SIWALL 13

Loran uncrossed his arms and leaned in toward Elliot. His transparent golden eyes held a strange hint of fondness.

“What you said to me last time. About how my way of speaking must have been the most frustrating thing in the world to me.”

As he started off, Loran looked as tragic as a monologuing stage actor.

“You probably know about my parents, my older sister, and my older brother, right?”

“Yes, yes.”

Elliot answered dutifully.

Ever since he was little, Loran had been the most precious treasure of the Pedet household. Born late and possessing the beautiful eyes of the god Lante, his entire family cherished him dearly.

“Even the family members who adore me so much tried their absolute best to fix my way of speaking.”

Well, wouldn’t they? Considering you have an absolute weapon of a mouth. Elliot thought to himself. Only to himself, of course.

“Every time I opened my mouth, each of them would blame themselves and look utterly heartbroken.”

Loran’s expression turned desolate for a moment.

“Their sorrow became my sorrow. For a while, I even tried keeping my mouth shut, and I directly begged our etiquette tutor to hit me with a cane. That only made them even more miserable.”

“….”

“I am a very twisted person. Regardless of my angelic appearance or my affectionate family environment, I am just… someone who views everything through a distorted, warped lens.”

Sadness gathered between every single one of Loran’s eyelashes, like a gloomy miniature painting. He was crying!

The moment he saw those tears, Elliot felt as though the words he had just heard were the most sacred confession in the world.

The sculpture of the gods lifted his golden eyes and stared straight at Elliot.

“Ever since I was a child, everything felt suffocating. Even though it probably sounds like whining when I have everything.”

“not at all. That’s not it, sir.”

“And out of all that, what I found most suffocating was myself.”

Why on earth am I like this? Why can’t I ever be satisfied? Why is living so boring? Why can’t I find any meaning in life? Why the hell? What’s wrong with me?

“I would have done anything to soothe this suffocating feeling. For instance, sending a love letter to Grand Duke Teron, a man I’d never even exchanged a single word with.”

Loran gave a faint smile.

“But when I heard your words, I realized it for the first time.”

Elliot, who had been listening to Loran’s confession with a sinking, bittersweet heart, wore a bewildered expression. Loran’s golden eyes mirrored that very expression.

“I had spent my whole life wishing someone would just understand how suffocating I felt.”

“….”

“Maybe I had been waiting for that my whole life.”

“Sir….”

“So I’ve made up my decision.”

Loran’s eyes sparkled as he gave the table a firm, energetic thud with both fists.

“Instead of writing mere letters, I myself must! I must conquer Grand Duke Teron!”

“—Hm?”

…Why on earth did it lead to that conclusion?!

Given the flow of the conversation, shouldn’t he be saying that since someone finally understands his feelings, there’s no longer any need to provoke the Grand Duke out of misplaced pride?

“Back then, you wanted to tell me not to cower in self-frustration, but to reveal my true self as I am, right?”

Me?

As Elliot stood there with his jaw hanging open, Loran firmly grasped Elliot’s hands.

“I decided to personally seduce Grand Duke Teron entirely thanks to you.”

Emergency alarms blared wildly inside Elliot’s head. He experienced a brief hallucination where Loran, smiling brightly with absolute conviction, looked precisely like the Grim Reaper.

“People say the Grand Duke hates rude people, but I’m the sculpture of the gods, aren’t I? There’s no way he’d actually do anything to me, right?”

He will do something.

Elliot recalled the ending of the original novel.

Loran Pedet, imprisoned with his tongue and hands severed. He was ruthless even when he was madly in love back then, so there’s no telling what he might do now.

Besides, there was a clear precedent. Didn’t Elliot’s own predecessor as bedtime attendant lose his hand just for missing a single violin note?

Arzen, whom he had faced directly for the past two days, wasn’t that violently unhinged, but he would undoubtedly show zero mercy to anyone who crossed the lines he drew.

“I’ll make him kneel before me and lick the soles of my shoes.”

Loran flashed a nasty, yet dazzlingly bright and sunny smile. After shaking Elliot’s hand once more with an expression of heartfelt gratitude, he stood up from his seat.

And watching Loran’s retreating figure as he walked out of the cafe’s private room, Elliot had a dark premonition.

Loran was going to get himself killed by the Grand Duke’s hands before long.

If he went out acting with that kind of attitude, original plot or not, sculpture of the gods or not, he was going to die very soon.

Cold sweat suddenly began to pour in streams down Elliot’s back. Why was this body’s metabolism so hyperactive? The moment it sensed anxiety, it just pumped out sweat immediately.

Loran would probably really try to seduce the Grand Duke in person. And that seduction would undoubtedly look to others—and to the Grand Duke—like an act of direct insult, mockery, and provocation.

From his own standpoint, all he had to do was wash his hands of it and ignore the whole thing. In fact, Elliot would be completely cut out of the situation, so his life would definitely be safe.

However, if he did that, Loran had a 70%… no, 80%… well, let’s be honest, a 90% chance of losing some part of his anatomy. The remaining 10% wasn’t mere physical mutilation, but the absolute probability of death.

‘I had spent my whole life wishing someone would just understand how suffocating I felt.’

