Foot Stench Was Addictive

Chapter 119

I leaned back against the sofa and folded my arms.

Lucius was just grinning with half-closed eyes, utterly oblivious to my mood. Annoying bastard.

"You look serious."

Lucius asked in a gentle voice.

"Do you happen to know what I came here to say?"

Like hell I don't, you bastard.

I'm not made of stone, and do I look like the type who'd meet someone else's sister and fail to read the room?

I let out a short sigh and went straight for it.

"You're here to ask me to meet your sister one more time, aren't you?"

Lucius's shoulders flinched slightly at my blunt jab.

But soon he curved his mouth into a fan-shaped grin and answered with easy confidence.

"Oh. I didn't know you'd be so firmly convinced of your own masculine charm."

Should I beat the hell out of this bastard?

Still, the playful tone told me my guess had probably hit the mark.

"I'm not being self-absorbed."

"Oh, really?"

"…"

Honestly, a little. A tiny, tiny, booger-sized bit of self-satisfaction was mixed in.

But it wasn't baseless confidence.

That woman, Sophia von Rohanna, had clearly felt a deep curiosity and fondness toward me—something that could definitely be called interest—and I could feel it in my skin.

That damn little coquettish gripe she'd made, blushing as she said, "Ugh, that's annoying."

That alone was enough to answer it.

But that wasn't the only reason I was sure Lucius had come to ask on her behalf.

After facing Sophia directly, I thought I might understand a little.

Why the hell is this bastard acting like this?

Lucius von Rohanna.

This calculating slick bastard was so fiercely protective of his twin sister, who was so frail she might collapse at any moment,

so why was he so desperate to keep trying to push her off onto a complete stranger?

I narrowed my eyes and stared straight at Lucius.

"If I'm going to decide whether to meet her, there's something I need to get straight first."

At my serious tone, Lucius also let the grin fade from his face.

"Please."

"Your sister."

I asked, stressing every word.

"What the hell kind of messed-up family circumstances are there?"

Lucius's blue eyes glimmered oddly.

"Circumstances, huh. Weren't you the one who didn't want to hear them?"

He had hit right at the heart of it.

Right. Of course I didn't want to hear them.

That's just how human relationships work, wherever you go.

The moment you hear the whole sordid story, you have to dunk your feet into that sticky web of relationships and get forcibly tangled up in it.

That's the most horrific obstacle to my ideal life as a freeloading bum.

"I was going to, but I've changed my mind."

"And the reason is?"

"Because if I just let this go, these damn circumstances are so messed up and tangled that I can't make sense of them."

I tapped the table with my fingers.

"And above all, I'd already seen with my own eyes that your sister looked seriously ill."

"…"

"Isn't it kind of ridiculous to come this far and then go, 'Ah, I don't care. If I don't hear the circumstances, then it's fine,' and wash my hands of it?"

At my words, Lucius simply looked at me in silence.

"You're a siscon."

"Yes. I won't deny it."

"At a glance, your sister doesn't look very healthy. And yet you're the one taking the lead in arranging her marriage?"

I let out a snort as if I couldn't believe it.

"What the hell kind of treatment are you trying to put her through?"

No matter how prettily you dressed it up, reality was cold.

Someone sick enough to be on the verge of collapsing any day now was bound to be treated as damaged goods in the brutal marriage market of aristocratic society, whether as a husband or a wife.

Even if you pushed through a political marriage, who in that house would ever treat her as a proper mistress of the house?

She'd just be used up as a pawn, a family link, and wither away lonely.

"A suffocating marriage like that, and you, a bastard overflowing with love for his sister, would voluntarily push it forward?"

I shook my head.

"If I were you. If I were Lucius von Rohanna, I wouldn't make her marry at all. I'd hide her in my shadow forever and make sure she lived a peaceful life."

Looking at the state of my family in my past life, too, the instinctive habits of people who cherish their blood relatives to a fault are all the same.

In fact, even as I asked this, one firm inference had already taken root in my mind.

On the carriage ride back to the academy yesterday, after parting with Sophia, I'd been mulling it over carefully.

"It seems you already have a theory?"

When Lucius asked, I squeezed my eyes shut.

"I do. But I fucking hate saying it out loud myself."

"Why not?"

"Because it's too pathetic."

I dragged both hands down over my face.

"It's like the delusions of some novel addict crawling around the secluded corner of a library looking for dopamine. Just saying it out loud makes goosebumps crawl over my tongue, so I can't do it."

