Chapter 69

Thus, Yelena decided to emphasize her sincerity by ‘going out to buy the thing herself’ and selecting it with her own hands.

Usually, when an aristocrat wanted to buy something, they would call merchants to their mansion. As long as she was sincere, then it was sincere.

“Let’s go over there,” Yelena instructed the horseman after attentively looking out of the carriage window into the street.

The carriage entered the alley where the jewelry store was situated.

‘It’s a shame that I’m picking a common item in the end…’

The gift that she settled with. When Yelena left the Duke’s castle, her distress was quite deep, but she eventually reached an acceptable conclusion: cuff links, a men’s accessory worn on the sleeve of a shirt.

At first, she thought about giving something related to swords instead of accessories.

After all, her husband was a swordsman.

But she quickly gave up.

‘I have no experience buying such a thing.’

Now, to be clear, all the men around Yelena were surprisingly unrelated to the sword.

Count Sorte was a typical scholar, and her older brother Edward, who inherited her father’s blood, was even more ill-suited to the sword than his father.

Besides those two, Yelena had a childhood friend, but in reality, that friend was even worse with a sword.

Since birth, his body was weak, let alone in good shape, so he never really had a chance to play outside properly.

As a child, Yelena often had a particular thought whenever she spent time with her childhood friend.

She wondered when he would vomit out blood and how she should deal with it.

But fortunately, the childhood friend left the capital before vomiting blood.

He left a message that he would return as a different person, but she hadn’t heard from him since.

‘Come to think of it, I don’t know what you’re doing… You’re not going to show up weaker, are you?’

Yelena imagined a reunion with a childhood friend who had turned into a corpse.

That wouldn’t be good.

“Oh, stop the carriage here and wait for me.”

While she was thinking about her thought process behind choosing a typical accessory as a gift for her husband, she arrived in front of the jewelry store that she wanted.

Yelena stood up and got off the carriage with her maid.

It was then.

“It’s a thief!”

“Catch the pickpocketer!”

‘Pickpocketer?’

Yelena unconsciously looked in the direction of the disturbance.

The man being pursued was running in her direction.

The man found Yelena and began to get closer and closer as if he was targeting her.

“Huh?” The maid voiced her bewilderment.

Yelena was equally perplexed by the sudden situation.

“Madam, it’s dangerous…!”

At the same moment when the maid tried to protect Yelena, she heard a “bang!” in front of her.

With a brief scream, the pickpocketer’s body soon collapsed.

A fair distance away, a certain knight was breathing heavily.

“Haah, haah. Damn it. If only I hadn’t hurt my foot, I wouldn’t have needed to run with a stone…”

“…Thomas?”

Yelena muttered absurdly.

She had only seen his face once, but it was a face that she would never forget.

At the same time, the opposite party also noticed Yelena. Thomas’s expression darkened.

“….Madam?”

* * *

Thomas said he was on leave today. He came out to the shopping district to buy some things he needed, stumbled across the pickpocketer by accident, and caught him.

Yelena stared at him with her arms folded.

Yelena couldn’t believe that it wasn’t the first time that Thomas had caught a pickpocketer as he did now.

The pickpocketer who fainted after being hit by a stone at the back of his head was handed over to a constable, and she heard the constable say, “Sir Thomas, again! Thank you every time.”

Even Thomas showed signs of it being insignificant as he handed over the pickpocketer.

It was like he had done what he was supposed to do.

“He’s a pretty earnest knight…”

Yelena recalled what her husband had said.

Perhaps, he didn’t mean to go to the training grounds every day and only roll around on the ground but instead be able to catch criminals.

Yelena, who was glancing at Thomas with a complicated mind, opened her mouth.

“How’s your foot?”

“Huh? Ah, yeah. It’s all right.”

Thomas stealthily hid the foot that Yelena had previously stepped on.

Yelena smiled slightly. It seemed like he was wary of the shoes that she was currently wearing.

“Thank you for today.”

“No, it was nothing.”

“However, I won’t apologize for what happened last time. Back then, you were certainly at fault.”