GC | Chapter 1.1

“It’s time for master to come home. Hurry up!”

“What is this stain? Where the hell did your heads go? Rosaline! Bring a rag. Don’t dawdle!”

Hasty footsteps and impatient shouts erupted from all over the mansion. They always paid careful attention every day to avoid displeasing their master, but they became especially tense when he was due home.

The head maid and the chief steward swept their eyes over everything with hawk-like sharpness, from the massive iron-barred gate to the manor itself, while the other servants adjusted one another’s clothing.

Within a few minutes, the household staff had lined up with the speed of trained soldiers. The head maid checked the appearance of the servants standing in two rows before the front entrance, then tilted her head in confusion.

“What about the one in the room at the far end?”

Realizing someone was absent, the head maid looked around. She was trying hard to stay calm, but her voice was trembling faintly. Her already grayish complexion began to drain even further. At her question, the servants glanced around too, then went deathly still.

“Didn’t you tell him what time master was coming home? Aiden!”

When the head maid barked the order sharply, a young low-ranking servant named Aiden lifted his head, shaking all over.

“I, I definitely told him. I said master would arrive at four in the afternoon, and that he had to come out before then, three times, I swear…”

“Damn it! Cut the excuses and bring him down here now! Now!”

As the head maid gave a scream-like command, Aiden hurried upstairs. At the same time, the deputy head butler came in at a fast pace and opened the front door.

“He’s arrived at the entrance.”

At those words, everyone waiting stiffened. The distance from the courtyard where the carriage stopped to the manor’s front entrance was not long. With the master being tall, he could reach the front in no time.

But the room at the far end took a little over ten minutes to reach the first floor, and ‘he’ was slow on his feet. More than anything else, ‘he’ never listened to anyone’s words in one go, whether it was the master or the servants.

It had already been close to five minutes since the low-ranking servant had run upstairs. The head maid clasped her hands tightly, her anxious face foreseeing the disaster that would soon unfold. The surrounding servants wore much the same expression.

“The grand duke is home.”

Not long after, the gatekeeper servant announced the master’s return and stepped aside with a crisp motion, and soon after, a man even taller than everyone else walked into the manor. Behind him came the chief steward and the other servants in a long tail.

“Master, did you have a pleasant day?”

Ignoring the head maid’s greeting, he did not slow his pace and flung the long fur coat he wore to the side as if it were nothing. The servants had to catch it at the edge of disaster.

The man brushed the snow from his head lightly, gave a quick order to the chief steward walking behind him, then scanned the surroundings.

“Where is Shey?”

With an expression that seemed to say something that should have been there was missing, he tilted his chin and looked over the servants one by one. Beneath that gaze, sharp as a honed blade, the head maid shrank her thin shoulders even more. As she quickly calculated whether to make an excuse that the occupant of the far room was too ill to come down, or to confess honestly, she heard the steady sound of footsteps on the stairs, tap, tap.

As the grand duke’s gaze turned toward the stairs in response, the eyes of the lined-up servants rolled quietly to the same place.

A doll was coming down the stairs at a slow pace.

His already pale skin, untouched by sunlight for so long, seemed to glow from within, and his walk was languid, almost listless. Each time he descended a step, his hair, now longer than it had been recently, fluttered in time with the movement.

Everyone else was on edge as if standing on a sliver of a razor blade, but he alone carried the relaxed air of someone who had wandered in from a different painting. Behind him, Aiden, his head bowed to the floor, followed as if he had committed some mortal crime.

The grand duke did not take his eyes off him until he reached the last step, but the man never once met his gaze on the way down. Yet the grand duke, long since accustomed to being ignored, closed and opened his eyes slowly, forcing down the anger that was rising.

“Shey.”

Calling his name in a voice no different from usual, the grand duke spoke in the language of the conquered nation. The words were a reprimand, but his voice was soft, unlike his infamous reputation for cruelty. Shey, however, only glanced at the grand duke with a blank face.

The grand duke swallowed that too, then strode closer and draped an arm over Shey’s shoulder, who stood a span lower than he did, with a broad smile.

“I brought you a gift. In your country, priests craft jewels to hold divine messages, don’t they? It took quite a lot of trouble to get this. Here.”

The grand duke reached into the inside of his coat at the chest and pulled out a thick silk pouch, then thrust it forward. Shey, half embraced as if by the shoulder, stood there blinking and took the pouch. The servants who had been watching the scene with bated breath let out quiet sighs of relief.

