Chapter 4 - Wedding Night

“There’s no way,” Amber mumbled to herself, confused. She was certain that she had been dragged to the capital city and killed in front of the emperor. Why was she back in the duke’s castle? On top of that, she was wearing a white wedding dress and a veil?

“A veil?” Turning to look at the wedding veil she had taken off, Amber quickly stood up looking inside the cabinet to find a mirror. When she saw her reflection, she gasped loudly.

Looking back at her was the face of herself from ten years ago when she didn’t know anything at all.

Twenty years old, wedding dress, wedding veil, and the lord’s bedroom. All of this indicated only one thing.

“Did I… come back? To my wedding night?”

Act 1: The Second Marriage

Realizing that she had survived, and had received the second chance she wanted, Amber couldn’t help but cry.

She didn’t know why she had returned to the past and whether this was possible. However, those kinds of things weren’t important. The only thing important now was that she was alive.

“Thank… you…” Amber mumbled a word of thanks to whatever unknown being had saved her as she knelt on the floor.

The emotions she had felt before she died popped up in her mind again. That painful sensation that engulfed her body like wildfire, regret, and a powerful desire to live once again…

Amber cried for a long while after that before she finally stopped. Having cried herself out, she felt her heart calming down and her head becoming clearer. As she returned to the past, the things she needed to do were clear to her.

‘I can’t let the tragedy that happened in the past repeat.’

All of the tragedies that happened to Amber started with her marriage to the Duke of Thales.

‘I’ll ask him for divorce right away,’ she thought decisively.

It would be difficult for him to accept her request for a divorce on the very first night of their marriage. Even if he did, people would gossip about her for sure, but it didn’t matter.

With her mind made up, Amber started off right away, only to hesitate and go still. Her memories of her previous life raced through her head, and a very important fact surfaced. ‘My child…’

If she were to divorce the Duke of Thales right now, her child would never be able to see the light of day. The child inside of Amber’s stomach had been the only one to brighten her dull, grey world filled with despair.

Her baby was her only blood relative in the East, and it was also a comrade that helped her survive the world that felt so cursed… The emotions that Amber felt for her unborn child were very complicated and deep.

One thing was for sure. Until she had her baby, she could never divorce Duke Kalix.

Amber looked down at her hand wrapped around the doorknob. White and slender, a very beautiful hand indeed. In her previous life, it hadn’t even taken three years before the ends of her fingers became stumpy and her hand coarse from laboring.

‘What should I do then?’ Amber thought to herself as she sat back down in bed and began to mull things over.

Just then, there was a knock at the door.

Before Amber could even tell them to come in, the door opened. The chief maid, her white hair styled into a French Pleat so neat that not even a hair was out of place, walked into the room.

‘Grace,’ Amber could immediately remember the maid’s name. In Amber’s first life, Grace and Amber’s mother-in-law, Bella, were always harassing her.

“The Duke shall not be coming tonight,” Grace said, not even giving Amber a glance or a greeting before imperiously reporting that. When the maid did deign to look down her nose at Amber, her eyes were filled with disdain.