Chapter 1 – Prologue

Once again, Amber waited inside the bridal room to spend her first night with her husband after his miraculous survival.
She took a warm, perfumed bath prepared by the servants and sat on the dress with only a thin nightdress on.

She was still scared of becoming intimate with a man she did not know.
No matter how much she tried to be determined, her shoulders shivered wildly in fear.

Amber drank several glasses of wine and stayed up all night long.
However, her husband never arrived.

“The duke’s wife was deserted on her first night with her husband.” Right away, that terrible rumor circulated on the castle grounds.
However, her husband never explained himself.
He didn’t even come back afterward to spend a belated first night with her.

The first time that Amber spent her first night with him was 4 years after that day—after it was realized that she had spent over six years in the East, and her marriage could no longer be annulled.

It was nothing but pain for her.
Amber couldn’t understand why this painful and meaningless act was always portrayed to be romantic and wonderful in numerous stories.

“Looks like you can’t go back anymore with this,” her husband said to her when the morning came. 

He left right after, and Amber felt as if she was doused in ice-cold water, absolutely wretched.
But, since she had slept with him, she thought that he might be more friendly to her.
She believed that she would no longer spend her nights alone in her room, shivering in the cold.

However, her husband still didn’t look for Amber unless he was required to.
When the time he needed to spend together with Amber approached, he would always show an obvious expression of disgust about it.

Amber slowly started to feel afraid of being around her husband.
The two times they slept together every month as formality were still just as painful as ever for her.

When she was twenty-eight, she learned she was pregnant.

The women of the Eastern lands usually gave birth in the latter half of their teens and early 20s.
Amber knew that many people around her gossiped about the fact that she hadn’t gotten pregnant for so lon