Prologue
***
The spacious and luxurious room was desolate.
The room was decorated with luxurious decorations, highlighting the owner’s high perspective and artistic sense, but it was gloomy and depressing. The dark red wallpaper, the chrome picture frames hanging from the wall, and profound-looking objects created an even more gloomy and bizarre atmosphere. The dimly lit room was not illuminated by a filament lamp or an oil lamp, but by a beautiful man with dazzling silvery-white hair.
His expressionless face looked eerily cold and emotionless. But when his eyes met mine, he looked so calm and gentle that I wondered when he had ever looked that way before.
“You didn’t eat yet.” You don’t have an appetite?”
It was a medium-low pitched voice mixed with sluggish breathing.
His eyes, blue as the sea on a cloudy day, turned to me, narrow and curved. I lay helplessly on the bed, and he sat neatly in the mahogany chair placed next to me.
The man held a silver spoon in his long fingers, while in his other hand he held a bowl of white soup without a pattern. He took a spoonful of the soup and blew on it a few times to cool it down, then thrust it in front of me and smiled beautifully.
“Ah- Try it. I’ll feed you.”
I turned my head away, not complying with his gentle command.
My eyes turned to the carpet on the floor and, his eyes falling slowly, was good as an obsession.
“You don’t want to eat? Do you want me to bring you something else?
“Please let me go…”
The tip of my voice faltered as I hadn’t spoken for a while. The man’s face tilted to the side as he readily responded to my nonchalant request. Immediately, his well-defined features created a strange expression.
“Why?”
“What is your reason for keeping me locked up like this? You know that hostage negotiations are useless.”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
The man kidnapped me and looked at me with such satisfaction, as if he was looking at a piece of art he had painstakingly collected.
I didn’t know what it was about me that made me beautiful, but it was not my looks, and there were no mirrors in this room, so I couldn’t even see what I looked like.
“Again, this doesn’t change anything.”
“It did change, a lot.”
He looked strangely pleased, as if he had been saved. He put down the soup plate and silver spoon, and his fingertips touched my cheek weakly.
“I’ve met my only princess.”
The insane man’s words were incomprehensible, and I kept my eyes down and counted the number of plaid patterns on the carpet as I struggled for an appropriate answer.
“I’m not a princess.”
I was the daughter of a Belford Navy General, but unlike my sister, I was treated coldly and abused. My father, the Admiral, discriminated against me and hated me because I was the cause of my mother’s death. I didn’t know why my mother died, but he just said that it was my fault. Rather, the person to whom the qualifier “Princess” was attached was my sister Celine.
“Colonel Rothsilde, no, Duke Rothsilde. I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
“It’s Noah.”
“Rossil… right.”
“Let’s call me again.”
The man corrected me with a smooth cut of my words. With a kind face, as if he was teaching a child to repeat himself.
“Yes, yes, Noah. I’m frustrated, please let me go.”
“Hurry up and eat.”
He lightly ignored persuasions such as “No” and “Let me go.” The Duke, who was fiddling with the soup bowl that was quickly getting cold in the winter weather, called his servant to bring him some hot soup. Shortly after the servant brought a fresh bowl of soup, he thrust the spoon at me again.
“Do you want to eat something else? Tell me whatever you need. You can’t starve to death.”
“No… I’ll eat it.”
With a resigned face, I began to eat the soup that he carefully blew and cooled like an obedient baby bird. I drank it, accepting small slices of soft white bread and put in my mouth and the wine.
“Good.”
The Duke, who was smiling at me, brushed a bob of hair behind my ear that came to my chin. I glanced sideways at him, looking at the straightened sleeves of his neatly closed shirt and the neatness of his tie.
His body scent had a talent for subtly fascinating people. Paradoxical sensuality and drowsy voice felt from the appearance of a clean and ascetic appearance. A man full of the strange charm of restrained decadent beauty.
The name of this man, whom I personally describe as a beautiful lunatic and a noble madman, was Noah Rothsilde, an officer of the rank of Colonel in the Progen Army, in the Rothsilde Duchy of the Progen Empire.
The treatment was extreme and strange for kidnapping the enemy’s daughter. Like precious artworks stored in the cabinet, he sometimes took them out and looked at them as if they were precious. With strangely impoverished and decadent eyes.
The problem was that its object was a person, but there was one fact he didn’t know.
In fact, I was satisfied with this life of confinement where I did nothing. In addition to being able to interact with him without any inconvenience, this unconcerned and beautiful man visited me every once in a while to make my eyes happy enough to not be troublesome. But if I live with him, satisfied and content, he may lose interest and send me back or even kill me. So I put on my best performance to try to get out, by refusing to eat and protesting.
I was by nature a contemplative who enjoyed shutting myself up in a dimly lit room and disconnecting from the world.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t have friends. I didn’t have a hard time interacting with people, but I was someone who preferred to stay at home and be alone in my room.
If I get an appointment once in a while, I tend to worry over and over whether I should go or cancel it, and then be overjoyed when the other person canceled the appointment.
For me, living in a hell where I had to do something every day and where I was forced to believe that life was the truth, this was a whole new world.
My dream of enjoying a life of idleness and doing nothing has come true in some small way.
This was a classic novel called ‘For the Evening Primrose’.
The story was about a heroine who was kidnapped by a high-ranking official of an enemy country and fell in love with the male protagonist who came to her rescue.
It was a fictional novel adapted from a true story, but the woman who actually escaped was captured again by a high official and died.
I just became Diana Claire in that captive abduction classic novel. My tragic goal was to remain unrescued and unmourned, without escaping due to unforeseen circumstances.
This was why I was kidnapped on purpose instead of my sister, the main character.