AIWA 02

Chapter 02

A five-year-old girl Lucienne happened to meet on the street looked quite well-bred. That gave Lucienne a brilliant idea.

Kidnapping.

She planned to demand a hefty ransom from the girl’s parents and then deliberately let the attempt fail so she would be arrested.

Then the Grand Duke would hate Lucienne and throw divorce papers at her.

“Let’s find your mommy. Come with me, sis.”

She comforted the crying child and coaxed her along, holding her hand tightly. But after walking about 300 meters, she ran straight into the girl’s parents.

The child happily greeted her parents and innocently told them that this big sister had promised to find her mommy.

Before Lucienne could even say anything, the parents repeatedly bowed their heads.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you so much.”

This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

The people around them applauded at the heartwarming scene.

The second crime she committed was assault.

She suddenly grabbed and beat up a large man who was smoking in front of someone’s house.

The man, reeking of alcohol, threw punches and tried to fight back, but they didn’t have the slightest effect on Lucienne. In fact, he couldn’t even withstand the amount of strength she deliberately held back.

When the neighbors came outside and began whispering among themselves, Lucienne made her movements even more exaggerated.

The more people who witnessed the savage and violent Grand Duchess, the better.

Lucienne expected the man to ask someone to call the security force.

Instead, the man prostrated himself before her and begged.

“Ma’am! Please spare me! I-I was completely in the wrong! If I gamble again, I’m a damn bastard! And I’ll never hit my wife again!”

The man’s wife had been watching what was happening outside through the window. She hurriedly grabbed her bag, came out of the house, and greeted Lucienne.

“Thank you for helping me.”

Her face was covered in bruises.

The man was a thug, and apparently, his wife had finally reached her limit and handed him divorce papers. He had hit her once, then said he would hit her again later, before coming outside to smoke a cigarette.

After hearing the story, Lucienne looked at the man, and he immediately said,

“I-I’ll get a d-divorce right now!”

The man’s signature was stamped onto the divorce papers in his wife’s hand.

The divorce succeeded exactly according to plan.

The only problem was that it wasn’t Lucienne’s divorce.

And the third attempt had been a few days ago.

By now, things had gone so far that the incident had even made the newspapers.

“Haa……”

Completely drained of energy, Lucienne slid down the sofa until she was practically sprawled across it.

“How am I supposed to get divorced?”

Please Leave Me Alone, a reverse-harem romance-fantasy novel about the love and adventures of Princess Verdi Wibroton and the Captain of the Knights, Emillion Hafender.

In the novel, the demons of the Demon Kingdom were incredibly strong.

Normally, it took ten adult men to fight a single demon.

However, many of the demons were constantly hungry.

The Demon Kingdom had vast stretches of barren land where not even a blade of grass could grow, making it an extremely harsh place to live.

In contrast, the Holy Empire of Wibroton, which shared a northern border with the Demon Kingdom, had fertile and abundant land.

The demons believed this was God’s arrangement.

Just as predators hunted weaker animals, it was only natural for demons to plunder the crops of weak humans.

That was how everyone could survive.

Communication between the two races was impossible.

Humans and demons did not speak the same language. Among demons, only the Demon King and his direct descendants could communicate with humans.

The Demon King said that humans found demons horrifying.

The demons felt that strongly every time they raided human settlements.

At the same time, they experienced an intense, almost intoxicating thrill because raiding was a way to unleash their innate strength to the fullest.

In other words, there could be no peace between the two races.

But one day, a very small change occurred.

A child born between a demon and a human, abandoned by her parents, was eventually adopted by the Demon Grand Duke Dylan Pietro after a series of twists and turns.

That child was Lucienne Pietro.

Perhaps because she was officially recognized as a rare hybrid, Lucienne could communicate with humans.

Thus, the former Emperor and Demon King Goth decided to pursue a political marriage in hopes of leaving even the slightest possibility for communication between the two races.

And so the villainess Lucienne from the novel married Paelo.

But eight years later, Lucienne would become a heinous criminal and stand trial in the Imperial Palace court.

In court, Lucienne ground her teeth.

This happened because the Grand Duke didn’t love me. It’s the fault of those disgusting Imperial citizens who hated and rejected me just because half of me is a demon!

She genuinely believed it.

