To My First Love, With Regret - 80

That place was teeming with thugs disguised in military uniforms. They picked a fight with him every time they crossed paths, so avoiding that room had long since become a habit. That was why, even while searching frantically for Lady Evelyn, he had subconsciously skipped it.

—Chantal, that door… have you checked it?

Had Chantal bypassed it for the same reason? She looked startled by his question, then, her expression turning terrifying, she sprinted toward the door.

Owen followed, but it felt as if he were walking toward his own execution. The ominous premonition that Lady Evelyn and Ethan Fairchild were inside that game room grew more intense with every step.

Slam!

Chantal threw the door open with a violent force. In that instant, Owen forgot how to breathe.

The scene inside was, in a word, a shambles. Poker chips and the jagged shards of a broken record were scattered across the floor. Above the card table, now a wreck of gambling debris, only dark shadows swayed helplessly.

The only thing moving in the game room was the hanging lamp, swinging back and forth in the wind blowing through the open window.

There was no one there.

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Ethan strode through the first-floor corridor of the manor, confident that he looked no different than he had before the war-like tryst.

A door at the far end of the servant’s passage opened, and a butler appeared, balancing a tray in one hand. As he approached, presumably heading toward the party, he stepped aside and offered a formal nod.

But the moment the distance between them closed to a single step, the butler’s professional, perfunctory smile crumbled.

—Major Fairchild, if there is anything I can assist you with, please do not hesitate to say.

Ethan had straightened his uniform meticulously before slipping out of the game room. Through what eyes is this man looking, Ethan wondered, that I appear so broken as to need help?

What Ethan needed was not the assistance of a stranger. Without a word, he snatched a crystal decanter of liquor from the tray and moved past the butler.

Pushing through the first door he found, he stepped out into the garden and gasped at the damp night air like a man who had been suffocating, desperate to suppress the unpleasant bile rising within him.

Finally, he had planted the seed of revenge in his enemy’s womb. Tonight, Ethan Fairchild was the hunter who had cornered a difficult prey after a relentless pursuit.

Yet, instead of a sweet sense of victory, only a nauseating sense of wrongness welled up from deep inside. Ethan squeezed his eyes shut against a wave of vertigo before opening them again.

Where had the garden gone—the one that used to breathe so vibrantly under the sun? Drenched in pale moonlight, the place was as cold and silent as the dead. Before his blurred vision, the rectangular flowerbeds transformed into graves, and the orderly rows of garden trees became tombstones.

Between the tombstones, the whispers of a man and a woman drifted on the wind.

—If we keep walking this quietly, I’m going to feel like a thief.

—Aren’t you a thief?

—What did I steal?

—My heart.

—Ha, you gave that to me. Who are you calling a thief now?

Ethan stood face-to-face with his nineteen-year-old self, a boy long since dead. That foolish, innocent boy who, while walking his lover home late at night, would blather on desperately because he hated for their time together to end, even while trembling with the fear of being caught.

White Cliff Hall, where old memories drifted like wraiths. This was the cemetery where his dead love was buried.

The feelings he had back then should have died, buried deep underground a decade ago, yet they lunged out like unrotted corpses to seize his ankles.

Ethan drew a breath to stifle the rising nausea, but froze like a man stabbed through the lungs. The familiar scent of the sea, mingled with a sensual fragrance, flooded his airway. During their tryst, Eve’s perfume had evidently seeped into his skin.

Damn it. To think she’s the kind of woman who replaces her men so easily, yet hasn’t changed her perfume in ten years.

Thanks to that cruelty, his dead love had now tainted even the very air he breathed. At this point, Ethan’s efforts were in vain; he could no longer hold back the retching that had plagued him since the moment they finished.

He doubled over, leaning heavily against a nearby tree. Where in this wretched state was the dignity of a hunter? He looked like a prey animal coughing up blood after a strike to its vitals.

He tried to heave it all out—the feelings that refused to die, the lingering attachments. But he knew that even if he spat out his very organs, those things would not leave him. That despair pressed heavily on his chest. His breath hitched, and his vision grew dim.

Soon, Ethan began to vomit something else: the self-loathing he felt for harboring these rotting emotions, for continuing to fester.

