Contract Marriage: Rewritten - Chapter 41
Chapter 41
Translator: Yonnee
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“How could you embrace Her Majesty the Empress so recklessly, Your Majesty!”
At the rebuke, Hyperion lowered his head even further.
Recklessly.
Yes, that was the perfect word for it.
He had devoured his wife with abandon. Without realizing how much she was struggling. Or how much it hurt her.
“Goodness. For her to faint! How difficult must that have been… Haa. She must’ve been even more nervous because it was her first time…”
As the scolding continued, Hyperion silently fiddled with his fingers.
He felt just a little wronged. He had been nervous too—it was his first time as well.
He didn’t even know how he’d made it through the day. When he tried to read documents, the words wouldn’t register, and Signo had sighed loudly by his side, clearly wanting him to notice.
His hands had trembled, and he’d picked up and dropped his pen several times. At one point, he had suddenly flushed red in the face.
It had been a completely chaotic day.
As evening approached, his heart had only pounded harder.
When he returned to the central palace after completing his schedule and saw the lights on, he couldn’t stop the smile that crept up on his lips.
His wife was in there.
His wife… who he hadn’t even properly held in the past three years.
Hyperion had rushed to his room and washed up.
He normally paid attention to cleanliness, but that day he scrubbed himself so thoroughly it felt like he might peel off his own skin.
‘She’s only ever seen me in such filthy states.’
Hyperion knew better than anyone how disheveled he looked whenever he returned to the palace every few months.
Caked dirt, bloodstains that wouldn’t wash out with water, his body wrecked from days of non-stop fighting. It had been a sorry sight.
Yet Laniakea had never once complained. She had only gone pale when she saw the blood.
‘Next time, I’ll have to kill them in a way that sprays less blood.’
Uninvited guests would sometimes come to Hyperion.
Even so, a guest was still a guest, and he always gave them the proper treatment.
Beheading, kicking, stabbing in the gut, though he didn’t like stabbing much. The stench was too strong.
But once—just once—he had spared an intruder’s life.
It was the day a knight returned from a charity banquet he had been sent to.
It was one of those dreaded events no one wanted to attend, so they had drawn lots to decide who would go.
The poor fellow who lost had gone, and, as usual, had come back with a scowl, tossing Hyperion the coins nobles had mockingly thrown at him.
“Your Highness, I received this.”
The knight had handed Hyperion a handkerchief.
A pure white, soft handkerchief stood out absurdly amidst the chaos of the border battlefield.
Hyperion stared at it with a cold gaze. It was clearly from the imperial household, essentially poison to him.
He had been about to tell the knight to throw it away, thinking the empress had pulled another petty stunt, when he noticed the embroidery in the corner.
The empress always embroidered both the imperial crest and her family’s sigil.
But the one the knight had brought had only a single letter stitched into it.
[ L ]
For a moment, he wondered whose it could be. But soon enough, he remembered someone connected to him with that initial.
The one who always greeted him kindly, no matter how battered he looked.
Hyperion had snatched the handkerchief from the knight’s hand, like someone reclaiming what was rightfully theirs.
The knight had looked startled.
“Her Highness the Princess Consort said she didn’t realize it was for a charity banquet…”
At those words, Hyperion’s grip on the handkerchief only tightened.
And that night, for the first time, he let an intruder leave alive.
It had been a truly good day.
“Your Majesty! Are you even listening to me!”
Snapped out of his memories by the angry voice, Hyperion focused once more on the reprimands being hurled his way.
“I assumed you had taken extra lessons after returning to the palace, since you weren’t saying anything… But this. Haven’t I told you before? Yours is far above average, so—”
“Stop picking on His Majesty! He looks like he wants to crawl into the ground and disappear!”
The man’s lecture, which had seemed like it would never end, was finally interrupted by the scolding voice of a middle-aged woman beside him.
Hyperion looked at the two people standing before him.
Gemma Ensy.
Tamil Ensy.
They were a physician couple who had always been with Hyperion when he was stationed at the border.
Before they were falsely accused of poisoning a rural lord and sentenced to execution, it had been Hyperion who saved their lives.
Since then, they had followed him everywhere, treating him and his knights.
After Hyperion became emperor, they were finally granted the qualifications to enter the imperial palace and had only now, at last, arrived.
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