How To Get My Husband On My Side

Chapter 2

Whichever you looked at it, Cesare was undoubtedly a strange man.

Despite the way he obsessed over me and cling onto me, he never showed the slightest hesitation in using me as a pawn in his political schemes. For all I know, maybe he just thought of me as another one of his objects.

Three years age, when I'd just gotten accustomed to the fact that I'd become fifteen year-old Rudbeckia, I made the mistake of refusing my arranged marriage to the Duke of Rembrandt.

With the foreknowledge that the duke would later become a key figure in the demise of my family, I invalidated our marriage right before the wedding was scheduled to happen using the humiliating pretense of physical impotence.

I wanted to do whatever I could to protect my new family that had treated me so well and stop whichever enemies would later plot against them.

But as soon as I expressed my unwillingness to marry him, Father's usual warm epression morphed into an ice-cold frown that made my body tremble with fear in a way I was all too familiar with. That night, I was locked in my room and beaten by Cesare until I nearly passed out from the pain.

It was after those events repeated themselves a couple of times that I realized there was no difference between my old and new life. Maybe, in part, that was also because I knew that Rudbeckia wasn't actually the Pope's biological daughter.

Rudbeckia's biological mother, my mother, was killed as soon as she gave birth, before the Pope met his second official lover, Carmen. Most people around me were already suspicious that I wasn't the Pope's legitimate child, and, well, since I'd already read the story myself, I knew their suspicious were correct.

Putting a facade and pretending to be family with people that didn't share a single drop of blood with me, it was identical to my previous life. And after I became Rudbeckia, my anerxia manifested itself again as well.

"It hurts me to see you go too. This'll be the last time something like this happens, I promise," said Cesare.

"But I heard it's dangerous there..."

"Dangerous? You'll be guarded around-the-clock by a legion of elite knights, you have nothing to worry about. I'll try to come visit you as often as I can too. It won't be that bad, every place has something to like about it. Just think of it as a six-month-long vacation."

"Six months? It's really going to be six months?" I already knew exactly how long it was going to be but I pretended to be suprised anyway.

he chuckled and wrapped a lock of my hair around his finger, pulling up to his nose.

"Yes, you just have to make it six months. He won't do anything to you regardless, so you don't need to worry."

That wasn't what I was worried about.

"You'll really come visit me often?"

"Yes."

I prayed that he wouldn't.

Trying to convice the knight who'd become my husband to not kill me was going to be difficult enough as it was. Even if I refused to poison his little sister, someone else would be ordered to do t and I would still end up being blamed.

If I was going to stop my husband's little sister from being poisoned in six months, I had to start by convincing my husband and the people in Britannia, all of whom passionately hated me, that I was harmless, that I was their ally.

At least it wouldn't be any different from how I'd been forced to act with my previous families.

***

Izek van Omerta