It's Too Late for Regrets - Chapter 7.3

Rayan ran around the whole mansion like a madman, searching for any sign of Ines. The knights, Alveron, and even the steward anxiously followed him.

 

“Your Highness, please calm down!”

 

“Why?”

 

His teeth clenched tightly. This made no sense at all.

 

Rayan pulled down the massive curtain that covered the mansion’s huge wall with a strong yank.

 

The curtain tore loudly, unable to withstand his force. Somehow, the portraits behind the curtain shook dangerously.

 

Crash!

 

Eventually, the portrait of the late Duke, which hung in the middle of the hallway, fell down the stairs. Screams and hurried footsteps buzzed close to his ears.

 

Rayan barely breathed as he muttered,

 

“Why.”

 

Why is she nowhere to be found?

 

His bedroom, her bedroom, the dining room, the garden — every hallway and stairway in the mansion. But nowhere. No sign.

 

Not a single trace that Ines ever lived in this mansion.

 

Even though she had breathed and lived here for the past six years, never leaving the place once.

 

She married him here, had a child, and eventually died in this mansion.

 

Rayan grabbed the collar of the knight who followed him closely.

 

The knight, staring into Rayan’s glowing green eyes, gasped. Rayan shouted in boiling anger,

 

“Why is she nowhere?”

 

“Your Highness…!”

 

“She spoke in front of me, cried in front of me, and died in front of me!”

 

If someone died, they must have lived first, right?

 

So why is there no proof that she ever lived here?

 

Her bedroom was already cleaned thoroughly. Rayan had ordered no one to enter.

 

Yet her dresses, jewelry, blankets, even the chair and table she used to sit on — all were gone.

 

“Who cleaned the Duchess’s room?”

 

“Y-yes…?”

 

“Who?”

 

At his sudden shout, two maids were dragged in by the knights shortly after. Their answers were all the same.

 

“Lady Kyra ordered the mansion to be newly renovated!”

 

“Lady Kyra said to replace all the furniture in the rooms…”

 

That meant Kyra’s words had higher priority than his own orders.

 

Ines wasn’t the only one treated like an invisible person in this mansion.

 

Rayan clenched his trembling hands into fists and passed by the servants kneeling before him.

 

They could be dealt with all at once later. Now, something else was more urgent.

 

Something that might still carry Ines’s touch. The hallway she often walked through, the paintings she might have glanced at…

 

“Why? How could she be nowhere…”

 

While searching desperately, the terrible truth he already knew kept circling in his mind.

 

No matter how much he searched, she wouldn’t appear.

 

Because he had once ordered her to live as if she didn’t exist. No one else, but him.

 

He had told Kyra himself,

 

<Don’t worry. That woman will leave no trace in Eleanor.>

 

And truly, she died without leaving any trace here.

 

As if she never existed from the start.

 

The harsh self-hatred he had held down all this time began to overflow.

 

Rayan stopped dead in his tracks, breathing heavily, then turned around without realizing it.

 

His steps gradually quickened and turned into a run. His throat felt blocked by a hot lump, and he forgot even to breathe out.

 

He ran down to the first floor and headed toward the chapel at the back of the mansion along the forest path.

 

He threw open the door he had locked tightly with his own hand. A soft floral scent greeted him inside.

 

Rayan hurriedly breathed in the scent as if he were a newborn taking his first breath in the world and crossed the chapel at once.

 

On the altar lay a glass coffin covered with green silk.

 

He roughly pulled back the silk to reveal the woman inside, lying just as she had been in life.

 

“Ines.”

 

His eyes grew hot with tears.

 

Rayan wiped his eyes several times with the back of his hand to clear his blurry vision and stammered an excuse.

 

“Ines, I… I tried not to come back here again.”

 

His voice was very weak.

 

Really, he had tried not to come back here.

 

Though he couldn’t bury the coffin in the cemetery, he didn’t want to disturb her rest again.

 

Because he killed her.

 

Because she wouldn’t want to see the face of the murderer who made her die and be remembered as a worthless bug.

 

“It’s true. I did….”

 

He didn’t even know what he was saying. He just kept rambling randomly.

 

“You stayed inside the mansion all the time… I kept seeing you. I thought I could live with just your ghost, but then one day, you stopped appearing.”

 

His fingers scraped the glass coffin.

 

“So, I tried to find your traces… but there was nothing anywhere. I thought I would be okay without you, but I wasn’t.”

 

So, in the end, he came back to see her again.

 

Rayan opened his mouth, then whispered with a faint breath,

 

“Why don’t you come?”

 

Even a ghost would be fine, just please appear in front of me. Even the smallest thing touched by your warmth.

 

How can there be nothing at all? How!

 

His voice started to break.

 

“I can’t live without you.”

 

How could she drive him mad like this? His ten fingers kept touching and scratching the cold coffin.

 

<I’m curious how you think of me.>

 

“Is it because I don’t answer? Is that why you don’t come?”

 

“I don’t hate you. How could I? Never, I….”

 

If he could never see the living Ines again, at least he wanted to keep her ghost by his side. That way, even if his heart rotted away, he could pretend to live normally on the outside.

 

He was someone who could never show weakness or break down, wherever and whenever. He would never allow that himself.

 

By nature, he was a protector, a wielder of power, and a ruler. He was the reference point for everything, and he had to be the subject of everything he did.

 

Because of this nature, anything that went against his beliefs or opposed him was treated as an annoying thorn.

 

Ines was the sharpest and toughest thorn among those.

 

She was the kind of person he could never accept, but also the only one who shook him deeply.

 

His lips moved on their own.

 

“I… love you.”

 

The thorn named Ines, which had been stuck in him and wouldn’t come out, began to hurt him at some point.

 

It pricked painfully and unbearably, then slowly became a part of him, leaving only a faint ache.

 

The thorn named Ines no longer annoyed him. It only hurt.

 

Why did it hurt?

 

Why did his heart ache whenever she avoided him, whenever she spent time alone with their child, whenever she got hurt somewhere he didn’t know…?

 

Edgar once said she was a lovely person. For many years, he did not argue against that, but he never accepted it either.

 

“Love…”

 

Yet the first word he ever spoke aloud was shockingly sweet.

 

He muttered like he was hypnotized,

 

“I love you.”

 

It was an addictive word that made him feel like he would faint at any moment, a strong dizziness washing over him.

 

“I love you…”

 

When he said it, it was as willing as hearing Ines’s voice.

 

That’s why it drove him crazy. Because he knew it was a heart he could never reach.

 

He growled a laugh deep in his throat.

 

Long ago, the one who first called her name and said she was lovely was not Rayan, but Edgar.

 

But because Edgar introduced her with the name Rayan Eleanor, she became his first love.

 

And Rayan used that very efficiently.

 

So, from start to finish, he never truly spared her.

 

He felt no guilt because he thought it was natural. Because…

 

Because Ines was a bastard, less than a commoner?

 

The last question was one he asked himself. And Rayan already knew the answer from the start.

 

No. Being a bastard could not be a justification for his sins.

 

She was not Millian’s uncle. She only gave him love, and she was so delicate that she could not even harm him or his country, yet he completely ignored that.

 

And now, he loved her.

 

He laughed bitterly at how ridiculous he looked, but tears blurred his vision instead of laughter.

 

His mind refused to accept it until the very end, but finally, everything turned dizzyingly upside down.

 

“I love you…”

 

The voice saying love too late sounded like the cry of a dying beast.

 

I.

 

You.

 

“I love you, Ines. I love you so much.”

 

The moment he gave the irritation and faint pain he always felt the name “love,” everything became very clear.

 

Since when? He had no idea where it started.