Chapter 18

Chapter 18

In the end, the words she had only kept in her heart burst out.

“To retaliate against people like you… I won’t have blood on my hands. But, one day in the future, you will surely suffer the same from someone other than me.”

Ruhan, who had only looked down at the ground, raised her head up. Enya, who was trembling with all the words, quickly shut her mouth at the sight of that pitiful expression. Her heart was pounding again, and she hesitated before backing away.

Ruhan threw a sharp glance at Enya, but she didn’t say anything and left immediately.

Servia got fed up and left, finding the sight no longer amusing. As she left, Suya went to her brother, Rigata, and sobbed while holding onto her swollen cheeks as he just looked at her and shook his head with a stern face. Ashika didn’t look good, either.

Clicking their tongues and everyone else turned around as well. Soon, all the women disappeared in an instant. Enya glanced at their backs as they left.

Rigata, who was watching from the side, furrowed his eyebrows and spoke.

“Look. I said it’s better not to look.”

The reactions alone were enough to predict what they were thinking.

People did not treat Enya as Enya. She was just a woman in Tarhan’s hut, a bedbug favored by him… that was her. Her stomach became uncomfortable, and her stomach, which had been in pain since before, was stinging as if something had been stabbing it.

“Are you ready to go back?”

He looked at her with a vague look.

Enya turned around without answering him. Tears welled up. However, all of a sudden, something caught her eye. She couldn’t believe her eyes at first and frowned.

An unbelievable sight entered her squinted eyes.

It was the man named Aksan, who touched her and flirted with her last night, and his close friend, Chiron, who immediately followed him. Their bodies were tied to a tree on the great rocky ground where the festival was held.

The carcass of a freshly-dead beast could not have been more wretchedly tied and drooping than theirs.

As Enya unknowingly took a step back, Rigata sighed as he stood next to her and ran his hand over his face.

It seemed that the two men’s lives were still there. Their shoulders, sagging forward, tied up, were shaking slightly. Still, there were countless minor scratches on the tied hands and feet. Maybe, they had been flogged.

He stood in front of Enya, who couldn’t say anything because she was choked up.

“Enya, you know Tarhan. It’s a good thing it ended like that. They will think so, too.”

Rigata was blunt. Because of this little woman in front of him, he had seen Tarhan acting with his eyes overturned like a male beast about to go into heat many times.

He always questioned that. Although Tarhan appeared to be hot-tempered, he was the most rational in the group. He had always excelled in reasonable judgment, and there was little to lose by following the decisions he had made.

Nonetheless, it was different when this woman was involved.

‘How could he be so blinded by a woman that he does something that bounds criticism without any hesitation?’

As an Aquilean man, it was something Rigata couldn’t quite comprehend. They viewed it as disgraceful, damaging to themselves and their women, and without any benefit in the long run or in the end.

Jealousy, in particular, was the worst.

Aquilean cited maintaining women’s independence as the best way to worship and respect them. It was to acknowledge that the start, process, and childbirth of pregnancy all depended on women and that men did not contribute to it.

Thus, Aguilea was a thoroughly matrilineal society. There were many children who did not know their fathers, but they knew their mothers for sure.

Tarhan’s act of having his own woman in Aquilea and thoroughly suppressing the woman’s freedom to share sexual activities with other men was regarded as a kind of dysfunction or eccentricity. Some attribute it to his origin.

It was said that such an act could not come from pure Aquilea’s blood.

Of course, there was not a single person who spoke directly about that in front of Tarhan. As long as they didn’t want their head to be split in two by him on the spot, there wouldn’t be such a daring person in the future.

Rigata looked down at Aksan and his friend, who were being punished by Tarhan, with a numb face.

Unluckily, they missed this Day of Repose because they mistreated the woman Tarhan was so obsessed with. Possibly, until the end of the festival, they would be bound here without a sip of water. Perhaps, they could not touch anything but the crumbs fed from their sympathetic mothers and sisters.

He was very familiar with such a scene because there was no such thing as mercy to describe Tarhan. However, the troublesome woman in front of him seemed a little different.

“Enya…? Are you okay?”

Rigata asked, looking down anxiously at the woman whose face turned white and trembling. Rather than worrying about the woman’s condition, he was concerned about what Tarhan would do to him because of her.

