The Yandere Villainess’s Past Life Was That of a Lonely Woman. After Reflecting and Stopping Her Stalking of Her Fiancé, He Somehow Started Approaching Her Instead. - Chapter 14

After clearing away the stench and the ghastly collection, I was finally able to calm down.

I sat before the vanity and pinned back my bangs with a hair ornament I had found while tidying the room. It was decorated with several small, pretty flowers. The bl00d-red color made it unmistakably Lycoris’s. Or perhaps it represented Lucius’s attribute of fire.

When I escaped from the school building, I had held my bangs down with both hands, and the servants had helped me when getting on and off the carriage. From the entrance of the estate to my room, I managed by relying on instinct.

Once inside, my first priority had been dealing with the smell, brushing my hair out of my face as I worked. Crawling on the floor to drag out the album hidden under the bed must have looked terrifying to anyone who happened to see me.

But now, with my eyes properly visible, I looked like a living person. And a very beautiful one at that. My sharp features gave me more of a villainess look, which might make other students fear me in a different way. In short, it felt like I had shifted from a ghostly villainess to a classic villainess.

“Maybe I should start wearing this to school tomorrow.”

It might be a little flashy for a student, but the heroine went around proudly with even larger flowers in her hair. Even the girls who bullied me never teased her about her strange hair color or oversized accessories. So it should be fine.

What worried me more than breaking school rules was my strange fiancé.

I studied my reflection closely. Sharp, almond-shaped eyes and thin lips. I had not noticed before, but there was a small beauty mark under my left eye.

“I… am beautiful, aren’t I? Probably, fairly, quite a lot.”

My lips curled into a smile. Whether I was happy or not, of course I was happy. I am a woman, after all. And now I held the position of an earl’s daughter, able to proudly wear elegant dresses. It was hard not to get carried away.

I wanted to cut off the bothersome bangs and the overly long hair at the back, and start school life over as a strikingly beautiful young lady. But changing too suddenly might stir up trouble. That worry had been growing inside me, and it was strongly influenced by Lucius’s sudden change in behavior.

When I met him earlier, I had removed my headband in order to intervene in the conflict between the heroine and another girl. My appearance had still been that of the ghostly villainess, and my obstructed vision had led me to bump into him. I remembered Lucius looking surprised.

The real shift happened when I called him “Lucius-kun.” My tone at that moment had not been Lycoris’s. That was probably why he decided I was different from the Lycoris he had known until then.

He even said my eyes looked different, and with great emotion declared that I had returned to the girl I used to be.

In a sense, I had returned to my old self. But it was not to the “flower-like” Lycoris he spoke of. Lucius was mistaken.

If I tried to break off the engagement now, I doubted it would go smoothly. Remembering how he kissed me without my consent, I thought he might start stalking me this time.

If the heroine, with her wealthy merchant father, got involved as well, things would become even more complicated.

The best solution would be to make Lucius believe Lycoris’s change had only been his imagination, and disappoint him.

At least until that problem was resolved, I decided to keep my appearance changes modest, pinning back only one side of my bangs.

And then there was the matter of my dark magic no longer working. My eyes drifted toward the magical tools displayed on the shelf.