I Live With My Villain Uncle Chapter 24

“Let’s not talk about it.”

Uncle looked away from me again and strode toward the carriage.

“Mommy didn’t hide me…… Maybe Mommy didn’t go around bragging about me enough.”

I complained belatedly, feeling wronged.

I thought she would go around the neighborhood announcing that she had such a pretty daughter.

Even though she used to kiss me a hundred times every morning before going to work, saying, “My pretty daughter!”

“Then you should’ve pestered your mother back then. Tell her to brag about you.”

“It’s okay. Mommy was busy.”

“Tsk.” Uncle clicked his tongue again.

“You’re so tiny, yet you have so many things you think are ‘okay.’ Why not just do it?”

“Mommy said she had lots of things she had to protect. So I shouldn’t pester her. Mommy was tired.”

“Then why do you do it to me?”

“Because I’m going to protect Uncle!”

I pulled away from Uncle slightly, clenched my fists, and proudly thumped them against my chest.

“……Let’s not talk about it.”

“I’ll open it.”

Gerard hurriedly opened the carriage door, and Uncle placed me inside.

I obediently crawled across the seat and moved farther inside.

Soon, Uncle climbed in, and the carriage door closed.

“Ah! I left some cake behind.”

I only remembered when I looked out the window.

But the carriage had already started moving, so all I could do was lick my lips regretfully.

And so, my first outing to a banquet with Uncle came to an end.

 

***

 

The weekend flew by after that, and soon we were approaching the following weekend.

I couldn’t even begin to describe how surprised Zenda had been when she saw me waiting outside that night after the banquet.

Zenda told Uncle that everything had been her doing, but thankfully, Uncle didn’t believe her.

Still, after that day, I felt like I had gotten a little closer to Uncle.

Because when I asked Uncle to come eat breakfast with me in the morning, he no longer got annoyed and actually got up.

Of course, I still had to call him more than ten times.

And we had also made plans to go to the Imperial Palace.

On the weekend, too!

It was tomorrow.

This was all thanks to Grandfather pulling some strings!

Grandfather was the best!

He had even said he would speak directly to His Majesty the Emperor, so I had been counting down the days.

I hadn’t seen anything strange in all that time, either.

But……

“Peanut. Give Uncle just one bite.”

I had opened my mouth wide, about to stuff a huge bite of ice cream into it, when I stopped.

Today was the day when I could play beside Uncle after a long time.

I was sitting beside him while he worked, humming a song I had seen in a book yesterday and eating the ice cream Zenda had brought me.

Uncle had just closed his documents and stretched when he suddenly spoke to me.

……He wanted just one bite?

“One bite?”

I asked suspiciously.

Grandma Sophie had even baked a crispy cone shaped like a little hat and piled the ice cream especially high for me.

It was the first time I had ever seen one like this, but she said they sold them this way outside.

When I told her that the cake I had eaten at the banquet had strangely tasted like fruit and was as delicious as the cakes she made, she said she would make me something even better.

“One bite.”

Was it just my imagination?

Uncle’s eyes seemed to have become long and narrow in a rather mischievous way.

He had refused when I asked him to eat ice cream with me earlier.

“You really have to eat only one bite.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

I looked back and forth between Uncle and the ice cream, thinking hard.

Still, he was Uncle.

I should give him some.

He had definitely said only one bite.

After making up my mind, I held the ice cream out to Uncle.

“Here.”

But all of a sudden, Uncle opened his mouth like a hippo.

“U-Uncle!”

I called out desperately, but by then, the entire scoop of ice cream had already disappeared into Uncle’s mouth.

It was like watching it get sucked into a cave. Just—

Whoosh.

It vanished in an instant, leaving only the cone behind.

I stared blankly at the empty cone.

I couldn’t believe this reality.

“H-how, how…… You said one bite. One bite only……”

I couldn’t even get the words out.

Technically, he wasn’t wrong.

Uncle had taken one bite.

But he never said that his one bite was going to be that big!

“Not bad.”

Uncle had eaten it all without leaving even a speck of ice cream around his mouth, looking completely satisfied.

“How could you, how could you……”

He really was a heartless man.

The way he grinned after saying it was tasty made him look exactly like a devil.

He was so mean.

