Chapter 197

Bloodshot eyes filled with moisture until the world blurred. It felt like falling endlessly into a bottomless abyss, with no ground in sight.

Elise’s prognosis was not good. That, too, had been expected from the start. She did not wake for nearly three days.

Freya repeated her instructions again and again to Rezette, who had not let go of his wife’s hand for a single moment.

“You must keep her warm at all times,” Freya said carefully. “Continue circulating heat through her body, and make sure she keeps drinking the willow bark extract to promote blood flow. Even if she wakes, she may not be able to move properly for quite some time.”

None of that mattered to him. Elise did not need to walk on her own. He could carry her for the rest of his life. As long as she woke safely, nothing else was necessary.

Freya hesitated, then added with a look of guilt.

“And it is likely that she will not be able to conceive again. This is not something Her Highness should endure twice. Next time…”

“There is no next time,” Rezette said.

For three days he had not spoken a single word. When he finally did, his voice was cracked and hoarse to a startling degree.

“There is no next time,” he repeated flatly. “Never.”

He had not even thought to ask about the child. He did not leave Elise’s bedside at all, and since he would not move, Lady Petisson had no choice but to bring the cradle into the bedroom herself. She left behind a sharp warning.

“No matter how shaken you are, you must hold the baby at least once,” she scolded him. “Her Highness suffered terribly to bring that child into the world. If you keep ignoring her like this, what kind of resentment do you think you will face later?”

If he could at least be scolded by Elise herself, he thought bitterly, he would ask for nothing more.

Despite Rebecca Petissson’s harsh rebuke, Rezette could not bring himself to even turn his head toward the cradle for some time. He could not predict what he would feel if he looked at it now. He did not trust himself to face the being that had nearly killed Elise.

With every breath, inflammation burned in his chest. Rezette felt disgust toward the version of himself that had once spilled his seed into her body again and again, satisfied and unthinking.

Could he even make a rational judgment in this state?

In the fragile stillness, a faint breathing sound reached his ears.

It was a sound he had never heard before. Small, delicate. The breathing of a newborn.

Rezette remained silent.

The baby’s soft breaths nearly drowned out Elise’s own faint breathing. If he had not been holding her wrist and feeling the slow pulse beneath his fingers, rage might have overwhelmed him.

He had no margin to properly grasp the situation.

And yet, the breathing continued.

His senses were painfully alert. Whether he wanted to or not, he could hear it.

Now and then came small whimpering noises, cries pitched at a frequency he had never encountered. They were so fragile they scarcely seemed human, like feathers brushing against his heart.

At some point, Rezette found himself listening to those sounds without realizing it.

She is breathing.

It was an obvious truth for a living being, yet one he grasped only with great effort.

He stared blankly at Elise’s closed eyelids for several more minutes before finally letting out a long, bone-deep sigh.

I should check.

Yes. He had to check. Elise herself had pleaded with him again and again just before her labor began.

“If I cannot stay conscious,” she had told him, her voice firm despite everything, “you have to look for me. You have to see what Cherry looks like when she is born, how she cries, how she smiles, who she resembles. All of it.”

Rezette finally tore his gaze away from his wife. It had been a long time since anything other than Elise entered his field of vision.

The resolve he had scraped together lasted only a moment. As soon as he turned his head and looked at the cradle, his mind went blank.

Something small lay there, wrapped tightly in soft cloth. That was Cherry’s first impression.

Confusion washed over him before he could help it.

She is too small.

The newborn was smaller than his forearm. Her face, barely the size of his fist, was still flushed with the reddish warmth unique to newly born life.

Her hair grew in soft and fine, like short grass, and it was pitch-black. A pure black, like the feathers of a crow.

Rezette said nothing.

He had once hoped that there would not be a single part of her that resembled him, and yet an unexpected sense of relief crept in.

“Hah,” he exhaled, letting out a hollow laugh at himself.

He remembered Elise saying that Cherry’s hair would likely be either black or light brown. Elise’s own silver hair, radiant as moonlight, was proof that she had once stood at death’s threshold. There was no chance it would be inherited.

