RAMHM Chapter 135

Revolting

'Tactless, bringing up Father like that—of all things.'

Doris turned the thought over in her mind: her father, who had refused to the very end to sanction the union between herself and Rhodness, even when she had given him every opportunity.

A father who couldn't even recognize the material of an emperor was far better off lying flat in that sickbed. Better for the country too, honestly!

Had he woken, he would have opposed not only Rhodness's accession to the crown—he would never have permitted Doris and Rhodness to come together. Not under any terms.

Was it not infinitely more valuable to House Castagna to have Doris marry Rhodness through her own standing as a saint, head held high, than to demean herself by ceding her twelve-year-old sister Raphaélla to Epero in exchange for the humiliating consolation prize of a crown princess title?

Doris drew the thought to its conclusion with a satisfied curve of her lips and studied her reflection in the mirror.

"Nora. When you traveled north recently—was Bliea's hair still blonde?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

Doris narrowed her eyes at her own black hair.

Bliea too had clearly dyed her hair blonde the moment she learned of Adrienne's existence.

'Round and round it goes—back to Adrienne again.'

Her teeth ground together.

But only for a moment. The steel sharpness in her eyes settled slowly back into still water, and the corners of her pale pink lips curved into a thin upward line.

If it was the image of Adrienne Pirreta—fair-haired, clean and unblemished—she could recreate it more perfectly than anyone alive.

Her long, slender fingers worked the front knot of the white dress she may as well have slept in, loose and unhurried, without a trace of hesitation. As the line of her collarbone resolved into shadow, visible in suggestion only, Doris smiled, satisfied.

"Your Highness—the Second Prince's flag has moved to His Imperial Majesty's palace."

Nora's voice came from the window where she'd been keeping watch over the Second Prince's quarters. Doris was on her feet before the words had fully landed.

"Your Highness—"

Before Nora could move to stop her, Doris was already out the bedroom door.

The corridor connecting the Emperor's palace to the Second Prince's quarters.

The feeling that crept up from the soles of her feet was that of a bride moving to receive her groom. And her face warmed on its own.

Then—at the far end of the corridor, emerging from shadow—a figure in full armor, striding with absolute certainty.

His face hadn't yet caught the moonlight, but Doris didn't need it. She knew.

Rhodness stopped at a distance when he saw her.

Doris walked toward him like an elegant cat on the prowl.

Those deep crimson eyes—catching her attention before anything else.

The saint who would lay to rest the ill-omen of those very eyes. The perfect counterpart to supply what he lacked.

That was who she was about to become.

"Rhoan."

She stood before him without any ceremony—and she had stopped performing ceremony some time ago now.

She had always preferred this Rhodness—the one who withheld courtesy from her—to the one who offered it in such careful excess. At least now she would not have to hear that wretched word: sister-in-law.

His eyes, which had once burned with a quality she could only describe as sensuous indifference, carried something different tonight. Contempt, she thought, reading it with mild surprise.

Doris let herself smile.

Just as Bardenaldo had been cornered by her leverage and had ultimately had no choice but to keep his appointments, Rhodness too, once he became emperor, would need an heir. He would have no choice but to come to her for it.

"Rhoan. There's no escaping this now. The whole world is blessing what lies between us. Do you understand what stability it gives the empire—the union of the ill-omened Second Prince with a saint?"

And that was simply the truth.

Rumors that the Second Prince might become heir had sent anxiety rippling through the populace. When the news spread that she—specifically she—was the saint capable of governing him, the people had welcomed the levirate law's revival. Through that single play she had absorbed even the factions that opposed the law and made them her own. If Rhodness wanted to reach the throne without incident, he would have no choice but to accept Doris Castagna, who held those factions' loyalty.

Doris was certain of her victory.

Who had unified Count Raelon—suddenly cut adrift from his own ambitions—and the western nobles destabilized by her father's absence?

Doris Castagna. She had.

"I have worked for you. To make you emperor. If you knew how much—you should be pressing kisses on me right now, right here—"

"Revolting."

