I Wasn't Trying to Seduce with the Male Lead - Episode 58

“A wrist? Whose, on earth?”

The mere thought of it made her stomach churn. She wasn’t a coward, but a severed wrist was still too much. Eleanor, a normal woman in that regard, completely lost her desire to look at it.

Her steps slowed down due to her unease, but Sky and Claude, on the other hand, quickened their pace and approached. They peered into the box without any hesitation.

“It really is a human wrist.”

“Damn it, what a gruesome gift to send. It’s horrible!” Minaz cried out, trembling.

“Who sent this, anyway?”

“To find that out, we’ll probably have to figure out whose wrist it is first.” Claude, as a judge, seemed somewhat immune and remained calm.

However, there was someone even more daring than him in that room.

“Ah! Duke Phaedra!” Minaz gasped in horror as Sky reached his hand towards the box.

“We need to examine it to find clues,” Sky said.

By this time, Eleanor had also arrived near the box. It was incredibly unpleasant, but she bravely decided to look. She figured it wasn’t just sent to be disgusting; there must be a clue.

“Ugh.” Despite bracing herself, seeing the pale, severed hand was still horrifying, and a gasp escaped her lips. Fortunately, even though it was slightly decomposed, there was no fresh blood or a gruesome appearance.

As Eleanor leaned in closer, Minaz made a sound of disgust from behind her.

“It looks like a man’s hand,” Eleanor said.

Sky nodded at her words. “Yes. A young man. And probably a noble.”

The hand, placed with the palm facing up, was too large for a woman but was quite firm and smooth. Since commoners in the empire couldn’t survive without labor, Sky’s words were likely correct—the owner of the hand was a noble.

Even with that knowledge, the scope was still too wide. Without the ability to examine fingerprints like in the modern era, identifying the person just from their hand was not easy.

However, another clue was soon discovered.

“There’s a ring on the finger.” Sky pointed to the area below the half-bent middle finger. Just as he said, a thick, gold ring was there.

“Y? For Young? Yulis? Yonsen? Yorf? Yacen?”

“York? Yeti? The shape of the crest is different, though.”

Everyone started listing off names of noble families that began with the letter ‘Y.’

Meanwhile, Eleanor’s expression grew rigid. Something had just occurred to her.

“Yu…nis.”

Minaz’s eyes lit up at the name that escaped Eleanor’s lips.

“Yunis? Was that the Count’s family in the south? Come to think of it, the crest looks similar.”

“They’re at the very southern tip. Did someone from that family come to the capital?”

While Claude and Minaz chattered, Biancasta staggered towards the box as if she were about to collapse.

“A…drian?”

The moment she saw the wrist, Biancasta’s face stiffened, as if she had a premonition.

“Aaaah!”

Letting out a piercing scream, Biancasta fainted on the spot.

Eleanor looked at Sky with a worried expression. “Is she okay?”

“She fainted from the shock, but her vital signs are fine. It would be better to let her rest than to try to wake her up forcefully.”

Given the shock she had endured, that was certainly the best course of action.

After entrusting Biancasta to a maid, they returned to the office, where the Duchess of Floyd was now seated with Blaine, who had just joined them.

“Is the Marchioness of Weiss alright?”

“Yes. She’s sleeping,” Eleanor replied, sitting across from the two.

The Duchess murmured with a puzzled expression. “Is the owner of that hand really a noble from the Yunis family?”

“It’s probably correct.”

“If she was so shocked, they must have been close. How did the young Marchioness of the capital become acquainted with a noble from the south?”

Eleanor calmly explained how Biancasta had first met Adrian Yunis at the Princess’s birthday celebration, how he had gone missing on his way back home, and how she had been persistently trying to find him.

As the story concluded, the door opened.

“We found this while investigating the box,” Minaz and Claude said, entering with serious expressions and holding out an envelope. It seemed they had finished examining the box that they couldn’t before because of Biancasta’s collapse.

“What is it?”

Instead of answering, Minaz handed the letter to Eleanor, gesturing for her to read it. It was a common paper envelope with no seal.

Eleanor opened it, took out the contents, and read it aloud for everyone to hear.

[I am his master. We are deeply connected. If you tarnish my honor, I can’t live with my head held high. If you contact him before me, I will immediately die. This is not just a threat; I mean it. Even in death, I will surely take him with me. If you don’t reach me by sunset today, the owner of the wrist will die.]

After finishing the reading, Eleanor murmured in a bitter tone, “The master of the oath was the princess, not the emperor.”

With her words, a heavy silence fell. Everyone’s expression was grim. They seemed to be deep in thought, but no one dared to speak.

It was Eleanor who spoke up again.

“Is there a possibility that Adrian Yunis is still alive?”

Skye, who had examined the wrist closely, was the one to answer the question.

