Chapter 2
“…I’ll go try to talk her out of it.”
As soon as I said that, Marie dropped her spoon.
A clatter rang out across the kitchen floor.
“Kyle, you?”
Marie asked cautiously.
“Yeah.”
“The young lady?”
“Yeah.”
“Think you can stop her?”
“Who knows.”
“Then why go?”
“Because if I don’t, we’re all fucked.”
Marie fell silent for a very brief moment.
Maybe I’d been too blunt; her face looked a little hurt, but I wasn’t wrong.
If House Monbel went under, the maids, servants, and cook would all go down with it.
Being employed by a noble house sounded good on paper, but when the family collapsed, the money for food would be cut off before the contract even mattered.
Having watched my stomach acid rise every payday as I checked my account balance to make sure I could pay my employees, I could see that structure all too clearly.
Uncle Bernard let out a low sigh.
“I’ve tried to stop her several times already. It’s not that the young lady doesn’t know this choice is reckless.”
“If she knows that and is still going, isn’t that an even bigger problem?”
“That’s why it’s harder to stop her.”
There was a strange, long-worn fatigue in his words.
Uncle Bernard must have watched Elysia de Monbel since she was young, and he probably knew that the young lady hadn’t always been this close to the edge.
People don’t start out laughing at the edge of a cliff.
Usually, the road behind them crumbles one piece at a time, until they come to believe that falling forward is the only choice left.
I untied my apron and hung it on a chair.
“Where is she?”
“In the study. The safe is over there.”
“Understood.”
“Kyle.”
Uncle Bernard called out to me as I was about to leave the kitchen.
When I looked back, he hesitated, then forced the words out with great difficulty.
“Please don’t be rude to the young lady.”
I looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“A chef shouldn’t be rude to a customer.”
“The young lady isn’t a customer.”
“Then let’s call her a prospective investor.”
Uncle Bernard looked as if he didn’t understand me, but I didn’t explain and stepped into the hallway.
I could explain later.
What mattered now was stopping Elysia de Monbel before the safe was opened.
The mansion’s hallways were dark even in the middle of the day.
There were windows, but the old curtains swallowed the light strangely, while the ancestors of House Monbel hanging in portraits guarded the walls with solemn faces, unaware that their descendant was preparing to gamble away the family fortune.
That solemnity was pretty irritating.
Putting this house under a mountain of debt probably wasn’t the fault of the living alone, but the people in the portraits had died far too comfortably.
As I neared the study door, I heard voices.
“Young lady, please reconsider. The Golden Deer Gambling House isn’t an ordinary gambling den. You know very well what sort of people the nobles who frequent it are.”
The voice belonged to someone older than Uncle Bernard.
Probably an old servant in charge of the safe.
There was desperation in his voice.
The kind of desperation that made even the listener’s chest feel tight.
And the voice of the person receiving that desperation was far too bright.
“I know. That’s why I’m going.”
Elysia de Monbel.
I stopped in front of the door.
I had only seen her a few times myself.
In Kyle’s memories, she was always busy, pale, and irritable.
Ever since becoming head of the family, she walked the halls like someone who couldn’t sleep properly and often left food on her plate.
Whenever that happened, Kyle had thought the young lady was a picky eater, but now that I thought about it, it seemed her problem wasn’t her appetite but her life.
The old servant said in a trembling voice,
“Young lady, if you lose all the remaining property, there will truly be no turning back. We don’t know what demands House Rosenhart might make over your debts. In the worst case, you might even be forced to use your own body as collateral.”
Perhaps it was something difficult to say outright, because the air beyond the door froze for a moment.
I furrowed my brow.
As befitted a romance-fantasy setting, this world sparkled on the surface with lace, perfume, and roses, but beneath it, the debt relationships of high society were filthy.
It was a world where people could joke about a fallen noble lady being sold off somewhere because of her debts.
I hadn’t properly read the original, but I remembered that my ex-girlfriend liked writing about that sort of thing.
After a brief silence, Elysia laughed.
It was a bright laugh, so bright I could tell even through the door.
It was light and cheerful, like someone being asked to go for a walk on a beautiful day, or being told that a new dress they’d ordered suited them better than expected.
“Then I’ll just kill myself.”
“…Young lady.”
“Why are you making such a serious face? I can just jump off a cliff or hang myself before they sell me off. I know how to do at least that much math.”
My hand, which had been about to reach for the doorknob, stopped.
Her voice was so bright that it sent a chill down my spine.
I knew that someone who had arranged their life like the final line in a ledger was more dangerous than someone who wailed in despair.
It was the same in a kitchen.
An employee who was truly at the end of their rope didn’t get angry or cry.
One day, their expression suddenly relaxed, and they said they were only going to work until that day.
By then, they had already finished processing their resignation in their heart.
Elysia’s voice was exactly like that.
“Monbel is finished anyway. Isn’t it better to bet even the last of our money and die than slowly waste away?”