"…What?"

Doris tilted her head, doubting her ears.

Rhodness's face carried not even the usual trace of a sneer.

The sculpted face she had always admired remained exactly what it was: cold.

Why. What on earth was the reason.

Doris could not believe that he had refused her—and her face flooded with heat at the same moment she couldn't believe it.

Who was it that had driven her to this?

"Are you withdrawing now, after all this?"

"…I."

"You wavered at least once—honestly, probably more than once."

Doris stepped closer to him. Her heart beat fast with anger.

"Which is why—on Bardenaldo's funeral day. In your office. When I reached for your buttons you only stood there and stared at me. The truth is, you were waiting for me to make the move. Weren't you."

Doris shook her head as though denying reality, but her lips had curved into something between a laugh and a grimace.

Compared to Bardenaldo, who had lived with the words help me practically dangling from his mouth, Rhodness wasn't someone who asked for things easily. He was the kind of man she wanted to lean into—and precisely because he was that kind of man, she had assumed he wouldn't easily say the soft and embarrassing things. That much she had read correctly.

"Ah—that."

His voice was light, the way someone might answer a question about what they'd eaten for lunch yesterday. Doris's smile went brittle.

"'Ah, that'?"

She caught a flash of Bardenaldo in his intonation and threw it back at him.

"My specialty's catching little vermin that squirm—and killing them, see."

"What are you trying to say? "

"I rather enjoy watching them squirm before I do it."

"... I said, what are you trying to say!"

"How else would I know precisely how far my sister-in-law could degrade herself? I needed that information before I could stop going through the motions of basic courtesy."

"…What?"

"I do recall finding it somewhat irritating. Did you really think, just because you popped a few shirt buttons, I'd fall into step with you?"

No.

No—it can't end this way.

Doris shook her head.

She had genuinely wanted this to work with Rhodness.

The first love she had tucked away inside herself. The first love she had buried because she could not give up the position of empress—she was finally ready to bring it into the light. To make that first love into an emperor. To claim both the empress's seat and the joy of a woman. To have all of it at once.

"To me you're an irritating gnat. Nothing more, nothing less."

The face of Rhodness—who by this point should have conceded and submitted—held not one thread of lingering feeling.

"I wanted to see how far it would go. That the crown princess of Ronteaux, no less, carries herself so cheaply. That she would go to these lengths because she thought loosening a few buttons counted as seduction. It does tell me something about the size of her nerve."

The one who should have been lowering herself, holding the other person in place, not making an enemy of someone with nothing to lose from it—that was not Doris. It was Rhodness.

"I said it before. Even if you stripped bare and waited for me—I would never be moved by you."

I've got fairly fixed tastes, despite how I look.

The murmur was addressed to no one in particular, as though she weren't there. His lips were beautiful. That was what made it more of an insult.

She had always known it wouldn't be easy.

As a child, accompanying her father to the palace, she had understood that even with every beautiful thing she could find adorning her, Rhodness's gaze did not travel to her.

She had haunted the edges of the Royal Academy until she finally located him. And she had seen where his eyes rested.

Adrienne Pirreta.

The first time in her life she had lost sleep over envying someone—that was the day. The first time Doris, who had lived as a princess of the west, had ever tasted defeat. Pale. Skin-and-bones. Washed out. A blonde nobody from the east.

It was from that day that the refined western princess had begun to copy Adrienne.

She resented the look on Adrienne's face—oblivious to who she was playing with, who was teaching her, grinning like an idiot, no idea who she was even with.

The first time she had dyed her hair blonde.

Doris had lingered at the library seat where Rhodness and Adrienne always met.

And then—a hand at her shoulder.

Eyes behind a mask, full of an excitement they could not conceal.

And the moment those eyes confirmed it was Doris, not Adrienne—and fell.

It had only been a moment of meeting eyes. Eyes altered by a mana stone, perhaps. But they had been, in that instant, the most beautiful thing in the world, and they had reached inside her and wrung her heart in their fist.

