I Tamed the Slave Male Lead Chapter 12

***

 

 

“Goodness!”

I gasped for breath and shot upright in bed. My breathing was ragged, as if I had just resurfaced after nearly drowning underwater.

“Oh my! My lady, you’re awake!”

“Becky…?”

Seeing the maid approach me with a delighted face, I looked around. It was already bright daylight outside the window.

‘Did I really sleep through the entire night? But why does my body feel so….’

I absentmindedly looked down at my hands and was startled.

The swelling and rashes that had been so severe before I fell asleep had completely disappeared.

Not only that, my difficulty breathing and the horrible headache were both gone, making me feel like I had been given a new lease on life.

This was the first time since possessing this body that I had felt this light.

“The family physician was angry yesterday. He said, ‘Why did you call someone who had already gone home when the lady is perfectly fine?’ But last night, your face was terribly swollen and you had such a high fever, didn’t you?”

After chattering away, Becky cautiously asked,

“What on earth did you have the apothecary prepare for you that made you recover so quickly, my lady?”

“I don’t know either.”

To escape Becky’s persistent questioning, I slowly pulled the blanket over my head.

‘Looks like Greham pressured someone to dig up information as quickly as possible. If there really is a medicine effective against an allergy to Urutu Mountain kumquats, Uncle would have been desperate to find out about it before anyone else.’

I quietly organized my thoughts.

‘But it obviously wasn’t the medicine I had prepared at the apothecary yesterday. And if there are miraculous remedies in this world capable of making the dreadful aftereffects of that allergy disappear in an instant, there are only two.’

The elixir possessed by the Imperial Family, and Yusiliph’s blood.

‘There’s no way the Imperial Family would have helped me, so Yusiliph must have saved me, right?’

So this was what happened when you helped the protagonist—you got rewarded in return.

Yusiliph might have had a prickly personality, but apparently his humanity hadn’t been completely ruined yet. Perhaps he simply couldn’t stand by and watch someone dying.

Wrapped in my blanket, I let out a relieved sigh, then suddenly tilted my head.

‘Wait. I’m pretty sure I woke up from a nightmare, but what was it about?’

Yet all that remained was a strangely uncomfortable and suffocating feeling. Oddly enough, I couldn’t remember anything about it.

‘I don’t know. What’s the point of remembering a nightmare anyway?’

For now, I decided to be grateful that I had survived and forget about the dream.

Soon, fatigue washed over me, followed by another sweet, deep sleep.

 

***

 

At midnight that day, a large shadow blocked Arabella’s path as she stepped out of the bathroom.

“Ah. Yusiliph.”

Even though Arabella was wearing nothing but a bathrobe over her bare body, she greeted him calmly.

It was almost as though she had been expecting him to come.

Yusiliph, on the other hand, had sneaked into her bedroom in the middle of the night to confront her, but he had not known she would be taking a bath. He stopped in surprise.

“Were you waiting for me? I slept the entire day, so I felt grimy and took my time washing up.”

She smiled faintly as she wrapped a cloth around her wet hair.

Despite the pallor unique to someone who had just recovered from an illness, Arabella’s face had regained its original features, making her look youthful and pert like a kitten.

Having soaked in the bath for a long time, her entire body had turned a rosy red.

Everything from her small face to the bare skin exposed between the loosely tied folds of her robe was flushed.

The moment Yusiliph took in that color, reminiscent of a perfectly ripe peach, he inexplicably thought his index finger was itching.

He deliberately averted his gaze and took a step back.

“…I’ll come back later.”

But she called out to him as he turned away.

“It’s okay. Is it because of what I’m wearing? If it makes you uncomfortable, should I change?”

As she said this, the woman casually tightened the robe around herself.

Yusiliph stared at her with an annoyed expression.

Why would he care about Arabella’s clothes?

He wanted to scoff as usual, but for some reason, even meeting her eyes felt uncomfortable.

Perhaps it was because the sight of her sweetly drinking his blood and blindly sucking on his finger still clung somewhere in his mind.

Unlike him, her utterly calm attitude also irritated him immensely.

Forcing his usual expressionlessness back onto his face, he asked in a stiff tone,

“Are you fully recovered now?”

“Yeah. Thank you. After getting some proper rest, I finally feel alive again.”

At Arabella’s words, Yusiliph narrowed his eyes.