Loran’s words from earlier kept annoyingly poking at Elliot’s conscience. For some reason, the inside of his mouth tasted bitter.

∞ ∞ ∞

It would be right to just leave Loran alone.

Elliot took in a deep lungful of the night air drifting in through the wide-open window. The thoughts of Loran, Arzen, and the original plot that had been cluttering his brain cleared away neatly in an instant.

The early spring breeze carried a cool, refreshing scent of grass and earth. As the heavy lily fragrance that had densely filled the spacious room slowly faded away, he even began to feel physically lighter.

Breathing in the fresh air, it felt as though the scent inside that bedroom had only made things feel all the more suffocating.

Right, no matter how much white lilies are supposed to help with sleep, between the lilies and the scented sachets, the fragrance in this bedroom was just way too much.

How does anyone even sleep in a place like this?

Elliot leaned his upper body a bit further out the window.

He didn’t know how many hours the Grand Duke had slept yesterday, but judging by how noticeably softened Henderson’s attitude had been, he must have slept quite a satisfactory amount.

It was a relief that he managed to fall asleep even inside a room so uncomfortably warm and dizzyingly thick with a mixture of all sorts of scents, but….

“Usually, if you keep telling yourself to sleep, sleep just runs further away…”

Thanks to working flat-out without a single day off, he was always starved for sleep. He had never suffered from insomnia himself, but precisely because of that, he knew all too well how agonizing it was not to be able to sleep.

In fact, back when he was Lim Seongsik, quite a few of his coworkers at part-time jobs suffered from insomnia. Whether they were tormented by it or not, there were always countless people who couldn’t fall asleep until dawn. Insomnia was the chronic disease of modern people.

“All the fragrance is going to blow away.”

A chillingly handsome voice echoed from behind him. Startled out of his wits, Elliot spun around reflexively and bent straight at the waist.

“Welcome~ Greetings, Grand Duke~”

“—Just close the window.”

“Yes, yes~”

Elliot agilely shut all the windows and presented the lavender tea he had brewed a moment earlier right in front of Arzen.

“This is tea brewed by drying the highest-grade lavender from the Pelion region. It’s hot, so please drink carefully~”

“….”

Arzen took a sip of the tea with a wary look. Meanwhile, Elliot waited patiently while wearing a polite smile—making sure the Grand Duke, or rather, the Grand Duke, wouldn’t feel any discomfort—while gazing off at empty space 45 degrees to the side with deliberately unfocused eyes.

Arzen only differed from yesterday in the color of his sleepwear—today he wore a black dress-style loungewear paired with a black cap—but he was once again fully prepared for bed.

Yesterday it had been so unexpected that it was just funny, but seeing it today, even with a lumpy, sauna-towel-like wrap tied around his neck, he still looked like a supermodel. The sheer radiance emanating even from the face captured in his blurry peripheral vision was unreal.

Back when he was Lim Seongsik, celebrities would occasionally visit his workplace. Especially when working at the movie theater, he saw them quite frequently for stage greetings and the like. Even then, he had always stayed true to his duties. He had never once asked for photos or autographs like the other staff members.

Right now, however, he suddenly felt a strong urge to get Arzen’s autograph. Deep inside his mind, a voice was shouting, ‘When are you ever going to see a handsome guy like this twice? Get his autograph already! Whoever he is, just get it!’

‘I can see him twice. Three times, four times, I can see him. Because I’m someone who works here….’

Elliot thought to himself, calming his inner desires. It left him feeling a little depressed as a side effect, but thankfully he managed to avert the catastrophic temptation of baring his stomach or back for an autograph.

“Let’s finish reading yesterday’s book.”

Arzen set his teacup down and lay down on the bed. While Elliot cleared away the tray holding the teacup, Arzen lay flat on his back, put on his sleep mask, and adjusted the position of his neck pillow.

“Should I skip the lullaby today?”

Elliot asked cautiously. Arzen gave a slight nod.

To think he wouldn’t need to sing a lullaby to a fully grown adult male again.

Yesterday’s experience had been utterly harrowing. Elliot felt a quiet wave of relief as he took a seat on the chair next to Arzen’s bed. He opened the book and began reading in a calm, steady voice.

“Naturally, the fear experienced by a soldier participating in battle cannot be the same as the fear felt by a merchant calculating the price of a customer’s goods. However…”

In the dim, dusk-lit room now surrounded by the refreshing air brought in by the earlier ventilation, Elliot’s soothing voice as he quietly read the book wrapped around Arzen in a pleasant embrace. Arzen closed his eyes and thought:

Maybe because I’m getting a little used to it, sleep isn’t washing over me quite as instantly as yesterday—

Snooze, snooze.

“…and so it turns out that—Oh, Grand Duke?”

Snooze, snooze.

“Are you… perhaps asleep?”

Elliot blinked. He had barely read through a single paragraph. Not a single chapter, not even a single page—just one paragraph!

Yet why on earth was he hearing the breathing sounds of a newborn baby who had fallen into a deep, heavy slumber?

“Is this guy… really an insomnia sufferer?”

Elliot voiced the natural suspicion that came to mind, but Arzen didn’t even get angry. It was only natural, since he was already fast asleep.

In the end, Elliot was able to head home for an early evening off that day.