To My First Love, With Regret - 99

—My, why is your stomach so unsettled?

He didn’t sound like a man concerned for Eve’s health. From the suggestive, testing tone of his voice to the way his gaze pinned her like prey driven into a corner, there was a streak of strange, dark euphoria mixed in.

He had been waiting for this exact moment—the moment he could link any change in Eve to signs of pregnancy. She couldn’t let him be certain it was morning sickness. Eve shot him her usual haughty glare and snapped back.

—I’ve been drinking too much lately.

Of course, Ethan didn’t look like he bought it for a second. While everyone else picked up their cutlery, he alone remained still, observing her.

—You drink yourself into a stupor, don’t know why your stomach is sour, and yet you go see a doctor? That’s about as ridiculous as a woman with a belly like a watermelon going to a doctor because she doesn’t know she’s pregnant.

…Why that specific analogy? Eve forced a laugh as if she had just heard an absurd joke, trying to hide her agitation.

—Anyway, ‘drinking too much,’ is it? I wonder what could possibly trouble our ice-hearted Princess so much that she’d drown herself in a wine cask….

—Can you let me forget about our money problems for at least one meal?

Perhaps the facade of Kentrell’s financial ruin was convincing enough. Ethan withdrew his suspicion and finally picked up his fork.

After that, Eve focused on her meal with a feigned composure, but her insides were tossing and turning like a rowboat in a violent gale. To retch again or flee now would be a confession of pregnancy to that razor-sharp interrogator.

Eve finished her plate by force, occasionally sipping juice so tart it made her tongue sting, washing down the rising bile. It was less a dinner and more a battle for survival.

She believed that once the painful ordeal was over, she would be free from his searching gaze.

She was wrong. Not long after she had collapsed onto her bed and closed her eyes, she was jolted awake by a rough hand grabbing her breast. When she opened her eyes, those relentless, blue-gray eyes were the first thing she saw. Ethan had picked the locked bedroom door as if it were a joke and was looming over her as if she were his personal property.

—Your breasts have gotten larger. Isn’t it a miracle? A woman who’s wasting away because she can’t eat, yet she puts on weight only here. Don’t you think?

Excitement simmered in the man’s grip as he kneaded her swollen chest as if inspecting her readiness to nurse. It wasn’t the lust of a male desiring a mate; it was the predatory glee of a wolf come to devour a lamb.

—Shall we put your husband to sleep again tonight and have a risky little go right next to him?

This blatant lust was merely bait. Beneath it, a meticulous trap lay open, waiting for Eve to walk right in.

If she refused the intimacy she usually submitted to, Ethan would undoubtedly take it as confirmation of her pregnancy. Eve, pretending to be groggy and half-asleep to buy time, closed her eyes again and spat out a retort.

—If you’re so desperate you have to wake a sleeping woman, go to a brothel.

What could be more foolish than accepting the beast just to hide the pregnancy, only to endanger the child who had just taken root? Eve chose to be suspected instead.

—Can’t be helped then. Get some rest.

Ethan withdrew surprisingly easily, without further pestering. It was as if he had been waiting for that very rejection.

It wasn’t an overinterpretation. As his hand left her breast, it traveled down, slowly and lingeringly stroking her lower abdomen. It was a touch so tender it made the fine hairs all over her body stand on end.

Now, no matter how favorably Eve tried to spin the situation, she couldn’t deny this one fact.

Ethan knew she was carrying a child.

She froze in terror at the lingering warmth of the biological father pressed against her child’s hiding place.

There’s no time.

As soon as he left the room, Eve picked up the receiver. A short while later, Owen came to find her in the study where she had secretly relocated. His face was flushed, as if he had been waiting for the summons.

—My Queen… do you have something to tell me?

He knelt before Eve and looked up at her like a fanatic awaiting a revelation. The shimmering hope in his eyes made the nausea rise again. Eve suppressed the morning sickness and tossed him the words of salvation he craved, like alms to a beggar.

—I’m pregnant.

In that instant, Owen turned as rigid as a plaster statue. His wide eyes shook uncontrollably in disbelief before a sudden flood of tears burst forth. Terrified that he was acting unmanly, he hurriedly fumbled with his glasses, wiping his eyes and stammering excuses.

