Chapter 44 - Promise Ring

Fabian and Black Hawk Knights decided to stay at the noble mansion on their way to the Empire for a day.

Since he pushed his body to the limit, Fabian must have been tired, but it was amazing that he didn’t show such a sign at all.

“Your Majesty, the horses and the knights are exhausted.”

“That’s why we’re staying overnight.”

Serus was very lucky. If it were him alone, Fabian would have stayed all night running alone. And above all else, he must obey Fabian’s words.

“Would it be possible to rest in one day?” Serus asked carefully.

Hearing that, Fabian kicked his tongue, “Is this the level of the Black Hawk Knights, my bodyguard?”

“Your Majesty is too strong.”

In fact, Fabian himself was stronger than the Knights in the Black Hawk, and he was excellent in martial arts as well.

His natural body, and limitless mind, made him the strongest man in the continent. So the Knights couldn’t surpass the fabian, no matter how skilled they were.

“The black Knights are excellent. If it were another group of knights we wouldn’t have been able to do this.”

“But it’s still weak.”

“That’s too much, Your Majesty…”

Fabian glared at him. His eyes made Serus speechless, “We will do our best to return as soon as possible to the Imperial Palace.”

“Ah… No, there’s a place I need to stop by before that.”

Serus looked up with a puzzled face at Fabian. He thought Fabian would run to the Imperial Palace to fulfill the overdue duties, but where else would he go?

“Where are you going….?”

” Where else…stupid…” Fabian frowned, looking at him, and then Serus remembered what he had forgotten.

“Oh, are you going to visit Duke of Perth?” asked Serus.

“Yeah, ckck…..you’re really a bad son.”

“Well,, it’s a little bit….. to hear that from Your Majesty.” But Serus, who knew his status, quickly shut his mouth. He heard the rebuke, but strangely he didn’t feel bad.

It was the Duchess of Perth, the person Fabian wanted to meet and spend his precious time with. She was Serus’s mother, as well as Fabian’s caretaker.

“It can’t be helped. My mother is the daughter of Metis, not the Empress of the Empire.” Fabian’s voice was very bitter.

“Honestly, I doubt that she’s really my mother who gave birth to me.”

“Your Majesty, you shouldn’t say that.”

“I know. And there’s no doubt. There’s a couple of witnesses.”

One way of maintaining high-ranking aristocratic titles in the imperial family was by producing heirs. This was a way to show legitimacy, and the rules to enforce loyalty, Fabian’s birth was arranged in such a way so that he became an Empress’s son.

“But that’s all.”

Fabian was obviously a child that was born from Empress. But he never drank her breast-milk, and most of the princes were born like that. And The Empress gave up parenting him after showing her son, that she gave birth proudly in front of the others.

“It was the Duchess who raised me in the first place, not my mother.”

A mother of two, who had been chosen carefully in advance. The one who breastfed him when he was a baby and was responsible for caring and raising him was the Duchess of Perth.

He was an important child who would become the Imperial successor. It was common for aristocrats not to be raised by their biological parents for reasons of love, as it would spoil them.

“I hope the Duchess gets better.”

Fabian was rarely concerned with anyone, so people called him a cold-blooded perfectionist, but Serus knew he wasn’t.

Like most of the Imperial Man, Fabian expressed his feelings in a clumsy way.

“My mother would be more reluctant to make Your Majesty worried.”

“I know. She’s so strict with manners.”

“Yes, she’s very strong. Your Majesty, I, and my brother, we’ve been hit so many times by her whip.”

Recalling that moment, Fabian laughed faintly and nodded. She dared to hit the crown prince because Duchess Perth really raised him with the same heart as her own child.

Thanks to this, some in the Empire even said that Fabian treated Duchess Perth more like a mother than his own biological mother, the Empress Dowager.

“Well, do you feel a little better now?” Serus asked.

“When did I get angry?”

Showing personal feelings It was an act that wasn’t like the emperor.

“Yeah. That’s how it was after you left Felice Kingdom. Anyone else might not, but I know.”

Fabian didn’t deny it. It was difficult to hide anything from Serus.

“Serus, did you know that the noble ladies despise the Empress?”

“I didn’t know, because I was taught not to interfere with women’s affairs.”

Fabian also was taught like that. A woman’s business is her own business. What’s going on inside the palace shouldn’t be allowed to come out. He must not find out, not even interfere.