That tryst was supposed to be a cold ritual of revenge. Instead, he had moved his hips with vulgar abandon, intoxicated by heat like a beast.

The only pleasure he should have taken from the traitor who threw him in prison was the thrill of vengeance, yet he had gone so far as to seek familiar comfort in her arms—like a lost animal seized by a homing instinct. Just like Eve’s scent, which he still remembered so vividly.

Ethan Fairchild, how can you still… how dare you crave love from the likes of Evelyn Sherwood? From the enemy who snatched away the brilliant life you built with your own hands and shoved you into a mire of blood and filth.

It was disgusting. More than the woman herself, he loathed the man who still felt something like love for her. Now, more than Eve’s betrayal, he hated the betrayal committed by his own body and heart.

—Damn it….

Though he retched until his stomach was hollow, the gut-wrenching nausea remained. He stopped his dry heaving, staggered forward, and collapsed onto the edge of the marble fountain.

The stopper he had pried from the crystal decanter rolled across the gravel, clicking to a halt. Like a fool who believed a terminal wound could be cured with disinfectant, Ethan pressed the cold glass to his lips and poured the potent spirit down his throat.

—Haah….

Perhaps it wasn’t a completely foolish prescription. As the intoxication rose, the nausea began to subside. He didn’t know if it was his emotions or his reason that had finally grown dull, but at least he could endure it now.

Regaining a shred of composure, Ethan looked up at the manor, now submerged in the bluish moonlight.

I’m not the one who’s truly disgusting. That place is.

Eden. The paradise that had exiled him, the sickening flower blooming atop the corpse of a poor man’s love.

Ethan gripped his black necktie—which he had loosely pulled down in his debauchery—and tightened it around his neck like a noose. Holding fast to the one emotion he was entitled to feel, he made a vow.

I will cut the windpipe of every Sherwood with my own hands. I will seize Kentrell.

Even if the price is killing my own soul and selling this body to do it.

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It was merely a transaction for the child.

Even as she persuaded herself with these words, Eve knew. She knew that even if she entered the bargain with cold calculation, the moment she begged for a night with the man who had betrayed her, her heart would ache for a very long time.

It was exactly as she had braced for. Ethan Fairchild had reached through her womb to cruelly gouge out her heart before leaving.

He had treated Eve as nothing more than a vent for his lust. It wasn’t even because he desired her body; the man had only been having a lonely affair with his own virulent hatred. Yet Eve, knowing all of this, had still chased after the love of ten years ago within him.

Thus, there was one thing in this tryst that had gone off-script. The person who had driven the dagger into Eve’s soul was not the man, but herself.

Her legs still trembled too much to support her weight, and the space between them burned with a dull, throbbing heat. The path she had thrown wide open solely to receive the seed of life was now twitching on its own, unable to forget the man who had departed. It was the aftershock of a humiliating climax.

Evelyn Sherwood, did you enjoy yourself with a man who no longer has a heart for you?

She had no right to despise him as a beast—that man who went mad with joy just because she swayed her hips, even while he hated her as an enemy.

You’re the same kind of beast.

But from now on, she had to get used to this fallen version of herself. Would a child truly be conceived in a single night? Until the day she confirmed her pregnancy, Eve would have to spread her legs for the man who discarded her and beg him to please discharge his desire inside her.

—Haah….

The mere thought of having to endure that self-mutilation again left her exhausted. Ethan had never been physically ‘rough’ while they were together, but an affair with him was inherently toxic.

Devastated in both body and mind after only a single encounter, Eve stood leaning blankly against the door like an empty shell, staring into the dark room with hollow eyes.

She only snapped back to reality when the sound of two pairs of frantic footsteps brushed past the other side of the door. Finally, she moved—toward the bed where the sound of peaceful, rhythmic breathing continued.

With every step, she felt the slickness between her thighs. Something kept trickling from within, soaking her underwear.

The seed of life, for which she had sacrificed her own soul, was wastefully slipping away from her.

She had wanted to submerge herself in water the moment it was over—to wash away every cursed trace of Ethan Fairchild and flush out the stupidity of mistaking him for her dead first love—but all her endurance seemed to have been for nothing.