“Young lady, please don’t say such things…”
“It’s all right. I feel lucky today. The stew was delicious this morning.”
At that, I opened the door.
The creak of the old hinges echoed through the study.
Elysia de Monbel was in the room.
Her pale blonde hair was slightly disheveled, as if she’d hurriedly brushed it, and the signs of sleeplessness were clear beneath her blue eyes.
Even so, she was smiling.
For some reason, her smile reminded me of a clown I’d seen in my previous life, laughing hysterically after losing everything in the stock market.
On the desk lay the leather pouch taken from the safe, and beside it, an invitation to the Golden Deer Gambling House had been neatly unfolded.
The old servant turned to look at me in surprise.
“Kyle?”
I gave him a brief bow, then looked at Elysia.
“Young lady.”
Elysia tilted her head, as if she found my entrance amusing.
“Kyle? What brings the chef here?”
“I heard you were going to the gambling house.”
“Word travels fast.”
“The mansion is small.”
“You came to stop me?”
“Yes.”
Elysia burst out laughing. It was the same laughter I had heard through the door.
Bright, light, and strangely broken laughter.
“Bernard couldn’t stop me. You think you can?”
“Uncle and I have different approaches.”
“How are they different?”
“Uncle is trying to stop you because he’s worried about you. I’m here because I don’t want to get fucked.”
The old servant drew in a breath.
He probably wanted to scold me for speaking that way in front of a noble young lady.
But Elysia merely widened her eyes, then laughed even louder a moment later.
“I like your honesty.”
“Thank you.”
“So why do you get fucked if I go to the gambling house?”
“If you lose, this house goes under, and if this house goes under, I’ll be thrown out without even receiving my overdue wages. Even if I somehow managed to endure that, writing ‘chef from a ruined baron’s house’ on my résumé would make it hard to get hired by a good kitchen.”
“What’s a résumé?”
“It’s something like that.”
“You say the strangest things.”
Even as she said that, Elysia didn’t interrupt me.
At least, there was room for a conversation.
Even a person about to do something insane could be surprisingly generous to an audience that had come to watch them do it.
I pointed to the leather pouch on the desk.
“How much is all that money?”
“Why does a chef need to know?”
“I need to know if I’m going to stop you.”
“Even if you stop me, I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Still, please hear me out.”
Elysia looked at me for a moment.
Her eyes were tired, but there was a strange curiosity deep inside them.
Maybe she knew that, too.
Maybe she knew that most of the people trying to hold her back would tell her not to die, but couldn’t tell her what she could do instead of dying.
She nodded toward the old servant.
“Tell him.”
The old servant hesitated, then stated the amount.
I heard the number and quickly calculated it in my head.
I still wasn’t completely accustomed to this world’s currency, but matching Kyle’s memories against the rough prices at the market, it was woefully insufficient to pay off the family’s debts and just the right amount to be swindled out of at a gambling house.
But to open a restaurant…
‘It might just be enough.’
Of course, a proper restaurant was out of the question.
If I’d said I wanted to open a fine-dining restaurant in Cheongdam-dong with this money, the interior contractor would have looked at me with pity before even writing up a quote.
But here, there was already a mansion, servants to wait on guests, usable ingredients in the storeroom, and, above all, a noble family name.
Even a name on the verge of ruin was still a name.
“Young lady.”
“Yeah.”
“If you’re going to lose that money at the gambling house anyway, invest it in me.”
Elysia’s laughter stopped.
The atmosphere in the study turned strange for a moment.
The old servant looked at me as if I’d finally started saying insane things, while Elysia slowly blinked, as though trying to understand what she’d heard.
“In you?”
“Yes.”
“In a chef?”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying it’s crazy for me to take the rest of my fortune to the gambling house, but normal to entrust that money to a chef?”
“It isn’t normal.”
“Then what is it?”
“The odds are better than gambling.”
Elysia stared at me for a while, then slowly pulled the corners of her mouth upward.
The moment I saw that smile, I realized.
This young lady was a little off and completely out of her mind.
And fortunately, people like that sometimes listened to proposals that made no sense.
“All right.”
The old servant nearly screamed.
“Young lady!”
Elysia raised a hand to silence him.
Then, tapping the leather pouch on the desk with her fingertips, she said with the most dangerously bright expression I had ever seen,
“I’ll hear you out. Let’s see how you plan to burn through my money.”
I took a breath.
Even when I’d stood before investors in my previous life, my stomach had never hurt this much.
At least then, my opponent hadn’t been a fallen noble lady who said she’d kill herself if she lost at a gambling house.
Still, it was fine.
My opponent was crazy, the money was insufficient, the family was on the verge of ruin, and the kitchen was a disaster.
To say the conditions were worse than Cheongdam-dong, honestly, Cheongdam-dong hadn’t been an easy hell either.
I spoke as calmly as I could.
“I’m going to sell food.”
Elysia tilted her head.
“Food?”
“Very expensive food. Have you heard of fine dining?”