment I thought he was in danger, there was no time to recall fear.

“You could have died.”

‘I know.’

From my throat full of water, not a single word came out properly.

Ricardo slowly knelt on one knee and met my eyes.

Drip, drip—water beaded on his hair fell to the ground. I couldn’t gauge what the changing expressions with each blink meant.

“I said you could have died.”

Eyebrows arched upward, transparent water droplets on his nose, streams of water flowing down his sharp jawline like rainwater. And black eyes containing nothing.

The lips touching mine came in a split second before I could even judge what was happening. They weren’t soft, gently approaching lips. It was an urgent, desperate kiss, pushing in like breathing life into someone pulled from water.

Even while my whole body trembled with cold, the pressed lips were hot as if burned. As I clutched his arms, my lips crushed as they moved, and when they separated, he let out a low sigh.

“I know, you have no fear. But I… I don’t.”

Me, fearless? Me, whose heart was pounding anxiously even at his self-deprecating laugh?

“I’m afraid. So much I can’t even sleep.”

It was an unfamiliar voice I’d never heard before. I could say with certainty that I had never heard a voice containing such deep emotion from anyone in my life.

“Am I afraid you’ll burn to death? No, no. What I fear isn’t that. I won’t lose you that way. I have power now.”

‘Then why…? Why are you so afraid?’

Ricardo stroked my hair with his wet hand. His cold fingertips were trembling.

“Even now my day begins with you and ends with you…”

“…”

“If I share glances with you like sharing food, mix laughter with you like exchanging words, and you who was by my side as naturally as breathing disappears. Then, how will I live?”

The clammy feeling of wet clothes clinging to my body, the cold rushing in too much to even try to stop, the fishy smell of water stinging my nose—I no longer felt any of it.

‘Lienne, Lienne.’ Only Ricardo’s wet voice calling my name swallowed my entire world.

Ricardo leaned in and pressed his cheek to mine. Burying his lips at the tip of mine, he whispered again.

“Then what do I do after that? You’re gone, and I might soon kill my father, and after I embrace that woman and become emperor, then I… how do I endure it?”

“…..”