CHAPTER 8
Emergency Wanted! How to Survive My Mastermind Husband
God had heard my prayers.
I was still angry that You had shoved me into this ridiculous fate, but at least today, I would praise You.
The weather had been ominous since dawn, and by morning, so much rain was pouring down that I didn’t even need to fake being sick.
There was enough rain to make me wonder if the entire estate might be swept away!
I had thought I would somehow get through Saturday and then pretend to be deathly ill all day Sunday, but it turned out I wouldn’t have to.
Even if the rain stopped now, the roads would be muddy and difficult for a carriage to travel through.
Besides, if they had dug a hole somewhere to bury me, it surely would have collapsed completely in all this rain.
Surely it hadn’t somehow failed to rain only there.
Heh heh.
If Noah hadn’t been sitting beside me, I would have burst out laughing.
Noah, on the other hand, didn’t seem pleased with the weather at all.
He looked like someone whose plans had been ruined and was annoyed about it.
Whenever I called him, he barely showed his displeasure, but the moment I looked away, that terrifying expression would return.
“It’s unfortunate that it’s raining, isn’t it?”
“If it weren’t raining, we would have gone out.”
“Anyway, thanks to the rain pouring down, I got to drink the tea Noah brought me instead of going outside.”
“Even if you had scooped up that rainwater and served it to me, I think it would taste sweet today.”
“It’s all right.”
“We have plenty of days ahead of us, anyway.”
“……”
Plenty of days?
Plenty of what?
Absolutely not!
“But where were you really planning to go?”
“You’ve been waiting for the weekend all this time, Noah.”
I glanced at Noah, who was sitting beside me.
Well, I might as well ask.
I wanted to hear what those gorgeous lips of his would say.
Noah took my hand with his long, slender, beautiful fingers.
He lightly kissed the back of my hand and smiled sweetly.
“It’s somewhere my wife needs to see for herself.”
“Ahaha, I wonder where that could be…”
“Since it’s somewhere Noah wants to take me, I’m sure it’s a wonderful place, right?”
Despite trying not to, my fingertips trembled.
Normally, I would have simply let him hold my hand, but I slowly pulled it away so he wouldn’t notice.
“It’s probably somewhere Hazel has never been before.”
Somewhere I had never been before…?
Where could that be?
Surely he wasn’t talking about heaven, was he?
Just as my entire body stiffened, he took my hand again.
It didn’t hurt at all, but after intertwining our fingers, he began to fondle each joint as though he were checking even my fingerprints, and cold sweat broke out on my skin.
If I ever needed to leave my fingerprints somewhere, I absolutely had to make sure I didn’t.
Every time Noah kissed my fingertips, I involuntarily flinched.
If this had really been a present or a date, he would have given me at least some kind of hint, but Noah seemed to have no intention of telling me anything.
In any case, now that he had decided to make his move, it wasn’t just today and tomorrow that would be dangerous.
He would be watching for an opportunity and planning to dispose of me in whatever way pleased him most.
It could be tomorrow, or it could be the day after.
Next time, he might even use a method that wasn’t affected by the weather.
I wouldn’t be completely free until I dealt with not only escaping from Noah but also getting a divorce.
His love might be fake, but I didn’t want the happy days when we were dating and even our one year of marriage to be tainted, so if possible, part of me wanted to resolve everything in a way that would let Noah remain unaware until the very end that I had discovered his true identity…
But I really needed to harden my heart.
If possible, I needed to find a way to escape from him in one clean move.
I was even considering exile as a last resort, so if I could find a way to stay away from him, even temporarily, that might work.
How long would it take after I disappeared before he stopped giving orders to his subordinates and started moving personally?
A day, two days, three?
A week, or even longer?
The others were all susceptible to my illusions, so they weren’t a problem, but the moment he stepped in himself, my powers would be useless.
Should I go back to the capital for a while, just to test it out?
If I suddenly said I was going to some other region where I had no connections, it might arouse suspicion.
After all, the Hazel I had shown him until now was someone who valued stability above all else.
There was no peaceful ending between us… was there?
Ugh.
No matter how I looked at it, everything was getting on my nerves.
In any case, to evacuate safely, I should start by finding a way to reduce the amount of time I spent with him.
Once I went to work, I would first quietly transfer whatever funds I could move without Noah noticing.
This entire place was basically a territory controlled by Kailus’s men, so it would be best to keep the most trustworthy people close to me.
I had lived believing that I should simply follow my own path, but if I looked hard enough, perhaps there would be someone I could share that trust with.
‘The most trustworthy person would be…’
“Ah!”
I let out an involuntary exclamation and immediately covered my mouth.
I really needed to stop doing things like this.
“Why is that, Hazel?”
“N-no, it’s nothing.”
“It just suddenly came to me.”
“Suddenly?”
Kailus, or rather Noah, gave me a faint, smiling look and rested his cheek against my hand as he asked,
“Lately, it seems you spend more and more time lost in thought without looking at me.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
Our eyes met across the faintly narrowed corners of his eyes, where those red irises gleamed, and a chill ran down my back.
“N-no, that’s not true.”
“How could it be?”
“I look at Noah all the time.”
“That’s strange.”
I gave him the smile he liked best and tried to gloss over it.
“Then what about now?”
“Now?”
I forced myself not to let my eyes dart around in front of Noah.
“Yes.”
“I always think of nothing but Hazel, but my wife doesn’t seem to feel the same way.”
“It makes me a little sad.”
