I Thought I Was the Monster Duke's Fake Tranquilizer - Chapter 22
I can do it all… I can do it all… I can do it all…
The moment Lucy’s words echoed through the forest like a lingering refrain.
Edward’s smile deepened in a peculiar way.
Chill.
Tepe and Gorgo instinctively exchanged glances.
‘It seems His Grace really means to deal with her thoroughly this time.’
No one knew better than the two of them how Edward treated those who had once caught his eye.
Scam artist though she might be, she was also such a small woman that she didn’t look capable of enduring such treatment.
‘She’s stumbled into the wrong hands.’
The anger and displeasure they had harbored toward Lucy shifted in an instant into something closer to faint pity, and the look of watching something already ruined.
But Lucy didn’t even have the luxury to notice that.
Clatter, clatter, clatter.
The hoofbeats of the temple soldiers were drawing closer by the second!
‘There’s no time for this!’
Whether he knew of her urgency or not, Edward remained smiling.
“You can do it all?”
“As if I’d stop at just kisses! For Your Grace— no, for my Master, I can do even more! Absolutely!”
“…”
“So hurry, the stamp on the contract, no, you can stamp it later, so just start the carriage…”
Edward, who had been smiling, abruptly changed his expression at those words.
“‘For my Master, I can do anything,’ is it?”
“I-Is there a problem…?”
“Then what if your master changes?”
That would be absolutely fan— Lucy, who had been thinking just that, hurriedly pulled down the corners of her mouth, which had been about to curl upward.
Because Edward’s expression had become just a little terrifying.
“Then you’d do all of it for anyone but me.”
I’m not even the female lead — why would that matter?!
Of course, she couldn’t say that.
Lucy sighed inwardly.
‘Well, I suppose it might bother him a bit.’
There was no need to revisit the subject of Edward’s temperament.
Just moments ago, he hadn’t merely grabbed her throat to kill her—no, he had employed the novel method of covering her nose and mouth entirely. Observe.
‘This bastard is creatively awful.’
A man like this could very well find the mere idea of sharing a purifier with someone else unclean.
Didn’t so many male leads in dark romance novels behave like obsessive germaphobes?
They found even lascivious acts filthy, despised any form of contact — until, of course, it was with the female lead, and then suddenly it was perfectly fine.
Recalling not just 〈The Last Dragon’s Bride〉 but all the other dark R-19 novels she had read to tatters in the shelter of her past life, Lucy shook her head lightly.
‘As long as I’m the purifier, it’s impossible not to touch.’
Fortunately, judging by his willingness to physically stop her breath, he seemed to have resigned himself to at least that much contact.
However, it appeared he would rather die than have a purifier who mingled bodies with other humans.
“But who exactly have you purified to make you so confident?”
…Hearing him put it that way.
‘In both my past life and this one, I’ve never even had a boyfriend.’
Who would she have purified?
Lucy forced strength into her brow, which threatened to furrow with indignation.
Edward, too, was growing slightly irritated.
‘She’s supposed to have fallen for me.’
What sort of bastard had she purified, to be able to declare herself a useful purifier with such confidence?
And on top of that, to brag about it right in front of the man she’d fallen for?
‘I can’t tell if she’s perceptive or completely oblivious.’
He had been letting her be, watching her act rather adorably coy.
But the thought of another man’s possibility left him inexplicably displeased.
‘What bastard dares… with my mouse…’
Edward’s eyes were just about to narrow when—
Clatter.
The sound of hooves rang out directly behind them.
With no room left to think, Lucy instinctively shouted,
“Oh, come on! Who do you think it is! It’s you, Your Grace!”
“…Me?”
“You know I was Lady Sepina’s test subject! All those heated moments you’ve had… that was all my purification power!”
My purification power… purification power… power…
Once again, the echo spread through the air.
Lucy flinched for a moment.
She was the one who had shouted it, but hearing it aloud like this, the feeling was undeniably strange.
Wasn’t this practically announcing that, through Sepina, he had effectively mingled bodies with her as well?
That the three of them had, in truth, been entangled in that way.
‘What kind of absurd R-19 premise does this sound like?’