“Before my hair turned white, it was light brown, like Andrei’s,” Elise had said. “Cherry might be born with brown hair too.”

“If so,” Rezette had replied quietly, “black would be better.”

“I like black too,” Elise had said with a smile. “It looks sturdier than pale colors. Like you.”

The way she had emphasized the word sturdy lingered in his mind.

Just as Elise had wished, and just as he himself had secretly hoped, it had turned out this way. Better for the child to be dark like him than resemble the emperor.

“I hope she will be a very, very sturdy boy,” Elise had once murmured.

That particular wish, however, had not come true.

She was a girl.

He knew it in his head. Everyone around him had made enough noise about it. But this was the first time the fact truly settled in his heart.

Rezette stared blankly at the baby, then turned back to Elise, then looked at the baby again. The curve of her closed eyes was astonishingly similar to Elise’s.

“No wonder she is so pretty,” a maid had said earlier in passing. “You can tell at a glance she resembles Her Highness.”

Now he understood exactly why she had said that.

Rezette bent slowly toward the cradle. He examined the small life more closely.

Once he truly began to register her features, her entire soft, rounded face came into view.

The nose…

The delicate bridge of her nose was Elise’s. Even her slightly full lips seemed to belong to her mother, though he could not tell if that was his imagination.

A strange sensation seized Rezette. Breathing suddenly felt difficult.

At that moment, the baby parted her lips slightly and opened her eyes. Even the small act of lifting her eyelids seemed exhausting, and she could not open them fully. Still, it was more than enough to see the color of her eyes.

Golden irises, sweet as honey, were revealed as they turned toward him.

In those clear eyes, untouched by the dust of the outside world, his own reflection was plainly visible.

Rezette was speechless.

The golden color he loved most in the world was embedded in his daughter’s eyes. Without a doubt, she was a small Elizabeth.

His vision swam. Rezette squeezed his eyes shut.

The veins stood out in his hands as he gripped the edges of the cradle. The life he had only vaguely imagined now existed in solid form before him. It took him three full days after her birth to truly comprehend that miraculous fact.

Rezette opened his eyes again and began inspecting the baby with an intensity bordering on ferocity.

Are her hands and feet all there?

Looking was not enough. He loosened the swaddling cloth. She had been wrapped so tightly that it took him a long while to even undo half of it.

When her tiny palm was revealed, he fell silent once more.

She was impossibly small, and not grotesque at all.

Aside from the single wing folded tightly against her back and the tiny scale on the back of her hand, there was nothing that made her look half-beast. This small, red, potato-like creature certainly did not resemble his own childhood self.

The heart that had been rattling with tension finally eased. Rezette let out yet another sigh of relief.

Despite her father’s relentless gaze, the baby showed no sign of fear. Each time she blinked her half-open eyes, golden light flickered beneath fanlike lashes.

Without thinking, Rezette reached out and touched her plump left cheek. The moment his fingertip met the warm, soft flesh, he hurriedly curled his hand into a fist. The warmth of living flesh filled that tiny body.

“Cherry,” he murmured.

Only after speaking did Rezette realize that his daughter did not yet have a name.

Even so, perhaps recognizing the familiar sound, the baby moved her mouth. She had been sensitive to external sounds even in the womb. She could not understand words, but she could surely sense intention, especially when it came to the name meant for her.

Rezette knew how important naming was. He himself had only taken his first steps as a human being after his half-brother had given him one.

A name. Something suitable…

Nothing came to mind.

Regret followed belatedly. He should have prepared a list of candidates in advance. He could not possibly attach just any name to a child who resembled Elise so closely.

Rezette sat beside the cradle and stared at the baby for a long while. Then, without thinking, words slipped out.

“You worked hard too,” he said quietly.

It was a clumsy first thing to say to a newborn. Rezette fumbled at the cradle and continued speaking without purpose.

“Tell your mother to wake up soon.”