I wriggled my bottom and moved a whole handspan away from Uncle.

I had to show him that the distance between our hearts had grown this much.

Of course, Uncle’s chair was already quite far from mine, so it didn’t have much effect.

Instead, I carefully nibbled away at the crispy cone at the bottom, slowly breaking it apart with my front teeth to make up for the ice cream that had vanished so pointlessly.

There was barely any ice cream left inside, either.

It was just as empty as the heart Uncle had left full of holes.

My front teeth had seemed a little weak lately, so I had already been careful with them, and now I was starting to feel miserable.

Zenda had even warned me that my front teeth might fall out soon, so I’d had nightmares about it.

“Are you sulking? If it wasn’t enough, you could just get more.”

I glared sharply at Uncle.

“It tastes different! And I’m not sulking.”

“How is it different? It’s the same stuff. Just ask Sophie for another one.”

“It’s different! The first one tasted the best, and you ate all of it! The second one isn’t the same! It doesn’t have that feeling! Uncle doesn’t understand anything.”

“You’re sulking. Is it really that precious to you when your uncle eats some?”

“I’m not sulking. I’m angry! And you lied to me. You should’ve taken a little bite. How could you take such a huge bite when you said one bite?”

“Oh, is that so? Our picky little niece. Want me to spit it back out?”

“No. I don’t eat things after they’ve been in Uncle’s mouth. What if I become nasty like Uncle? And you already swallowed it.”

“Hey, what’s so nasty about me?”

“You’re nasty. Nasty Uncle.”

I turned my back completely on Uncle and sat there eating the crumbs of the cone.

It was tasty, too, but it would have been so much better with ice cream.

Uncle tapped me lightly on the back.

I pretended not to notice and kept breaking apart the cone.

Uncle poked my back again.

It tickled, but to show him I was angry, I deliberately wriggled around without turning back.

“Then what? What am I supposed to do for you?”

Do something for me?

Uncle had actually said something like that.

I glanced at the ceiling to see if it had somehow been blown open, then slowly turned my head to look at him.

By then, Uncle’s large upper body had leaned toward me.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll see.”

“……Nasty Uncle.”

“What do you want to do?”

At those words, I turned my bottom that had been facing away from him back toward Uncle.

“Uncle, then let’s go to the market today.”

Uncle immediately frowned.

“Why would we go to that filthy place? If you need something, just order it.”

“No. The flower shop I used to go to with Mommy!”

At that, Uncle’s expression went blank.

“Where’s the flower shop?”

“I don’t know how to get there…… But if we go to the market, I’ll know! There’s a place in the market that Mommy always stopped by when she went to buy flowers. Let’s buy some flowers and take them to Grandfather tomorrow.”

Uncle stared at me with a sullen expression for a long while before ruffling my hair.

“Fine. Go if you want.”

“Really?”

“You think I go around lying to you?”

I didn’t answer.

I just stared at Uncle and blinked.

The biggest liar who has ever deceived me in my entire life…….

Perhaps feeling guilty, Uncle told me to go get more ice cream, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked out.

But he came back not long after.

One hand was shoved insolently into his pocket, while the other held a tray topped with ice cream.

“Happy now?”

It wasn’t in a cone, though.

It was in a shallow bowl.

“Um…… A little.”

A little disappointed, I stuck the cone I had been eating into the ice cream and used the spoon to scoop some up.

Instead of sitting in his chair, Uncle remained standing and casually gathered the documents into one place.

Then I noticed the seal Uncle used to stamp his documents and letters.

“Ah!”

With the spoon still in my mouth, I rummaged through the pocket attached to the side of my dress and pulled out a piece of paper.

Zenda had made the pocket for me because she said I had to carry it around with me every day.

“Uncle, you have to put that on here too.”

“Take the spoon out.”

Tsk.

I put down the spoon and spoke again.

“Uncle, stamp that here, too.”

I unfolded the paper again and spread it flat on Uncle’s desk, pointing at the blank space.

“What’s that?”

“The thing where Uncle presses his finger down.”

“What’s that?”

Uncle kept pretending not to know, even though he was staring right at it.

So I lifted the paper up and showed it to him properly.

“Right here, in this empty spot.”

“You think I use this just anywhere?”