Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP

Chapter 403: Chapter 403: The Wine Has Taste

Athanor turned toward her, still sitting at the edge of the bed, his face already gearing up for the kill. “I see. So it was your living standards all along.”

“Exactly.”

“Though weren’t you the one who had no idea what Hestia’s proposal was actually about?” He tilted his head.

“You heard nothing past ‘will you marry me’ and reacted purely to those four words. Which I know for certain, because on the entire carriage ride back, you gave me a headache with one question after another. About her. About her family. About the very proposal you had just finished interrupting.”

Lysia twitched. Then her confidence snapped back into place like a bone reset. “Buddy. You were drunk the entire ride. Whatever conversation you’re describing happened strictly between you and the voices in your head.”

“Ah. I see. That does make sense now.” Athanor nodded slowly.

“But here’s the part that still doesn’t. Someone who resents me was standing in the middle of a royal banquet, defending my character. Loudly. Making me sound like some manner of saint, which happens to be the precise opposite of what every person in that hall thinks of me.”

“That—” Lysia’s voice cracked up an octave. “That was the wine talking!”

“Then the wine has remarkably good taste in men,” Athanor said, flat as a ledger.

“IT DOES NOT!” She jabbed a finger at him. “Every single word out of it was a lie, because you are the furthest thing from a noble that has ever drawn breath. You’re scum. You’re a scum who stands there calling bitches like that princess breathtaking while throwing harsh words at me like I’m some hideous thing you found under a bridge.”

She lifted her chin. “And for your information, I was a real catch back in my world. Boys used to reject themselves on my behalf. They’d talk themselves out of it before they ever got the words up their throat. So no. You are not a gentleman.”

“I was only spitting facts,” Athanor said. “Or at least, what the kingdom insists are facts. She is breathtaking. When I danced with her, half that hall stared at me as though I’d walked off with their bride. She has quite the fan following, inside the kingdom and well beyond it.”

He paused. “But when I took her hand for that song, nothing happened.”

Lysia went still.

“When one of the most rumored beauty in this kingdom proposed marriage to me, nothing happened. When she stood close enough that I could count her eyelashes, my heart never once pounded. Not the way it does around a certain someone.”

Every curse Lysia had loaded and primed died somewhere in her throat.

Athanor kept going, and he didn’t look at her while he did it. “You know, the citizens of my duchy tell their children a story about me. They say that the more times a man dies and comes back, the more of himself he leaves behind on the other side. They use it to frighten their little ones into behaving. Mind your manners, or you’ll end up like the Duke. A body that comes back, and comes back, until nothing lives inside it except the coming back.”

His hands rested loose on his knees. “They hold me up as the proof. That my heart is an empty shell, hollowed out by all those deaths. And in a way, they aren’t wrong, because I’ve believed for a very long time that I don’t carry a heart at all.”

“Nothing moved me. Not victory. Not music. Not one of the most beautiful women in all of Lux Aeterna holding both my hands and offering me a throne’s worth of dowry.”

Then his voice dropped lower, almost puzzled at its own words.

“And yet these past months, the curse has been running backwards. I keep catching myself doing things a child would do.”

He frowned faintly. “Last week I hid your favorite teacup on the highest shelf in the pantry. For no reason whatsoever, except that I wanted to watch you convene a one-woman tribunal over my entire staff.”

“Teasing and overwhelming a single weakling of a mortal during training. Then laughing about it afterward as though I had won some grand and historic victory.”

He finally turned his head. “So let the kingdom keep its breathtaking princess. Flawless she may well be. But her beauty, her proposal, and her hand in mine for one entire song could not remind me that I own a heart.”

A beat. “Yours has never once let me forget it.”

The feathers had all settled by now. Not one thing in that room made a sound.

Lysia stared at him for a long moment, then said, slowly, “…You really are drunk. You’re sitting in my room spouting complete nonsense with your tax-season face on.”

“I’m not—”

“But.” And a vicious little smile came creeping up her lips. “But I can see them, you know. All those emotions leaking out through the cracks in that shell of yours.”

She pushed herself upright against the headboard. “So fine, Duke. Let’s play along. Let me squeeze every last drop out of you while you’re still soft and vulnerable and stupid.”

“…I am beginning to regret the honesty already,” Athanor said.

“Too late. We’re having a confession battle.” She held up a finger. “Rules are simple. One question each. Answers must be the truth, the whole truth, and absolutely nothing that smells even faintly of I was merely honoring the terms of our contract. Because you and I both know exactly what we’ve been lying about.”

She didn’t wait for him to agree.

“I’ll go first. Why did you specifically target me?” Her eyes locked onto his.

“And don’t you dare lie, because I already know you could have picked anyone. Literally anyone. My mother. The headmistress. Any one of a hundred monsters who’d have made your pair far more likely to actually win that tournament.”

Her voice dipped. “So answer me. Why me?”

Athanor was quiet for a moment.

“Even I don’t know why,” he said. “I have no answer for it. No good one. I’ve never been able to explain to myself why I imprisoned a weakling like you.”

His jaw tightened. “I call it my greed. Or my stupidity. The thing that tore five years out of your life against your will, purely so I could satisfy my own curiosity about what was happening to me.”

Lysia’s brow furrowed. “…What do you mean?”