Chapter 20: A Great Tragedy

The first time Leandro killed a man was when he had just celebrated his thirteenth birthday. His mother, Lucilia, who was rumored to be beautiful, was Leandro’s most beloved person in the world. She used to be publicly shunned by the royal family for not being born from a noble line, but she was a beautiful and tender woman who did not yield to such a thing and poured infinite love onto her son.

Her figure was so brilliant that when she stood with her long silver hair to one side and smiled broadly, he thought that a goddess had descended from heaven. When he found Lucilia dead in a horrible way in front of his eyes, Leandro felt as if the world was over.

Her hand that gently swept over his face, her arms that held him warmly… And her face, which looked at Leandro with love, were all cut into pieces and dipped in the sea made of blood.

Leandro, a young boy who shrieked on a floor filled with his mother’s blood, was only ten years old at the time.

Other than the fact that unknown assassins rushed into the empress’ residence and killed Lucilia, there was nothing to be known about who was behind her death. Lucilia’s funeral was held without finding anything to prosecute the culprit.

Leandro did not speak for three years. He lost his voice in the shock of seeing his mother’s miserable corpse. At that time, Leandro’s father, Eckhart the Third, was busy licking his own wounds from the loss of his beloved wife and did not look back at his son who needed help for it was difficult for him to face Leandro, who would have looked exactly like Lucilia if she had been born a man.

Leandro, who lost his beloved mother in a moment and was abandoned by his father, was left completely alone and neglected. No one came close, and no one even spoke to him. All he did was walk around the backyard, where he used to take strolls with Lucilia. Without any education or training as a crown prince, Leandro himself was cut off from the world.

Perhaps if a squire he ran into on the forest path at the time had not spoken to him when he was crying, Leandro would have become a lunatic, not to mention an emperor.

A brown-haired boy who abandoned his status as an aristocrat and became the squire of a low-level knight for money. If only he hadn’t met Carlos.

Three years passed in such a gloomy atmosphere, and Eckhart III met an aristocrat woman and recovered his vigor little by little. In the meantime, Leandro was crying inside, licking the rotting wounds by himself.

A banquet was held to celebrate Leandro’s thirteenth birthday, and Leandro felt a blood-boiling rage when he saw the woman sitting next to the emperor, already an empress. How dare she… it was so unpleasant that such a woman would take the place of his mother’s.

As soon as the woman made a slip of the tongue about the terrible last moments of Lucilia’s, Leandro unwittingly pulled the sword out and swung it at her because she knew the secret about Lucilia’s damaged body that only he knew. Leandro heard her words and was convinced that the woman was the culprit in the assassination of the empress. When he came to his senses, the banquet hall was in chaos.

At a gathering to celebrate the crown prince’s birthday, the emperor’s only heir wielded a sword against the new empress.