Shey opened the mouth of the pouch with fingers marked by many scars and turned it upside down. A jewel shaped like a pebble, tinted the color of moonlight, rolled out from inside.

In Shey’s country, where many gods were worshiped and large and small temples stood throughout the land, there was a tradition of crafting jewels to contain divine messages. Only a tiny number of chosen priests could actually hear the divine message, so jewels that had been blessed and crafted by their own hands were considered one of the finest gifts a person could receive.

Shey had also been a priest who could hear the message. He had once been.

“Your country’s chief priest blessed it. I don’t know from which era the chief priest was, though. That old boar from Laurel wanted this so badly. For a bastard with his death already on the calendar, his greed never ends. Still, I snatched it first. What do you think? Do you like it?”

With an excited voice, the grand duke pressed close to Shey’s side and chattered in a way that did not suit him at all. Anyone could see he was trying to please this indifferent captive.

“How much was it?”

That was when Shey, who remained indifferent no matter what the grand duke handed him, asked the price. There had been many gifts thrown away without even a glance, so asking the price meant that, in one way or another, he was interested. The grand duke looked rather delighted.

“100,000 sidel. It’s a fair bit for a jewel, but this is nothing.”

100,000 sidel was an amount equal to a whole year’s household expenses for a wealthy noble family. Yet even with that staggering sum, Shey showed no reaction.

He picked up the pebble-like jewel with two fingers and held it up toward the ceiling, then stared blankly as he reflected it in the light of the chandelier.

“100,000 sidel…”

“Don’t worry about the price. If you want, I’ll get you something else any time…”

The grand duke was answering with obvious pleasure when Shey tilted his mouth into a crooked sneer, then swung the hand holding the jewel with all his strength.

Smack!

“Idiot. This is fake.”

One of the servants drew in a small gasp.

While the servants, who had witnessed the master being struck, froze so hard they could hardly breathe, Shey alone looked as if nothing had happened.

If anything, his expression had become even more irritated as he opened his palm. The glittering moon-colored jewel fell to the marble floor. With a sharp cracking sound, the broken jewel rolled recklessly over the geometric pattern.

“Seeing you bring something like this here all pleased with yourself really tells me what your taste is worth. Your eyes don’t seem any better than that boar’s, either.”

After delivering the cold rebuke, Shey stepped on the jewel fragments and walked past the grand duke.

The hand of the master, pale white as it clenched into a fist, came into the servants’ downward-tilted view. They closed their eyes entirely, finding it sacrilegious even to look. From the moment they realized Shey had not come down in advance, they had expected the day would not be easy, but there truly was not a single quiet day here.

A wide stride sounded in the ears of the servants with their eyes shut. By now, they could easily predict what would come next.

“Let go!”

The grand duke, who had come up behind him in a few large steps, seized Shey by the wrist and marched forward. Shey twisted his arm in resistance after being grabbed, but it was useless. The strength gap between the grand duke, who had wandered battlefields with his father since the age when he should have been sitting in his parents’ lap and playing, and Shey, who had been shut in a temple for his entire life serving the gods, was overwhelming.

In the end, Shey stumbled partway down the stairs, but the grand duke paid him no mind. If he did not get up at once, his shoulder would surely dislocate, so Shey quickly straightened his knees. The moment he managed to rise, he would be dragged again by the grand duke without a moment to catch his breath.

“Ah!”

Dragged into the grand duke’s bedroom and nearly thrown onto the bed, Shey let out a small cry. He had struck his forehead against the posts on either side of the bed as he was shoved down. Wincing at the numb pain, he pressed a hand to his forehead, and a heavy weight settled over his body.

“Boar, did you say?”

The grand duke, whose face was even paler than the snow-covered mountains around this island nation, smiled thinly and began undoing the belt at his waist. Seeing that the area around his thighs had already become thick, there was no doubt his lust had stirred again somewhere along the way. Shey felt sick at the sight of that stubborn, disgusting lust.

“Shey, answer me. You were talking just fine a moment ago.”

“Stop spouting disgusting nonsense and get out.”

“Why? I had no idea you had such a hobby. Calling the man you push bellies with every day a boar, what else could that mean except that you wanted an animal’s cock?”

The grand duke burst out laughing, his shoulders shaking with a chilling cackle, and tossed the belt beneath the bed.

“You like boar cum? What, was the cock on other men no good after trying it? You should have said so earlier. Then by now your pussy would be full of boar piss…”