I Thought I Was the Monster Duke's Fake Tranquilizer - Chapter 11
‘Those who owe their lives to His Grace have no shame.’
Tepe pursed his lips.
In contrast, Gorgo voiced his concerns with a far graver attitude.
“If the intervals between his seizures grow any shorter… even we will have difficulty holding him back.”
“I know, Gorgo.”
“When that time comes, even if it costs us our lives…”
“Let’s not talk in such grim terms.”
As if to shift the mood, Tepe opened his mouth in a deliberately flippant tone.
“Well. It’s a one-in-a-thousand, one-in-ten-thousand chance, but if, as the temple claims, Lady Sepina truly awakens as his mate, then this whole ordeal…”
Bang!
The next moment.
The carriage door flew open without warning.
There was only one person who could approach undetected by knights of their caliber and open the door without a hint of hesitation.
“You’ve returned, Your Grâ…”
But what if there was a woman slumped limply in the duke’s arms?
“…Your Grace! What on earth is this?”
Tepe shot up like a cat that had just spotted a cucumber.
Had our duke, unable to overcome his temperament, finally committed murder?
It was Gorgo’s words that calmed Tepe, who had been thinking just that.
“Could this be a woman who committed some discourtesy toward His Grace?”
Looking closely, the woman was alive.
‘A discourtesy.’
That certainly sounded plausible.
Tepe grimaced and composed himself.
“What is it this time? A woman who threw herself at His Grace to touch his hand? Or his lips?”
Even when treated as a monster, Edward was still Edward.
His innate beauty. His colossal frame. And the title of Duke of Thesseron, along with his standing as a dragon incarnation.
Madmen who had lost their senses over himâregardless of gender or ageâwere in no short supply.
There were even those who drooled over his scale-covered appearance, calling it exotic.
‘Those ones are just as shameless!’
Among them, the bolder ones would throw their whole bodies at Edward, or attempt to toy with him while pretending otherwise.
If the woman in the duke’s arms was one of those…
“Did you bring her here to punish her personally?”
Edward did not answer Tepe’s question. He simply climbed calmly into the carriage.
“It must be my many sins.”
He had been slightly startled when the woman fainted, but Edward quickly regained his composure.
She must have been so stricken by the sudden sight of his face that her heart had given out.
Indeed, he had seen no small number of people faint while worshiping his face, which led him to that conclusion.
“Yeees, of course. To certain degenerates, Your Grace’s very existence is a crime… But truly.”
“What happened?”
Gorgo asked seriously.
Tepe, too, continued to steal glances at the woman.
A grimy figure, small as an acorn.
Among all those who had ever accosted the duke, she was peerlessly frail-looking.
‘Wait.’
But the duke, showing not a hint of displeasure, had carried this woman back in his arms?
‘Alive, no less?’
The very same man who couldn’t stand even holding purification rites with Lady Sepina?
That thought had only just belatedly dawned on him.
“Apparently, this one seems to be mine.”
“…What?!”
“And so I picked her up.”
At the unexpected declaration, an earthquake rattled through Tepe’s eyes.
His gaze darted repeatedly to the scrawny, grimy woman, then back to the duke, then back again.
When words like that passed between a man and a woman, they usually meant…
“…Don’t tell me. This frail little thing went mad for you, threw herself at you, and you couldn’t stop her for fear that one smack would kill her. And so, with this woman, you ended up going all the way…”
“Just how far are you going to wander off on your own?”
“It’s not true, right? Your Grace? Surely you haven’t brought her here to take responsibility…”
Tepe was in the middle of letting his imagination run wild whenâ
Gorgo, who had been observing the woman with a calm demeanor, spoke up.
“By ‘mine,’ do you mean she is something that has been bestowed upon Your Grace?”
“Yes.”
“Then is this woman a test subject of the temple?”
“…!”
At those words, Tepe straightened up at once.
To anyone else, it might have seemed a nonsensical leap, but Gorgo, always a man of few words, had a habit of skipping the process and reaching the core of the matter directly.
‘Though for all that, the bastard is almost always close to the mark.’
Seeing that the duke did not deny it this time either, Gorgo’s words appeared to be true.
Tepe looked at Gorgo with eyes demanding an explanation.
Soon, Gorgo opened his mouth in his usual manner.
“That the temple has been conducting some sort of experiment, that much, we already knew.”