“The cut wasn’t very clean, and it seems he bled a lot. It’s been a while since it was severed, so it’s not certain, but if it had been cut after he was dead, the blood would have clotted. So there’s a possibility it was severed while he was still alive.”

Having a limb cut off while still alive. The mere thought of Adrian’s suffering was horrifying, but at least there was hope that he was alive.

Claude’s voice was filled with anger. “Cutting off a nobleman’s wrist and sending it as a gift… Even if it’s Her Royal Highness the Princess, this is an excessive act of wickedness. She won’t be able to get away with this easily if we file a complaint with the Court of Law.”

“That would require proof that the princess sent it,” the Duchess of Floyd said, cutting off Claude with a cold tone.

“If we investigate, we’ll surely find a trail somewhere. Transporting a magical box to the imperial palace and secretly leaving it in a guest’s villa isn’t something just anyone can do.”

“The opponent is His Majesty the Emperor’s daughter. Even if she were witnessed entering the main gate with the box and leaving empty-handed, we can’t simply accuse her,” Minaz interjected into the argument. “Based on her past actions, the princess has likely brainwashed or used magic on most of the people she’s used. It will be hard to get a testimony, and even if we manage to prove her guilt, she won’t be severely punished. Pushing for a legal case just to get her a few months of confinement would only bring bigger trouble later on.”

Claude, as a judge, looked very displeased but didn’t deny the obvious truth.

“Most importantly, the princess said she would die if her honor was tarnished. That would mean the Count of Calabria would also die,” Eleanor pointed out, referring to the letter’s contents, and the atmosphere grew dark again.

Bound by the oath with Lian, they could not touch the princess. The princess, on the other hand, could fully exploit that fact.

“We need to decide what to do right now. The deadline is sunset,” Minaz said, bringing them back to reality.

The sun was already past its zenith, so if they wanted to get to the imperial palace in time, they had to leave soon. There was no time to make a detailed plan.

“Could we just say we didn’t go because the sender wasn’t mentioned?” Blaine suggested a quick solution.

Sky shook his head. “If I were the one making this threat, I wouldn’t be so forgiving. I’d just kill Yunis and say, ‘He died because you didn’t come.'”

“Would she be so quick to kill the hostage and lose all leverage for negotiation?”

“Even if she kills Adrian, there are plenty of other hostages. She could just kidnap anyone who’s remotely connected to any of us here,” Sky’s rich accent resonated with a chilling tone. “Parents, distant relatives, employees, friends… all of you here have a wide network. Even if you’re not that close, if they start getting kidnapped and killed one by one, it’ll be quite hard to just stay here and pretend you don’t care.”

Everyone’s expression hardened, but Skye remained unfazed as he spoke.

Looking at him with dissatisfaction, Claude’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “You certainly know a lot about the mind of a blackmailer.”

“Thank you for the compliment.” Sky accepted the remark with a smile as if it were nothing.

Minaz stopped Claude, who was about to snap back, and said, “Stop the bickering and think of a solution.”

“Any method we come up with will just be empty talk unless we can break Lian’s oath. We need to free Lian first.”

“That’s true, but the problem is how we do that,” the Duchess said.

Blaine, who had been speaking passionately, answered in an uncertain voice. “I heard there’s a way to break an oath by severing or sealing the part where it was cast. We just need to get in touch with Lian somehow…”

“It’s hard to get in touch with him, and besides, the princess said she would die if we did that,” the Duchess said.

“That’s just a threat, it’s not real. Would a princess really kill herself over something like that?”

“It’s not just a simple threat,” Sky countered Blaine on behalf of the Duchess. “The princess is a strangely obsessive and extremely sensitive girl when it comes to the Count. There’s no law saying she won’t do something rash in a moment of emotion. And besides…” He paused and looked at Blaine and the Duchess. “You two know the Count of Calabria well. What do you think he’d do if he found out he was under a vassalage oath?”

The Duchess bit her lip, and Blaine answered in a low voice, “He would draw his sword against the imperial family.”

“Exactly. His rebellion would be a real threat. The imperial family would use force to prevent us from joining him.”

Minaz lowered his gaze and murmured with regret, “Damn it. Should I have told Lian when we used the warp stone?”

“The Count doesn’t know much about the oath, and with the difficulty in contacting him, telling him something like that would only cause more chaos. His personality is so unpredictable that there’s a risk of us getting out of sync before we can even find a proper countermeasure.”

The heated discussion continued, but no viable solution emerged. This was expected, as there was no time, and the situation was so desperate.

Lost in thought, Eleanor, who had been listening silently, glanced at her watch. The sun was already starting to set. There was no other way.

“I will go to the imperial palace.”

Everyone’s eyes widened at Eleanor’s quiet voice.

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