“Ahaha, what are you talking about?”
“I always think about Noah too, you know?”
“I was just thinking about the pumpkin pie we had for dinner last night.”
“Mmm!”
“It was so delicious.”
“And Noah made it himself, too.”
As though he were afraid I might really be thinking about something else, the sharpness around his eyes softened again.
He always had that expression whenever I said I wanted to eat something or that something was delicious.
I wondered if the witch who wanted to fatten Hansel and Gretel up had worn the same expression.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand what Noah meant.
Whenever we were together, I had always looked only at Noah while talking to him, with honey practically dripping from my eyes, so it made sense that he would notice.
In fact, whenever Noah seemed lost in thought, I was the one who would pull on his hand and ask what he was thinking.
Of course, he hadn’t been nearly this terrifying back then.
That was because I had been completely blinded by love and hadn’t known anything!
“Don’t look anywhere else.”
“Don’t think about anything else.”
“Just look at me, Hazel.”
“Hmm?”
“At least while we’re together.”
How could he say something that essentially meant don’t even think about escaping from my grasp in such a sweet voice?
The fragrant aroma of the tea suddenly turned bitter.
—
That evening.
After leaving Hazel, who had fallen asleep a little earlier than usual, Kailus went to his study and dealt with the work that remained.
Then, as he flipped through the documents that had been submitted up to that day, he fell deep into thought.
Hazel’s behavior had been suspicious for the past few days.
She had always smiled brightly, but lately, she had been flinching and startling at the slightest things.
Her gaze, which had always been fixed on him as though nailed there, kept rolling away whenever she got the chance.
Had anything unusual happened?
There was nothing particularly noteworthy in the reports he had received.
Surely she wasn’t thinking about another man.
He had cleared everyone around her away, so there was no way that could happen.
“Ah.”
He scanned a list filled with dates and occasions: ten days, twenty-two days, one month, fifty days, one hundred days, their engagement ceremony, their wedding, and so on.
He had written them all down without missing a single one because he wanted to celebrate the special occasions according to Hazel’s ideal preferences.
Could she be acting strangely because she was preparing a wedding anniversary present?
Once he thought of it that way, Hazel’s behavior suddenly made sense.
Of course.
She had acted the same way when it came to the date she had told him was her birthday.
What kind of adorable gift was she working so hard to prepare this time?
The mood that had been coiling tightly inside him instantly relaxed, and his handsome lips curved pleasantly.
“Then I suppose I should pretend I don’t know.”
He could overlook something as minor as that.
Leaning back comfortably in his chair, he pulled out a document from the very back of the drawer and unfolded it.
“Hmm.”
It was already a document from more than a year ago.
It contained Hazel’s personal information and details about her ideal type.
Thinking back to the first time he had seen this document, he couldn’t help but chuckle.
—
“Here you are, Your Excellency.”
A document roughly ten pages long was placed in Kailus’s hands.
“Name, Hazel Love.”
“Age, twenty-three.”
“Gender…”
“Female.”
Resting his chin on his thumb, he leisurely ran his index finger across his lips as he muttered.
“She has no family and was born and has lived in the capital all her life…”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Since she has no family, she should be easy to get rid of, too.”
“At least there won’t be any trouble afterward.”
Kailus’s direct subordinate, Sid, chimed in with a shrug.
“She’s 164 centimeters tall and weighs 44 kilograms…”
“Is she going to blow away in the wind?”
“Tsk.”
“She isn’t even a handful.”
Kailus shook his head as though wondering if such a thing was even possible.
His red eyes slowly moved downward.
She had joined the Imperial Knights as their top-ranked recruit immediately after graduation.
She had more than one hundred subjugation missions to her name, the only person with such a record among both the Imperial Knights and the White Dragon Knights.
Her targeted illusions had never failed, and she was also skilled in large-scale illusion magic capable of putting an entire army unit to sleep.
“I thought she was just a woman with a lot of nerve, but I shouldn’t underestimate her.”
In truth, he didn’t have to worry too much because illusion magic didn’t work on him.
It said that her targeted illusions had never failed.
Perhaps it would be amusing in its own way to see a woman who had never known failure experience it right in front of him.
Kailus continued reading.
She had currently resigned and moved her residence to Ferrarium.
Afterward, she had begun operating a mercenary guild and was rapidly expanding it with minimal funds.
The corners of Kailus’s lips twisted crookedly.
The source of those funds was obviously him.
So she had taken his money and run off to that rural backwater, cheekily increasing her wealth.
He let out a hollow laugh and turned to the next page.
After flipping through page after page and reading for quite some time, Kailus suddenly stopped at one point.
“Her ideal type is tall, with shoulders as broad as the Pacific…”
“What is the Pacific?”
“I don’t know.”
“Since it says broad, perhaps it refers to something extremely wide.”
When Kailus furrowed his brow, Sid straightened up and clasped his hands behind his back.
“Anyway.”
“He has to be kind, gentle, sweet, and well-mannered during the day.”
“At night, he should still be kind, but also wild and beastlike…”
“What?”
“She says a certain degree of possessiveness is acceptable?”
“Why on earth does she like something like this?”
“Shouldn’t she avoid it instead?”
“Could her ideal type have a split personality?”
“Perhaps she has an unusual preference that differs from that of ordinary people.”
“She’s a woman bold enough to have guts coming out of her ears, so perhaps her tastes are strange too.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Or should I find out whether this is the sort of ideal type that’s popular these days?”