Seriously. If I rattled off this third-rate melodrama-level brain speculation and turned out to be wrong, the embarrassment would be entirely mine.

Lucius let out a small huff of breath.

"You're really... an unfunny, heartless man."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Then I suppose I'll have to say it myself."

Lucius drooped his shoulders as if conceding defeat, and in a subdued voice began to lay bare the family's long-buried affairs.

"The legitimate direct line of the family is me and Sophia. But..."

"But?"

"As you know, because my parents died early, a good portion of the Rohanna family's actual power and wealth has already passed into my uncle's hands."

Ah.

Oh.

Fuck.

"And my uncle's side is frantic to marry her off to some influential family before Sophia's health gets any worse and she loses even her value as a marriage prospect."

"…By any chance, how old is the prospective groom?"

"Even Sophia's and my ages put together wouldn't be enough."

I got chills.

It was so creepy that it matched the overused cliché I'd predicted in the carriage down to the last detail, and I felt like I'd die of embarrassment instead.

What is this? It feels like I've been diagnosed as a severe delusion case.

"Why can't you stop it?"

I asked sharply, forcing down my embarrassment.

"No matter how much power my uncle wields, there's no way a crafty old fox like you couldn't stop a forced marriage like that."

"That's harsh. I don't know why the image of me in your head is stamped like that."

"Enough. Spit it out already."

There's no way even this part matches my guess, right?

Please, let it not be.

I hoped it wouldn't be.

"Sophia wants it."

"…Yeah. I figured she'd say that."

"She's insisting on accepting the obviously unreasonable political marriage herself."

For the first time, Lucius shed that slick mask and gave a bitter smile.

When a faint gloom settled over the expression of that always-cheerful, narrow-eyed man, his whole impression changed markedly.

"Because she wants to help me, and this family that's nothing but a name, even just a little... for that foolish, paltry reason."

A chillingly intense sibling bond, the kind you'd only see in some bottom-of-the-barrel internet novel or third-rate romance fantasy.

A brother trying to protect the family, and a frail younger sister willing to sacrifice her own unhappiness to lighten her brother's burden.

And the bastard who barged in between them and stole the younger sister's heart.

'Ah.'

The moment I saw that familiar start-to-finish cliché play out before my eyes.

I seriously wanted to pry open my own skull, pull out my brain, and scrub it clean in ice water.

'Fuck.'

Older sister.

Yeah. It was all because of our own older sister.

In my past life, every time I got my phone in the army, I'd sprawl around and read all those countless romance fantasy novels.

…Actually, after reading all that, I even read some internet fiction too.

Foot stench was addictive.

The military ruins people. Damn it.

Because my brain had been so deeply contaminated by those filthy media, I ended up perfectly predicting even a serious real-world tragedy as if I were reciting the table of contents of a third-rate novel.

I repeatedly scrubbed my face with both hands.

"Mr. Cassian?"

Lucius called me cautiously, watching my bizarre reaction.

"Do you have a headache?"

"No. I'm just feeling disgusted with myself. Don't mind me."

I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts.

So, this bastard's purpose was clear now.

"To sum it up, it's this: your sister doesn't want to be a burden to you, so she's trying to accept the trashy political marriage your uncle is pushing. Right?"

"Yes. Regrettably."

"And you can't bear to watch that happen with your own eyes."

I let out a snort of dry laughter.

"In other words, you'd rather have your sister fall head over heels for someone and come down with a lovesick fever, because if she got to experience proper love once, she'd at least have the will to refuse the political marriage your uncle is pushing."

Lucius shook his head and gave a bitter smile.

"That's right. I wanted Sophia to have the will to live for herself, the will to rebel. Not to be swept away by the family like a corpse, but to live like an ordinary twenty-year-old woman who wants something with all her heart."

"And you decided I'd be the perfect fit for that role."

"Of course."

"Good for you, you crazy bastard."

I leaned my head back against the sofa and looked up at the ceiling.

Complicated. Damn complicated.

I'd gone out just to cleanly settle my debt with money, but somehow I ended up cast right in the middle of someone else's family power struggle and a tearful sibling melodrama.

"So what am I supposed to do?"

I asked.

"The answer I'd like to hear is the same."

Lucius urged me for an answer, the smile gone from his face.

"Would you be willing to meet Sophia once more?"