Reborn: The Duke’s Obsession

Baron Henry's bedchamber was quiet, the air thick with the scent of medicine and the heavy stillness of a long illness.

Augusta sat in the comfortable armchair beside his bed, a small plate of diced fruits resting on her lap. With a small silver fork, she gracefully stabbed a cube of sweet melon and had a bite, her movements unhurried and calm. She looked at the still, silent figure of her husband, lying comatose in the large, imposing bed.

"It has been days now since I have come to see you, Henry," she began, her voice a low, conversational murmur, as if she were simply catching him up on the local gossip. "It truly is a shame. You should have seen me, Henry. You should have seen how I was radiating power and authority on the chairman's seat at the company meeting. I do wish you had been there to see me in my moment of triumph."

She chuckled to herself, a soft, self-satisfied sound, and took another bite of fruit.

"But then again," she said. " Your presence would hindered my victory. Your absence, my dear husband, is the only thing sustaining my moment of triumph. That's why I had kept you alive all this while."

She took a bite of grape, chewing it softly as she continued. " Should I tell you a secret?" She asked, her voice dropping to a low whisper. " I had to put you in this state in such a rush because of your stupid daughter but it's all for the best. I had to increase your arsenic dosage and say those things to trigger you and put you in this…. this pathetic state."

"Speaking of your daughter, Delia, she must not find out the truth, right, Henry?" she chuckled, her voice dropping to a more conspiratorial whisper. "That her mere existence, her very birth, is a crime. A crime that I will keep punishing till she justifies herself with her death. To this day, I still do not understand it. I cannot wrap my head around how she possibly survived that carriage accident all those years ago. But if she had to survive, she should have been tucked away in some nameless orphanage in a far-off corner of the kingdom. But you… you had to go and look for her, didn't you? You had to bring her back to this house."

She stood up and placed her now-empty plate on the bedside table. She looked down at Henry's pale, unmoving face. "I used to think about how she tried so very hard for me to love her when she was a little girl," she said, and then she shuddered, a look of pure disgust on her face. "You know, she is just like her mother. They are both blue-eyed devils. Hypocrites, the both of them. Acting as if all they need is love and nothing else, acting so sweet and so innocent. But then, eventually, they try to have it all. The moment you fall for their pathetic lies and you let your guard down, they strike, taking everything and leaving you with nothing."

She looked at Henry's face and, with a gesture that looked almost tender, she adjusted the heavy blanket around his still form. "Delia took Eric away from my Anne, just like her mother, Catherine, took your love away from me."

She chuckled again, a bitter, humorless sound this time. "You would not even touch me, Henry. Not once. In our twenty long years of marriage, you never once touched me. You never consummated our marriage." Her voice became a low, wounded hiss. "Even that one time, when I drugged you, hoping to pin Anne's pregnancy on you, you still did not touch me, even when the effect of the powerful drug was so overwhelming. Did I disgust you that much?"

She brushed a stray strand of grey hair away from his head, her touch surprisingly gentle. "Was Catherine so much better than me, Henry? Did you love her that much that touching another woman even after her death feels like a sin to you? Did you know how much I truly loved you, back then? But you betrayed me. You went behind my back and got a common merchant's daughter pregnant, all because you did not want to go through with the marriage my father and your father had arranged for us."

She turned and went to the bedside table. She took a small, tablet from a dark-colored medicine bottle and dropped it into a fresh glass of water. She noticed that the tablet looked slightly different from the last batch. "It seems they have started changing the appearance of the arsenic capsule," she said to herself, her voice a simple, observational murmur as she watched the tablet dissolve. "Oh well. As long as it still gets the job done, I do not really care."

After the tablet had completely dissolved, leaving the water perfectly clear, she lifted Henry's head from the pillow. She carefully poured the contents of the glass into his mouth, tilting his head back so that the poisonous liquid would pass down his throat. She then took her own silk handkerchief, dabbed the corners of his mouth, and then, with a look of pure revulsion, she threw the used handkerchief into the waste bin.

"Do not resent me for this, Henry," she whispered to his unhearing form. "You are the one who got yourself entangled with that woman in the first place. This is all your own karma."

She walked to the door, her hand on the cold brass doorknob. She looked back at him one last time, at the man who had denied her his love, his body, and his respect for two decades. She smiled, a cold, final expression.

"Deal with it," she said.

As she left and closed the door with a soft, final click, a single finger on Baron Henry's right hand, his pointer finger, moved. Just a twitch. A small, almost imperceptible sign of life.