I Possessed The Immoral Empress

“Fortress?”

“Yes. My own secret hideout! But who are you, and how did you find this place?”

Henry squeezed through to sit beside Valliere in the fortress, questioning her.

“Huh?”

“Your face is all bruised. Who did this to you?”

If it had been adults, they might have pretended not to see, showing a sort of courtesy, but Henry, only nine years old, lacked such delicate sensibilities.

“Oh, this… I just fell and got hurt.”

“What?”

Henry’s expression hardened at the obvious lie.

“I’m a bit clumsy, I usually fall a lot. So…”

“Hey! Did you get these from falling too?”

Henry grabbed Valliere’s wrist and looked at the blue bruises scattered across it.

“How could these be from falling? They look like you were hit by something sharp…”

Valliere, embarrassed as if caught in a shameful act, blushed and quickly hid her hands behind her back.

“It’s not like that.”

“What’s not like that? Who hit you?”

Even though they had just met, Henry felt a pull of sympathy for the girl who had clearly been mistreated. He knew all too well how cruel adults could be from his own experiences.

Though Henry himself was neglected rather than physically abused—being the emperor’s son had spared him from beatings—other children weren’t so lucky. Servants’ children often became scapegoats for their parents or employers’ frustrations over minor mistakes.

Under Henry’s pressing, Valliere could only pout her lips and eventually started to shed thick tears.

Henry, who had only wanted to scold whoever had hurt her, was taken aback by Valliere’s sudden crying.

“What, what’s wrong? Why are you crying? Does it hurt somewhere else?”

At Henry’s questions, Valliere continued to stream clear tears while slowly shaking her head.

“Ah, don’t cry! This isn’t a place for crying! This is a happy place! No one is allowed to cry in my fortress!”

Perhaps a more tactful approach would have been better, but that was the best Henry could manage at the moment. Yet, Valliere quickly wiped her tears with her sleeve and stopped crying.

“I’m not crying anymore. Let me stay here now.”

With her eyes still moist, Valliere forced a bright smile onto her face.

Seeing her smile, Henry decided to stop pressing her.

He didn’t want to risk making her cry again by asking more questions.

“There’s no need to force a smile. This place is for thinking of happy moments.”

“Happy moments?”

“Yes. Moments that made you feel good. I liked it when my mom would let me eat sugary candies.”

Henry shared what he considered his happiest memory.

Back when Henry’s mother, Linette, had not yet given up her aspirations towards the late emperor, she occasionally bought snacks for her son. Although most of the child support went towards her own luxuries, she spent a small amount on her son’s snacks, priding herself on being a good mother.

Young Henry loved it when his mother unwrapped the white paper package to hand him a hard candy.

Not only did he look forward to the sweetness, but the delighted expression on his face as he savored the candy, under his mother’s fond gaze, meant even more to him.

Henry deliberately put a piece of sugary candy in his mouth and exaggerated a happy expression.

Sometimes, this would make Linette stroke his hair, indulging in her fantasy of being a good mother—a moment of happiness that Henry cherished as irreplaceable.

“I liked…”

After listening to Henry, Valliere seemed to ponder something before speaking in a small voice.

“I liked it when my dad would visit.”

“Your dad?”

“Yeah. Mom would be nicer when dad was around.”

“Doesn’t your dad live with you?”

“No.”

Valliere simply affirmed Henry’s question and then closed up again.

After all, Henry himself lived separately not only from his father but also from his mother.

Henry chose not to pry further and quietly waited with Valliere as the sun set.

The two children shared their warmth and happy memories through the cold winter.

Their wrists and necks turned red from the cold, and their breaths visibly puffed white, but that winter, Henry found a place to belong for the first time.

Whenever he headed to the old shed deep in the forest, Valliere would be there waiting for him, her cheeks reddened and nose running.

Each time, Henry would shake his head, pull out his worn handkerchief, and wipe her nose or the occasional nosebleed.

Valliere always gave him a pure, untainted smile, like a clear, shadowless snowy field.

Henry sighed deeply, his head bowed, his hands cradling it.

That smile, that shadowless smile from back then was as marred as her small, bruised body.

It was just Valliere’s accustomed act of hiding her wounds that had fooled young Henry.

The person who always beat Valliere was her mother, and the occasionally visiting father was the baron who owned the lands.

Valliere was the baron’s illegitimate child.

It would be years before Henry understood the complicated circumstances of the adults around him.

Leaping through time to the present, Valliere left Henry with an innocent smile that he knew would deeply wound him. Yet, that smile, still concealing pain as it did in the past, caused Henry’s heart to feel as if it were being split in two.

