Prologue
Was it the sixth time? The seventh?
No… maybe even the eighth.
Another day where I sat through a blind date I neither cared for nor wanted, forcing smiles and small talk while wasting precious hours of my life.
A meaningless series of dull matchmaking meetings.
They were nothing more than my elder brother’s self-satisfaction, born out of his excessive concern for me.
To that, I had contributed only the tiniest bit of guilt and conscience.
After all, I couldn’t deny the truth—that for the past twenty-three years, I had done nothing but eat, sleep, laze about, and idle away on my bed.
“Would you like to order more food?”
…Excuse me, what?
“I heard Lady Christener has quite the appetite, so I made sure to bring a very full purse today.”
Now hold on. That’s crossing the line, isn’t it?
At those words, I lifted my gaze from the far edge of the table in disbelief.
First came the dazzling silver hair and piercing blue eyes, followed by a beautiful face smiling warmly at me.
A face that was, no matter when I looked, both striking and flawless—and also one that always managed to kill my appetite.
Unthinkingly, I stared blankly again at Rixion Luhanes’ face, before awkwardly averting my eyes and replying:
“Ah, haha… Today I don’t really… have much of an appetite.”
“Is that so? What a shame. I was hoping to see for myself the sight of you finishing ten plates of steak.”
…How in the world did this man know that?
Don’t tell me he’s about to ask me to split this marble table in half just to prove it.
A shiver of unease crept over me.
What if he actually did tell me to do it? Should I grind the table into powder instead? Or put on that nauseating act of false modesty again?
Which option would make him lose interest in me faster?
I fiddled idly with my hands beneath the table, seriously considering it.
Strange. Am I more well-known than I thought?
How had the gossip of my disastrous matchmaking failures rolled around until it reached Rixion Luhanes’ ears? He seemed to know everything.
“Well, today isn’t the only day, after all.”
That gentle voice brushed against my ear, sounding so impossibly kind that I could hardly believe it belonged to the man before me. No matter how many times I heard it, I never got used to it.
Excuse me? What’s that supposed to mean? Why do you sound like we’ll be meeting again?
My brows furrowed before I realized it, suspicion and wariness filling my eyes as I studied the man across from me.
And once again, he smiled, eyes crinkling beautifully.
A wave of goosebumps spread from my knuckles to my wrists, and I rubbed the back of my hand against my skirt to shake it off.
Why on earth was this man treating me this way?
Is there anything more terrifying than being shown inexplicable kindness from someone whose motives you cannot grasp?
And worse—why did he act as though he knew me so well, as though he truly cared for me?
What’s his goal?
No matter how much I doubted, questioned, and tried to read his intentions, I could reach no conclusion.
I didn’t know what he wanted. But I did know one thing for certain:
I must not be deceived by that beautiful face.
Because I knew.
No matter how sweetly he spoke or how tenderly he behaved, beneath that lovely shell lurked a savage, terrifying monster.
And I also knew how mercilessly brutal the world of The Saintess of Erendel—the romance fantasy novel I now lived in—truly was.
Rixion Luhanes, Duke of House Luhanes.
A man incapable of genuinely loving anyone. All he possessed was his flawless face… and an obsessive desire to own.
The man before me was the kind of lunatic who would lock away the woman he “loved,” ignoring her tearful pleas to let her return home.
And worse, when the heroine finally managed to escape, he dragged her back—then butchered, one by one, the people who had helped her flee, all before her very eyes.
A psychopath.
Sigh…
I kept my eyes fixed on the teacup in front of me, swallowing a long sigh.
How had things come to this?
Why was I, someone who didn’t even exist in the original story, sitting here on a blind date with the novel’s official male lead?
And why did I keep meeting him, when I thought it would end after just once?
Ugh, I really shouldn’t have made that mistake back then…
I pressed down the urge to tear at my hair and recalled the very first time I had met this man.
“Go on a blind date.”
It had started as an ordinary day.
I was lounging on my bed as usual, lazily flicking my feet while reading the latest issue of Today’s High Society, a fairly popular gossip magazine.
From a certain baron’s affair scandal, to the growing discord between the Imperial family and the temple, to the shocking revelation that Princess Elena had purchased a painting for three thousand gold at auction only for it to be revealed as a forgery…
The magazine was full of juicy stories that I couldn’t put down.
Of course, that didn’t mean I had the gall to ignore the master of this mansion when he stormed into my room, bristling like a general come to claim his enemy’s head.
I set the magazine I’d been engrossed in down on my chest and looked up at my elder brother, Michael Christener.
Michael gazed down at me with a face that wavered somewhere between anger and disdain.
It was an expression I knew well—one I’d seen countless times.
The kind of look that said he found me pathetic, exasperating, and utterly shameful—yet, as I was his only sister, he couldn’t bring himself to cast me out.
So he held onto me with great difficulty, but every so often, his patience would nearly snap.
But wait… what had he just said to me?
I blinked, wearing an expression that clearly said, I didn’t quite catch that.
“I will no longer tolerate your lethargic, slothful ways.”
Michael’s sharp finger pointed directly at me, his self-righteous face hard with menace.
Feeling guilty, I couldn’t offer a single retort. I just looked away quietly.
I was already twenty-three.
In the Kaiden Empire, a woman of twenty-three was considered to have long surpassed the proper age for marriage. Usually, noble ladies would make their debut in society at eighteen, then meet someone and wed by twenty-one at the latest.
Thus, any young lady who reached her mid-twenties unmarried was seen as defective in some way.
And the head of her household was often scorned as an incompetent fool for failing to marry off his precious daughter.
Moreover, in this empire, the prevailing belief was that a woman’s greatest happiness lay in marrying a good man, building a home, and raising a family.
Such close-minded, outdated ideas were deeply rooted in the empire’s culture.
So what had I, a noble daughter of twenty-three, been doing all this time?
To explain that, we must go all the way back… twenty-three years ago.
That was when I was born into the world of the romance fantasy novel The Saintess of Erendel.
