I Reincarnated As A Villainess, But Why Did I Become A Cat Butler Instead? - Chapter 167

Chapter 84.1

While accepting the Princess’s visit, I was consumed in all sorts of troubles by myself.

‘…What if it’s a trick of this world to somehow turn Dimitri into a villain and kill him?’

Such a tragic development was pictured in my head, in which the god of fate, who tried to somehow move forward according to the predetermined fate, sent the Princess to Blois to conflict with Dimitri.

‘What if the cat shapeshifters make a big mistake with the Princess? What if the Cayetana or elders drive a wedge between her and Dimitri? Or what if Dimitri is blamed for an unavoidable accident…?’

It was evident that I was anxious and engulfed in negative thoughts all day long.

Dimitri asked, swirling the wine around.

“Do you have any concerns?”

He looked a little sleepy and languid as he asked that. He seemed very comfortable in his half-reclining position on the couch.

“Before we talk about my concerns, may I ask why you’re getting ready to go to sleep in my office like this?”

I widened my eyes and stared at Dimitri fiercely.

Recently, his office has been overrun with aristocrats who have an emergency regarding the slave trader of the Count of Bilbao, so I used that as an excuse to finally share the office. Viscount Villefranc, who was stomping his feet because Dimitri was distracted by me, was the most excited.

However, the Viscount wouldn’t have known that he would be stuck in my office like this ever since. Dimitri grinned shamelessly, his face languid and a little bewitching.

“There’s nowhere else in Blois that’s as quiet as this place these days.”

“Maybe the reason the mansion is so noisy is because Dimitri keeps disappearing, and the servants are looking for you?”

People have been desperately looking for Dimitri these past few days, and it made me wonder if cats might enjoy bothering people in some way.

“It’s because they bother me so much.”

Despite his words, it was clear that he was enjoying the situation, not that he was receiving the attention of the elders.

‘He’s like a mischievous cat.’

Shaking my head, I sneakily brought up the story about the Princess.

“Dimitri, what do you think of the First Princess?”

“Well, a fallen, unstable string?”

‘That’s not what I meant, but he’s right.’

The heroine, Elaine, was the daughter of the late Empress.

The Empress was abdicated after being caught for a ridiculous reason, but the real reason was that she had become politically useless.

For four generations, the Astor Imperial Family has been at war to conquer Pelsian, located in the far west.

Pelsian was a country with a vast territory, a very long history, and a developed culture. The Imperial Family had been fighting the Pelsian for a very long time, and finally, under the current Emperor, they succeeded in conquering most of the region with a stronger military force.

‘Dimitri had a lot of credit for that.’

However, the Astor family focused only on the goal of ‘conquest’ for too long and hadn’t thought beyond that.

How to govern that huge territory so far away from the empire? As a result, there were constant insurgent movements aiming to rebuild Pelsian in various regions. In response, the Emperor devised a marriage policy as a solution.

He dethroned the existing empress and installed the Empress of Pelsian as the new empress, proclaiming, “The Pelsian people have become my people, so I’ll treat them equally, as equals to the people of my empire.” This marriage policy was a classic political maneuver intended to appease the population and prevent further rebellions.

‘The ones who became pitiful due to that were the late Empress and her surviving daughter, Princess Elaine.’

The new empress, a foreigner, found herself struggling to solidify her position in a precarious political climate. In her eyes, Elaine, a grown woman close to her own age, was a threat. Consequently, to protect herself, Elaine lived quietly within the imperial palace, erasing her presence and remaining as inconspicuous as possible, as though she didn’t exist at all.

‘But now she’s at a crossroads between marriage and seizing power.’

The Empress, desperate to get rid of Elaine before her eyes, has been whispering to the Emperor to send her away in marriage to a faraway land.

The Elaine I knew wasn’t greedy for power, but she hated marriage.

Thus, while trying to escape from the Imperial Family, she wandered around the imperial city looking for an opening to escape and stumbled upon a scene of hounds being mistreated. She helped an abused hound, who turned out to be the male protagonist, Cadis.

As she tried to convince Cadis to run away, she was stunned by his tearful loyalty.

‘…Just like I did when I met Cadis.’

Loyalty as straight and unwavering as a loyal dog to the point that it felt suffocating.

I knew how shocking it was because I’ve been through it. Of course, there was a curse spell that stopped the heart if you weren’t loyal to the Emperor, but the loyalty of the dog shapeshifters didn’t stem from that curse spell.

Their loyalty was a racial trait, albeit with some individual variation.

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