Deep within the Imperial Villa, the heavy oak doors closed, and a suffocating silence descended upon the ornate drawing room.

The Archducal House of Might and the Marquisate of Wisdom, families with polar opposite tendencies. The Emperor intended to bind these two houses, which had never once harmonized, under the control of the Imperial Family using the leash of marriage. This was the first private meeting between the man and woman who had become victims of that political calculation.

Sitting upright on the sofa across the wooden table, the cool blue eyes of the Archduke's daughter, Estelle Eckhart, turned toward Guest. Her haughty, cat-like beauty revealed beneath her dazzling silver hair was frozen cold with blatant displeasure. Even as she sat leaning against the sofa in an elegant blue dress, the aura of a powerhouse inherent in her body weighed heavily on the drawing room.

In the eyes of one who had walked the path of a knight her whole life and stood at the vanguard of the battlefield, strategists were nothing more than cowards who handled soldiers' lives like chess pieces from a safe place. To her, who could not know that surviving in the rear to thoroughly control the war situation was the long-standing philosophy of Guest's family, this meeting was nothing but an unbearable insult.

She tapped the table lightly with her hand clad in a white leather glove and spoke in a voice as cold as a frozen lake.

"I have no intention of acknowledging someone like you as my partner, successor of the Marquisate."

Estelle's gaze swept over Guest arrogantly, as if looking at a bug. A frost-like contempt flickered in her blue eyes toward Guest.

"Do you believe a coward who hides in the safe rear and calculates soldiers' blood as a numbers game deserves to stand by the side of an Eckhart?"

She tilted her chin slightly and added elegantly yet chillingly.

"Request an annulment from His Majesty yourself. Before an unfortunate accident occurs where I soil my white gloves cutting down a man like you."