He inadvertently thought that Enya was a very small woman. The tribal women were generally smaller than the men though she was petite. Her build itself was small and thin.

‘I wonder how much she starved when she was young.’

Rigata clicked his tongue inside. Yet her hips and breasts were moderately generous. Her skin seemed a little whiter than that of the normal woman, and her face looked as glossy and soft as a leaf of grass that had just bloomed at dawn. The lips were terribly red.

Looking at her, his throat seemed to dry up. He often inadvertently thought that it was not so incomprehensible that Tarhan was so frantically obsessed with that little woman.

“Enya…?”

He called out Enya’s name once more, and he reconsidered how troublesome this weak woman was. When she saw a sight like this, she bowed her head, perhaps bothered by it, so Rigata bowed his head to examine her face.

He soon realized that the trembling head was looking in an entirely different direction from the direction in which Aksan and his companion were tied, and he lifted his face again.

Rigata saw the piercing red hair and frowned.

Tarhan stood there at the end of Enya’s gaze naturally. The sight of a woman blooming like a desert flower next to the majestic figure of the deputy chief, whom Rigata served, helped him find the source of Enya’s anger.

It was Abisak, the daughter of the chieftain, whom they brought from Perugia.

The expression on Enya’s face was clearly anger… No, could this be called anger? Rigata corrected himself. She thought it would be right to call it a sense of betrayal mixed with shock, or out-of-control fear.

This woman couldn’t have had the guts to show her feelings of anger in the first place.

Before the situation got out of control, Rigata seriously pondered that he should turn her gaze away from those two people even if he had to touch this woman’s body.

But, such worries could not last long. In the first place, there was no way that Tarhan could not see Enya from not far away. Almost at the same moment, Enya’s eyes saw him standing next to the strange woman, Tarhan turned to look at her.

Rigata mumbled a curse to himself.

If he could avoid the deputy chieftain’s suspicious wrath at him by taking a step back from this woman right now, he could. He knew well that even he, who had been with Tarhan for a very long time, could be seen as Enya’s potential lover.

Without hesitation, Tarhan moved his feet straight in this direction.

Rigata was trying to come up with an excuse for that momentary time. However, before he could even complete the sentence in his head, Enya’s body, which had stood stiffly in front of him, fell forward for a moment like a stone house collapsing.

If he had not instinctively grabbed her forearm, her nose would have been broken.

However, as if he didn’t care, Tarhan approached them in an instant. With a clenched chin, he shoved Rigata’s arm that had grabbed Enya’s skinny forearm as if he was about to cut off his arm.

Enya felt someone lift her up from the pain that seemed to break her head. When she was lifted suddenly, something swelled as if it had been on top of her rumbling stomach. She swallowed the nausea and succeeded in not pouring it onto the man’s chest.

Until she saw Tarhan from a distance, she could endure it. Still, the strange woman standing next to him was the problem.

The scene was more shocking than Aksan being tied to a tree covered in scars. Even as her mind wandered, she could feel something soggy flowing between her legs though she had no time to worry about such things.

“Do, don’t…! Put me down…!”

Enya thrashed in the midst of her confusion. She could feel Tarhan hardening his body at the first thing she ever did.

He looked at her with shocked eyes. She had never resisted him.

But, that was it. He put strength in his arms again and, without delay, tried to move his steps. As she was taken to his arms in despair, she could feel the gaze of the red-haired woman from behind.

Enya tightly closed her eyes.

The daughter of the chieftain, brought from Perugia. She couldn’t bear to have her first appearance like this.

“Please, put me down…! Tarhan, I beg you. Please…!”

Enya even gave Tarhan a slap that she had never done before. Of course, after hitting him, she looked into his eyes. Her hand that hit Tarhan’s shoulder tingled. Eventually, he lowered her to the floor with a bewildered look though he did not release the tenseness in his clenched chin.

As soon as he put her down, he shouted.

“Didn’t you hear that Ihita said not to come out? You’re not feeling well, so why did you come all the way here?!”

Enya bit her lip. She pointed her finger at the two men tied to the tree.

“I came out just in case that happened. I’m afraid you’ll be like that.”

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