In reality, she had lived quietly for a while after getting married.

She had even hidden her demonic strength, pretending that she had none at all by using her mixed-blood heritage as an excuse.

Although the marriage had been arranged at the Demon King Goth’s command, the moment Lucienne saw Paelo’s dazzling appearance, she wanted to be loved by him.

Lucienne and Paelo had obligatory conjugal relations once every two months.

Paelo performed the emotionless, mechanical act, but Lucienne felt differently.

She wanted a passionate night with Paelo.

She wanted his expressionless face to bloom like a flower whenever he looked at her, and she wanted him to hold her passionately in his arms.

So she decided to live kindly and do no bad things.

After all, she had heard that humans liked good people.

However, Lucienne was always swearing at, hitting, and picking fights with the servants.

To Lucienne, those things were simply part of everyday life, not bad deeds.

Wasn’t it simply the law of the world that the strong could treat the weak however they pleased?

She hadn’t torn off their limbs or killed them, after all.

In her mind, she had shown humans considerable mercy.

It was when the new administrative secretary, Hanana, began seducing Paelo that such a kind woman finally crossed the line.

Paelo showed absolutely no reaction to the seduction.

Lucienne, however, did.

How dare she covet my man? She deserves to die.

While Paelo was away at war, Lucienne caught Hanana and killed her.

After using her strength to her heart’s content, Lucienne’s heart pounded with excitement.

It also felt like she was finally being true to her instincts.

So this is why demons attack and plunder the Holy Empire.

Having reached her own understanding of the natural order, Lucienne covered up the incident.

After that, she had no qualms about committing murder as long as she did it somewhere Paelo wouldn’t notice.

But then she discovered that Hanana had been Princess Verdi, the heroine’s, closest friend.

Hanana’s death became the reason Verdi visited the Ronater territory.

Lucienne found Verdi annoying as she investigated the incident while also accomplishing various heroic deeds.

So she tried several times to quietly kill Verdi as well.

But each attempt ended in failure because of Emillion, the main male lead, and her husband, Paelo, who intervened.

Through several confrontations, Verdi gathered mountains of evidence of Lucienne’s crimes.

Then she arrested Lucienne and brought her to trial.

“That villainess used her position as Grand Duchess to cover up most of her terrible crimes. She deserves the death penalty! We don’t know what kind of rampage she might go on with that monstrous strength of hers, so her hands and feet should be cut off immediately!”

Verdi calmly looked around at everyone attending the trial before finally turning her gaze toward Paelo.

“Grand Duke Ronater should also pay for his crimes. A married couple is one body, after all. However!”

At Verdi’s clear voice, Paelo quietly lowered his gaze toward the floor.

Verdi stared at him, as though he were prepared to accept whatever punishment came his way, and continued.

“Considering that Grand Duke Ronater protected Wibroton from the demons, and that his marriage to the Grand Duchess was arranged through an agreement between His Late Majesty and the Demon King, I believe he should be pardoned.”

Everyone in the courtroom agreed with Verdi’s argument.

“Who the hell decided you could cut off my hands and feet and execute me?! You rotten bastards! Do you even know who I am?!”

There was only one person who furiously protested the verdict.

Lucienne herself, the defendant.

Lucienne screamed and fought back with all her might, but in the end, Emillion wielded Wibroton’s sacred sword, a treasure of the Holy Empire, severed her hands and feet, and cut off her head on the executioner’s block.

Her body was then burned.

Afterward, Paelo became Verdi’s man.

In the side story, Verdi stood before the grave of her deceased friend Hanana and confessed,

“Thank you, Hanana. For moving according to my plan.”

Verdi had been interested in Paelo from the moment she saw him.

But she couldn’t touch him because he was a married man.

“Thanks to you, I was able to get rid of that villainess and make the Grand Duke mine.”

Still sprawled across the sofa, Lucienne recalled the original novel.

She glanced at herself in a hand mirror and let out a deep sigh.

“What good is being pretty?”

Three months ago, she had opened her eyes and found herself transmigrated into the body of Lucienne.

While reading romance-fantasy novels, she had occasionally thought that living as a character after transmigrating into a novel might be fun.

But she had only meant the kind of story where she would be a cute, precious high-ranking noble being showered with love and affection.

Not something like this.

Not as the spawn of a demon.