"Tastes." Her eyes sharpened into something jagged. "Fine—tastes. I'll accommodate your tastes. Don't you understand? In this world, right now, the woman who most resembles Adrienne Pirreta—the only person who can even approximate her—is me."

After that day, whether it was blonde hair or eastern-style dresses—nothing had pulled his gaze to her, but Doris had kept at it.

She had grown accustomed to rebuilding herself in Adrienne Pirreta's image. She could do it in her sleep.

Bliea Acacia.

When that vulgar woman had managed to slip into Rhodness's new affections on the strength of a face that resembled the right one—Doris had felt a jealousy she could not contain, and alongside it, something that looked like hope. Rhodness Casmir de Ronteaux. He too, for all his exacting pretense, was a man in the end.

"If I become Adrienne Pirreta—"

"If she isn't Adrienne, it's useless."

Past indifference. Contempt.

Those eyes she had always longed for—the eyes that more than any jewel she had ever seen she had most wanted to possess—moved with that quality now.

"No matter how many times you announce yourself a saint. Would you peel off a dead woman's skin and wear it?"

"I… I am the companion the gods have joined to you…"

"If you're truly such a saint, why not at least make a show of trying to resurrect the dead."

The polite younger brother. The courteous brother-in-law.

The raw face beneath every mask looked at her with undisguised contempt.

And even that contempt was careless—his eyes never softening to meet her, only the corner of his mouth lifting in the barest, most perfunctory curl of disdain.

That careless contempt shattered her pride into pieces.

"You would need to be the living image of Saint Marini herself—the saint who actually raised the dead—before you could dream of sitting beside someone as ill-omened as me."

She had always hated the excessive courtesy the old Rhodness had shown her. But this wasn't what she had wanted instead.

The way he spoke—the way he moved—as though addressing the lowest creature in the world. It cut through her without restraint.

The one whose gaze she wasn't worth the effort of fully meeting. That was what she had become. The humiliation crested in her chest like a wave.

"Don't let that mouth say Adrienne's name again."

"Rh—!"

"If you annoy me again—"

Rhodness leaned his large frame toward her. Fear and longing knotted her body together and she could not move.

"I will erase you and your house from this world without leaving a trace."

His voice settled cold against the corridor floor.

The body that had come close withdrew again. Those red eyes dropped briefly to her loosened neckline—a contemptuous curl—and then the scent she had dreamed of all her life grazed the edge of her senses and was gone in an instant, as though mocking her.

"Rhoan!"

Without a backward glance, Rhodness’s black cloak whipped in the wind blowing through the corridor.

No matter how she called after him, no matter how she raged, Rhodness simply became a point in the distance and disappeared.

That was precisely what it amounted to.

She had been treated as less than a fly passing by in the road.

She had killed a husband who might have been kept alive.

She had even moved to eliminate her father—Rhodness's obstacle—from the path.

For him.

She had genuinely abandoned everything.

There's nowhere left to retreat to.

Doris faced the empty space where he had been, the cold wind against her skin.

Every humiliation she had suffered in her life added together would not equal tonight.

The fist she had made of her pale hand trembled.

From some distance behind her, Nora approached—carrying, it seemed, an outdoor wrap she had chased after Doris with.

Doris seized the wrap as it was draped across her shoulders and turned on Nora with a look.

Nora lowered her head without a word, waiting.

"I must meet with His Eminence the Grand Prelate again, Nora. The sainthood investiture—I want it moved forward."

It was an instruction to prepare another donation.

"…I will carry out Your Highness's command."

As Nora bowed with the full compliance of someone who had stopped expecting otherwise, the last edge of the fury coiled through Doris's body softened—just barely.

'At the ceremony announcing the new saint's arrival. Rhodness—you will feel it in your bones that I am the only answer left to you.'

The trembling at the corners of her lips finally drew itself into a slow arc.

Doris let herself be consumed by the vision: the heated night of Rhodness's submission, the ceremony of the new saint—her triumph sitting plain before her, waiting to be collected.

Behind her, a cold light crept into Nora’s bowed, submissive face.