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“You have six months. You must kill your husband within that time frame.”
It was the first night of the wedding.
Those words were shocking for a bride who had just walked into the bridal room for the first time on her wedding night.
Alice, the bride who had received the frightening command, stared at the woman in front of her.
The woman had dull purple hair and seemed to be wearing an expensive dress. Alice didn’t recognize the woman before her.
Yet, the woman was staring back at Alice with expectant eyes.
“Why aren’t you answering?” the woman asked. “You can’t be trying to tell me that you aren’t going to do it, are you?”
Alice’s lack of response made the woman’s eyebrows narrow in suspicion.
“Did you forget just how much money I poured into your family? If it weren’t for me, your brother would’ve never received his knighthood. Your whole family would be sitting on the middle of the road if it wasn’t for me.”
‘Is this a dream?’
For a moment Alice asked herself if she was dreaming. The threat against her family was horrific and she was unsure if she had heard the threat.
But the reality was that it wasn’t a dream. The cold air that brushed against her thin negligee was proof that she was awake.
As she felt the cold-induced shivers run down her spine, strange memories rushed into her mind.
The memories that flooded in at once made her head ache in momentary pain. Alice squinted her eyes to combat the sudden aching and throbbing in her temples.
Noticing Alice’s shift in demeanor, the woman began to shout at Alice, misunderstanding her sudden emotional appearance.
“Why are you quiet!? Are you ignoring me? You’ve been arrogant ever since you’ve arrived at the Duke’s mansion! Now that you’ve successfully married into the Duke’s home, do you think that you’re the real Duchess? Do you think that you’re better and higher than I am?!”
She raised her hand, threatening to slap Alice after yelling.
Meanwhile, Alice was still struggling to understand the memories pouring into her mind. Through the overwhelming rush of memories, she recognized the woman before her.
‘If this isn’t a dream, then the person in front of me is . . . ‘
She was the mother of her husband who she had just married earlier today, she was the wife of the eldest Duke of Diorat — Quillian Diorat.
‘Right now, my mother-in-law is asking me to kill her son. What is going on?’
Suppressing her confusion, Alice turned to her mother-in-law whose face was flushed red in anger: “I’m sorry. . . I’ve been so nervous that . . . that I’ve made a mistake.”
As she bowed her head and apologized, the woman’s mood softened.
“Tch- Let this be a reminder that I’ll beat you up until you come to your sense if you make a mistake like this again. You didn’t enter this household to become a Duchess, you came here to be at my beck and call. Never forget that.”
“… Yes, mother.”
“Six months. The Duke must be dead within six months. So, don’t make any more mistakes in the future, and do what I tell you to do.”
“…… Yes, I will keep that in mind.”
A satisfied smile hung on Madame Quillian’s face when she heard Alice’s meek answer.
“Well then,” she said after staring at the large bed in the bedroom, “take good care of your husband tonight.”
“…… Yes.”
With a satisfied chuckle, her mother-in-law left the room, leaving Alice all alone.
The door slammed shut with a click and the footsteps faded away.
When there were no more sounds, Alice flopped down on a nearby chair, reality finally sinking in.
“No . . . What the hell is going on,“ Alice muttered blankly as she looked down at her body.
She was wearing a strange negligee, and her hands were the purest shade of white — a shade she had only seen in dramas.
She had always washed dishes in the back of the kitchen, so her skin shouldn’t be this smooth, or this white.
With a realization, she stood up from her seat and walked towards the full-length mirror on the other side of the room.
Staring at her reflection, her eyes widened in shock.
The girl in the reflection had smooth and soft pink hair, and eyes that seemed to be speckled with gold.
She also had a cute face which seemed to be a lot younger than her original age.
This was not the appearance of ‘Han Su-yeon.’
“Am I…… am I really dead?”
The last thing she could remember about herself was seeing the flames of gas exploding in the kitchen where she worked.
She couldn’t have survived that gas explosion.
That was a realization she came to once she had seen the magnitude of the fire.
She remembered how she had softly murmured, ‘Oh, I’m dying’ as the realization came to her.
“…… It’s embarrassing.”
It was unfair that she had died without being able to properly coordinate with the chef as an assistant.
For a year, she had worked as a kitchen assistant without pay.
“Haa, my life…….”
She let out a deep sigh of relief and looked again at her reflection in the mirror.
Pinching her soft cheeks with her fingers, she let a small yelp of pain before realizing that this wasn’t a dream.
Han Su-yeon is really dead.
And, to her surprise, she turned into a woman named ‘Alice Podoori’.