—That the Queen, hic, would grant a miracle to this lowly servant… I, I was so overwhelmed I lost my composure…. Thank you, Lady. I will be a wonderful husband and father, even if it costs me my life.

Eve looked down with cold, indifferent eyes at the man prostrating at her feet and pouring out his vows. She asked a chilling question.

—Do you want to be a father?

The man, who had been trembling with the ecstasy of becoming a father, suddenly froze. He slowly raised his head to face Eve. His eyes were a chaotic storm of confusion.

He was already the father the moment Eve conceived—so why ask if he ‘wanted’ to be one?

It was because he vaguely sensed the weight behind that peculiar question. Owen Callas was an inadequate man in many ways, but he was a dog who understood his master’s commands well enough.

—Owen, do you think you can actually become a father?

—Of course I….

—Chantal won’t just let me give birth to it, will she?

The blood drained instantly from Owen’s face. He knew better than anyone what Chantal, blinded by jealousy, was capable of.

But true to his nature—a parasite that survives by clinging to the strong—he immediately tried to shift the responsibility onto Eve.

—You needn’t worry about Chantal. Doesn’t the Queen already hold that pathetic clown in the palm of her hand?

—So, instead of protecting me, you’ll hide behind my skirts? You’ve failed as a father already.

—N-no! That’s not what I meant. I misspoken. I will protect you and the child even if it costs me my life!

Owen clung to her desperately, his face ghastly. It was a relief to see that even a parasite’s cowardly nature bends when it’s about to be discarded by its host. He was exposing the very weakness Eve needed to pierce.

—I don’t want to raise the child in my womb while holding my breath like a criminal again.

Eve placed both hands over her lower abdomen, as if shielding the child.

—If this child is born frail because of my mental distress, that sin will be on your head for failing to protect us.

—Th-that will never happen. I’ll do whatever it takes….

—Anything?

—Yes, of course.

As if she had been waiting for those words, Eve’s eyes flashed like golden sparks erupting from a dark blue barrel. She delivered the command.

—Kill Chantal.

In that moment, it was as if Owen Callas himself had died. His skin turned pale in an instant, and his frozen body was no different from a corpse.

—…What? Th-that’s….

He made sound, but it was just a meaningless repetition of syllables. While Owen remained paralyzed, unable to either obey or defy the order, the Queen indifferently pressed the timer on the time bomb.

—The deadline is before you return to the North.

He had only three days left.

—If Chantal isn’t dead by then, your child will die.

As soon as the sentence to terminate the child was handed down, Owen began to tremble like a leaf and gasp for air. He looked like a man witnessing a vision of his own child being torn apart before his eyes. His face contorted hideously.

To think that such a weak man could make such a terrifying expression.

As expected, the fact that Chantal had aborted Owen’s child in the past served as the wedge that would shatter their relationship forever.

Does he regret confessing his secret to me now? He’s essentially exposed his own fatal flaw.

Ah, that feeling… I know it all too well. I was the same.

Ten years ago, when she was blinded by despair after being abandoned by Ethan, how had Owen and Chantal approached her? They had posed as saviors, only to use the secrets she entrusted to them to nail her limbs to the cross. This was nothing more than a justified reprisal.

—A coward who can’t even rid himself of a single flea doesn’t deserve to be the father of my child.

The child he had always wanted, or a woman he had long since stopped loving? It wasn’t even a choice worth debating. For Owen, discarding Chantal was an inevitable path.

But was the method the problem?

—D-does she have to die? Wouldn’t it be safer and easier to lock her in a psychiatric ward for life?

He resisted stubbornly, trying to avoid murder at all costs. It wasn’t that he wanted to save Chantal; he was simply terrified of killing.

Fine then. She would make him forget that petty fear with a much more horrific one.

Eve thrust a poisoned blade into Owen Callas’s most pathetic pressure point without mercy.

—I’d rather have Ethan Fairchild’s child one more time.

—N-no! My Queen, please, anything but that….

—Ethan would even commit murder if I commanded it.

Eve deftly twisted the truth of the past. She made Ethan’s killing of Harry out to be a deliberate act of blind obedience to her, rather than a crime of passion.

Ethan Fairchild was a perfect slave who wouldn’t hesitate to become a murderer at my command. Unlike you.

That blatant lie was the incantation that would cause a man driven mad by inferiority to be reborn as a killer.