Can a heart truly ache this much, when it’s just an organ?

For the first time, Henry experienced an unbearable pain, understanding what it truly meant to feel like his heart was breaking.

After two suicide attempts and threats of murder from his half-brothers, Henry had resolved to live because of Valliere and, driven by her, had decided to become the emperor at any cost. He wanted to give everything in this world to his pitiful lover, to protect her so that no one could ever inflict even the smallest wound on her soul again.

Now the boy had become an emperor, an untouchable sovereign, yet all his resolutions had turned hollow.

“You’re not even human. You coldly dispose of your half-brothers and even exile your own mother? Are you even human? Do you have any humanity left in you? Living like this, you’ll end up alone! See how you fare living a lifetime as a lonely emperor.”

These were the parting words from Linette as she was exiled.

Having just ascended the throne, feeling as though he owned the world, Henry was initially unaffected by his mother’s words. He dismissed them as the ramblings of a foolish woman.

But now, he wished he truly lacked a human heart. Why her cruel words resurfaced at this moment, he didn’t know, but now he realized that his mother’s curse was not just a curse, but a prophecy.

Tears flowed endlessly from Henry’s eyes, soaking the floor beneath him.

In this moment, Henry longed to return to the old forest fortress, a place that could barely shelter him from the storm but felt cozier than anywhere else in the world. In his impregnable royal palace, immune to rain, wind, and even storms, and while he was the master of this grand house, he felt no happiness.

He had clung to the fact that someone was there to share warmth with him, just as before.

But now, the girl who had willingly shared that small warmth was gone. There was only a stranger wearing the skin of his first love.

A witch maker.

Both Ermedeline and Valliere had been transformed by his own hands.

It didn’t matter if Ermedeline became a witch or a devil, but he had turned Valliere, his last bastion, into a witch as well.

He had eradicated the only place where he could find solace.

“Mother, fortunately, it seems your son still retains a human heart, suffering like this from merely a heartbreak.”

Overwhelmed by pain, Henry writhed in his chair, clutching his chest.

“If only I were like mother’s curse suggested, without a human heart, how much easier would it be?”

He clenched his teeth so hard to prevent his sobs from escaping that his jaw ached.

Yet, an emperor cannot live merely as a private individual. 

He is in a place where neither full sorrow nor joy is permitted.

Even as his soul felt like it was being torn in half, with blood seeping from that wound, Henry was expected to pretend everything was fine.

Count Hallstein urgently shouted as if there was a pressing matter.

“Your Majesty, there is an urgent report I need to present!”

Count Hallstein wanted to give his recently heartbroken Emperor a moment of respite, but the news he had just received was urgent.

Henry, wiping away his tears and forcibly clearing his face of moisture, called for Count Hallstein.

“Come in.”

Count Hallstein hesitated for a moment at the sight of Henry, who looked as though he might die at any moment, but then he began to speak hesitantly.

“They are moving the state affairs to the border areas from Frianton.”

“What?”

Henry’s face, previously marred by the pain of rejection, suddenly cleared upon hearing Count Hallstein’s report.

“The border areas, you mean…”

“Yes. A massive military force is being assembled at our nation’s borders.”

Count Hallstein knew that the clumsy letters of persuasion would not work, but he had not expected Frianton to mobilize its military so quickly.

“Our military strength?”

“Most of our forces that can be sent are already stationed at the Frianton border. Only a minimal standing army remains at the other borders.”

Henry, who had been inwardly relieved to have resolved one problem, soon regretted not listening to Count Hallstein’s words, but it was too late to turn back now.

“Leave only the surveillance personnel and send everyone else to the Frianton border.”

“What about the capital’s forces?”

At Hallstein’s question, Henry frowned as if to say he was talking nonsense and looked up at him.

“Leave the capital empty when Leopold is holding it? Are you serious?”

“But if we remove the forces watching the borders…”

Henry, not wanting to hear any more from Count Hallstein, waved his hand dismissively, signaling him to leave.

In fact, at this moment, Henry was making an irreversible mistake.

If it had not been for the breakup with Valliere, Henry would not have made such a foolish error.

But now, having parted from the woman who was both his life’s purpose and reason, his vision was clouded.

The state of the borders seemed unimportant to him.

After all, without him, the Trivian Empire was a place without value.

Furthermore, Henry thought carelessly that if foreign troops stormed the empty borders, the regional lords would somehow buy time.

However, it was not foreign soldiers armed with swords and weapons who entered through the emptied borders.