Guiding the Male Lead out of His Trauma - Chapter 42.1
However, Cassiel didn’t respond at all.
It was only after sensing something off that I realized how careless I’d been.
Conscription.
The color had completely drained from him, and he looked like a corpse with the soul sucked out.
‘Ah, I messed up.’
Just one word, and Cassiel had undoubtedly been dragged back into a bad memory.
I regretted bringing up the news of my deployment to the front so casually.
I should’ve approached it more carefully.
Gripped by trauma, he asked in a chilling voice.
“…Why you?”
I didn’t want to sympathize with Cassiel’s self-pity.
But even so, I couldn’t condone anything that would so carelessly evoke the death of his family.
I hadn’t even considered that he might associate my deployment with Claire’s death.
I had rejected the Crown Prince’s offer of sponsorship. He would retaliate against me for defying him.
And that retaliation would come in the form of my deployment to Lomdina.
I needed to explain that properly and clearly, but the moment I realized my mistake, the words wouldn’t come.
“Liliope, I asked why you’re being deployed. Is it because of the Crown Prince? No… you don’t even have to answer. I can figure that much out on my own.”
When Hyacine gets angry, he flies into a rage.
When Acteon is angry, he goes completely silent.
Cassiel didn’t fall into either category.
“Thinking too clearly is the problem. It would’ve been better if I’d just been stupid and clueless.”
Right now, he was like a cold flame.
It didn’t seem hot, but a quiet and eerie heat was smoldering beneath the surface.
With the others, I always had the confidence that I could stop them somehow. But standing before someone who had barely reburied his fear and grief, I found myself at a loss.
“It’s just a deployment. Like training a hunting dog. He’s just scaring me a little, and once I’m tamed, they’ll probably call me back. It won’t take long. I won’t die…”
“And you expect me to believe that?”
He growled, mocking me.
“You want me to trust those bastards?”
“The Crown Prince isn’t dumb enough to waste a cadet with a high-rank without using them properly. He wants to win this war—”
“Claire had the same rank as you.”
The words I’d begun to use to convince him vanished from my tongue without a trace.
“Do you know why I got this pathetic punishment? Because they told me I should consider her dying in service to the country an honor.”
He shouted each syllable with venom.
“She, just like you, got bounced around from one deployment to another because of their pathetic power struggles. You think this is going to be the end of it? That they’ll bring you back once you’ve shown a little obedience? Sure. And then what? What happens if it looks like you’ve submitted to the Crown Prince? Then it’ll be my father’s turn.”
Cassiel ground his teeth.
Each of his miserable, furious sentences blurred at the end with a wetness he couldn’t hide.
“You’re going to be dragged around in their tug-of-war until you go insane. Just like Claire did…”
“Cassiel, you’re—”
“If this is how it was going to be, why did you say that to me?”
His face was hidden behind his hand, and I had no way of knowing how distorted his expression had become.
It felt strange.
Even without seeing his face, the damp despair pouring off Cassiel was palpable.
Even if he’d managed to conquer his fear of facing death again, he hadn’t been able to escape the lingering fear that someone he kept close might leave him too.
It was a feeling only someone who had known that kind of loss could have.
“You… You have to live…”
I don’t like this guy.
But even if I couldn’t like him, I didn’t hate the version of him that had tried to change, starting from the moment he grabbed hold of something, anything.
Even if Cassiel and I were like oil and water, that didn’t give me the right to carelessly poke at his wounds.
I’d been treating him too one-dimensionally.
Cassiel doesn’t want me to die.
Like handling a fragile, thin shell, I carefully reached for his hand and pulled it down.
The face hidden behind his trembling fingers…
Silent tears clung around his eyes in small drops, and I instinctively held my breath.
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, unsure of what to say first.
“Take your hand off.”
“If you planned to die that helplessly, you shouldn’t have asked me for help in the first place.”
He murmured darkly.
“What if… we just got out of here completely?”
“…What?”
“How…?”
“If we faked an accident and erased your identity, relocating you somewhere else wouldn’t be that hard—”
Cassiel cut himself off, as if finally realizing what he was saying.
Overwhelmed by his spiraling thoughts, he lost control of his own reasoning.
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