“Isn’t it something like a Marquis or a Count saying words and doing evil things to me, Emperor?”

Anger became truth, and truth became confusion again.

“But my mother might know what a woman is like.”

“No, I’m not really interested.” Fabian said something that wasn’t in his mind. “She said as if I had left her until she was treated like that. But which husband likes to see his wife being treated like that? What a stupid woman.”

It was very awkward to see him heating up alone when Serus even didn’t ask about it.

“If you have nothing more to say, I’ll go back.” Serus said quietly and disappeared.

“Stupid….” His rage, which had just subsided, tried to reappear.

“Yeah, you never needed me.”

The same was true even now. Evelyn never once asked Fabian for help or leaned on him.

“I was nothing.”

Fabian murmured sadly. Then he took the note out of his hand and threw it into the fireplace. The first thing he wrote about Evelyn Felice was instantly burning and turning to ashes.

“It’s not worth thinking about.”

He soon turned his hand to a pendant necklace. The pendant, an inherited treasure of the imperial family, could keep a small portrait inside and had a hidden space to store small items.

In the past, the imperial family’s ancestors always put poison in it to determine their own fate when captured by the enemy.

“Now….”

What Fabian put there was a wedding ring. It was the same ring that Evelyn left before the Empress, without any regret.

“A thing like this…..”

Fabian held the ring on his palm and raised his fist as if he were throwing it into the fireplace. It was something that Evelyn had thrown away. So what’s the problem if he threw it away too?

No, he should have thrown it away earlier.

“Fuck….”

Fabian’s fist that was holding the ring drooped helplessly. The wedding ring was still on the ring finger of his left hand. Evelyn believed that he was wearing the ring without any thought or meaning, but Fabian’s heart was a little different.

“How could you be so cold?”

Sharing a ring was a bond for Fabian, and an oath and ceremony. That meant they were reliant on each other forever.

That’s why Fabian never took out the ring Evelyn wore at the wedding ceremony. Because he believed that a wedding ring should be like that.

[‘There was magic on the wedding ring. When they were pinched on each other’s finger-ring’, the magic would tie the two together ‘]

And it was Evelyn, who whispered it with her blushing cheeks.

[‘So, never take off this ring.’]

[‘No matter how angry you are at me, or even if you hate me and don’t want to see me…’]

Fabian didn’t believe in superstitions. What he wanted to protect was Evelyn’s request, not the magic of the ring.

[‘As long as we don’t take off this ring, our relationship won’t end. Because the God of Marriage will protect us.’]

Fabian was sick of it and tired, but the left hand that held the ring gave him strength.

“That’s what you said to me……”

Fabian couldn’t throw the ring in the end. The magic that Evelyn had whispered to him stuck to him like a curse now.

Took off a wedding ring meant to void the marriage contract that was made in this life. Divorce was a rare thing. And Fabian also believed that there was only one marriage in his life.

“Why.”

Fabian still didn’t know why.

There wasn’t even a small quarrel between them. But one day, she suddenly said goodbye and disappeared.

He couldn’t understand Evelyn, who had easily forgotten her past promise that only the person who put in the wedding ring could break it.

“It’s so easy.”

Fabian’s voice rang bitterly. Little by little, the word divorce, which he had hardly forgotten about, began to come to light.

Everything before the Empress was the same. This was because after she left, Evelyn told not to change a single thing. At the time, Fabian felt more relaxed and quickly rejecting truth than accepting the separation as it was.

“Why, it’s so easy just for you?”

But the moment he saw life on Evelyn’s cheeks when he met her again, Fabian’s heart was broken. His heart which he promised himself that he would never look back, and not be shaken, collapsed.

“Why, it’s not easy for me…?”

Evelyn looked happy. She was living in the present without him. Fabian, who denied the breakup and was still trapped in the past, was shining shabbily.

“You’ve already abandoned it.”

Fabian knew in his head that the imperial divorce was not easy. And he knew well in his head that Evelyn, who had left him so coldly, had no intention of coming back.

“But…..I can’t even throw it away.”

Fabian failed to throw the ring and put it back into the pendant. There was no way that he could throw Evelyn’s ring into the fire without removing his own ring from his finger.

“It’s sucks……” He spoke to himself in a low voice.

The memory of Evelyn, leaving without telling him why, was too bitter.

He was also hurt by Evelyn, who looked happier than ever.

But the cruelest thing was his weak heart, which could not accept the end of it all.