Seeing his wary gaze, she looked puzzled.

“What’s wrong?”

“Thanks to me…? Why would you say that?”

At his question, she rolled her eyes as though realizing her mistake.

Seeing that expression, Yusiliph became even more suspicious.

‘Does she know that I healed her? But how?’

She had definitely been asleep at the time.

If she had merely been pretending to sleep, there was no way he would not have noticed.

Sensing his gaze sharpen, Arabella sighed with an awkward expression.

“The thing is… I actually know. I know that you saved me using your blood.”

His brow twitched at her answer, and a fierce light flashed in his eyes.

She hurriedly continued.

“I’m really grateful! If it weren’t for you, I would have faced death twice in a single day. I also know that you don’t like using that ability. So I’m even more grateful. I mean it.”

Arabella clasped her hands together, doing her best to convey her sincerity through her eyes.

But Yusiliph was too shocked to notice any of her efforts.

‘…She even knows that? How?’

His cursed regenerative ability was not limited to healing himself.

Simply having another person consume or apply his bodily fluids allowed them to temporarily share that miraculous regenerative power.

It could not cure a long-standing illness, but it was more than capable of healing wounds and inflammation and restoring a person’s strength.

There was one puzzling aspect, however.

That regenerative power did not have the same effect on everyone.

Its effectiveness varied depending on the individual, and there were even some people on whom it had almost no effect at all.

Whether that was fortunate or unfortunate, Arabella happened to be among those on whom it worked astonishingly well.

‘But there are only three people in the world who know about this: me, my father, and my sister.’

His father had always warned him.

If this ability were ever discovered, he might spend his entire life being exploited as a treatment for disgusting humans, suffering without end.

That was why he had desperately concealed this extraordinary ability all this time.

‘But then, what the hell is this woman…?’

Could it be that she had known everything from the beginning?

Was that why she had bought him without hesitation the moment she saw him at the slave market?

Could this woman even know the reason he had come to the capital?

‘If that’s really the case.’

His gaze suddenly turned vicious.

Before she could say another word, his hand shot out with startling speed and seized her by the throat.

“I suppose I should have just left you to die instead of sticking my nose into your business.”

“Ghk! W-wait, Yusiliph.”

Arabella desperately tried to free herself from his grasp, but his hand was as hard as stone or a tree branch, unmoved by her resistance.

“Tell me. How exactly do you know about my ability?”

“That… that’s—ngh. Even if I explained it, you wouldn’t understand.”

At Arabella’s answer, his gaze grew even more murderous.

Then Arabella urgently spoke, her face reddened as blood rushed to it.

“If I die, Alin… will be trapped in the Magic Tower for the rest of her life. Are you… okay with that?”

For a moment, genuine murderous intent swirled in Yusiliph’s dark-red eyes.

His grip tightened further, and Arabella’s vision flashed white.

Tears filled the corners of her eyes from an instinctive fear of death.

Thud.

The next moment, she collapsed onto the floor as though she had been thrown there.

“Cough, cough, haah….”

Arabella coughed painfully, her body trembling.

Yusiliph looked down at the woman he had thrown, his eyes sunk into a darkness that was chilling to behold.

Before he could do anything else, she hurriedly spoke.

“I’ll… I’ll explain everything someday. Cough. Once I save Alin and keep all the promises I made to you… I’ll explain everything. I swear. Cough.”

“…….”

His silent eyes remained cold.

“And I swear, haah… I don’t have any sinister intentions. I—I…! I just want to live, you bastard!”

Overcome with emotion, her final words burst out as almost a scream.

‘I just want to live.’

It was a desperate cry unbecoming of a noble lady.

Yet the anguish etched across her distorted face at that moment was so genuine that there was no way to mistake it for anything else.

Yusiliph looked into her eyes and, after a brief pause, asked,

“Then tell me now. How can I save Alin? Don’t try to scheme your way out of this or waste my time.”

“Cough….”

Arabella clutched her throat and glared at him resentfully before staggering to her feet.

“You’re… cough… too emotional.”

Yusiliph scoffed.

“If I were truly emotional, you’d already be reunited with your father in the afterlife.”

“You’re bringing my family into this now?”

“You brought my family into this first.”

Their conversation descended into a childish argument, but it was forcibly cut short when Arabella’s cough erupted again and spiraled out of control.