Alice Podoori was the second daughter of a humble count who was sold to marry the Duke.
‘…… Did my spirit possess her body?’
A phenomenon that only happens in movies and novels had happened to her in real life.
Thankfully, it was a lot easier to understand her situation because she had Alice’s memories with her.
But Alice’s life was…… not easy at all.
Alice’s life had poured into her mind like a movie, and from that movie, the happiest scene was when she was a young girl, warmly embraced in the arms of her mother.
Alice was the middle child from a humble Countess’s family that were not-so-well-off.
Her older brother was set to be the family’s successor, and her younger sister was very sick.
When her younger sister was born, he parents fawned over her more, and they grew disinterested in Alice.
To cover her older brother’s knighthood expenses, her family sold her off to marry Duke Diorat.
At this point, she thought that she might’ve been able to find happiness while married to the Duke, but as seen earlier, her mother-in-law was a crazy person trying to kill her son. Not to mention that her husband wasn’t in his finest condition either.
The Duke’s physical condition was so bad that he could not even hold a formal wedding.
He had been lying unconscious and bedridden, waiting for the day of his death.
In fact, there were many rumors being passed around that the Duke had already died, and that the Diorat family was deliberately hiding his death to avoid the collapse of the Duke’s house.
Alice was married to a living corpse.
Slide–
Alice walked carefully to the bed and gently rolled up the curtain covering it.
There she saw her husband lying there, unconscious.
The moment she looked at his face, Alice had forgotten the grave situation that she was in.
“Wow…… so handsome,” she gasped as her gold specked eyes widened.
He had black hair, a smooth forehead, a pointed nose, and thick lips that looked like the dark night sky.
Even with his eyes closed quietly, the man was as enchanting as a sculpture.
He was so handsome and perfect that he could not be compared with any actor she had seen in her past life.
“…… Come to think about it, it’s been over six months since you’ve collapsed so why are you still in a good shape?”
She began to curiously look down from his face to his body, where she could see his wide shoulders and firm chest through his pajamas.
At first glance, if she could see the clear muscle lines, and his firm chest . . . and as she looked further down . . .
“It’s big…… Ah, ahem.” Alice coughed and hurriedly raised her gaze.
She looked up at the ceiling with a bit of embarrassment, then cooled her burning face and looked at her husband’s sculpture-like face again.
‘You’re ill, and I’ll have to kill you…….’
Her mother-in-law had taken her in to kill someone who was already on the verge of death.
Even though the Duke was not her real son, it was still a very horrifying thing to do.
And it’s horrifying that I have to do it myself.
“This isn’t some kind of television drama,” she said with a sigh, “I’ve actually possessed the body of a wife who is supposed to kill her husband.”
In her last life, she had read a novel with a similar storyline in her last life.
It was a romantic fantasy novel where the wife had killed her husband at the order of her mother-in-law.
Of course, the wife was not the female lead. She was just a supporting character that appeared briefly at the beginning of the novel.
Eventually, that wife ……
“Oh, hold on…….”
Alice’s face stiffened as she recalled something.
The name of the husband who died in the novel was clearly…….
“…… Kaillus Diorat.”
And the name of the wife was ….. Alice.
[Alice Diorat, who poisoned her husband, is hanged.]
Alice specifically remembered this sentence from the novel.
‘Kaillus Diorat and his wife-to-be, Alice.’
For good measure, she checked the face of the handsome Duke again.
The novel’s description of the Duke perfectly matched the face that she was staring at earlier.
She had actually possessed a supporting character in the romantic fantasy novel.
“Oh, this is crazy.”
***
‘Ugh, arghh…….’
Even as her breaths grew heavy and she became filled with exhaustion, Alice still continued to run.
She ran towards the entrance where a single ray of light poured out in the dark darkness.
But before reaching the entrance, someone reached out to Alice.
Alice could feel that she was begin held by large hands and trapped between wide arms.
“You can never run away,” a low voice murmured into her ear.
As she turned to look at the man holding her, black smoke filled his face and she was unable to recognize him.
With a deep breath, Alice opened her eyes as everything else faded away.
Blink, blink.
As her sense of reality gradually returned, she blinked slowly, staring at the handsome side profile of the man beside her.
“Ah, what was that dream……?” Alice muttered quietly.
Alice’s eyes widened in surprise when she realized her sleeping posture.
One of her hands was rested on the bare skin of her husband’s wide chest under his shirt, and she was hanging off of him with one leg rested on his thigh.
The hardness of his chest underneath her fingertips instantly woke her up.
“Haa!”