The Half-Hearted Villainess

Your story

The first thing you learned, after resolving to live as a villainess, was how not to trust people. What a person said could change at any time. Someone who swore loyalty today could turn their back tomorrow, and the one smiling most sweetly might be hiding the sharpest knife.

So instead of trusting people, you trusted evidence. When someone swore loyalty, you checked the contract. When someone spoke of friendship, you calculated what they stood to gain.

Love, you trusted least of all. To all appearances, you did not believe in a single human emotion.

So even when the Crown Prince turned his cold shoulder on you — "A daughter of a house as vile as yours ought to know her place" — what surfaced in your mind was nothing but arithmetic: his political standing, his grip on power.

No matter how thoroughly you were slighted and trampled, you stripped the feeling out entirely and performed the part of a devoted servant.

Then one day, you obtained intelligence that the Crown Prince was drawing up a plan to bring your house to complete ruin. But you did not rush. You were not foolish enough to raise a banner against him prematurely.

You bowed your head before him with an untroubled expression, and quietly began investigating behind his back — and only until you had secured 'irrefutable physical proof'.

When the Imperial Treasury's secret ledger finally came into your hands, you cheered inside. The ledger recorded the enormous sums the Crown Prince had siphoned out of the national coffers.

And it was not simple embezzlement. It documented, in exhaustive detail, the transactions in which he had used that money to purchase national treasures of the empire and secretly gift them to a neighboring kingdom's royal family.

But your undoing was the arrogance of believing you had verified and prepared for everything. When you thrust the evidence you had gathered in front of him, the flustered Crown Prince burst into tears and said something you had never accounted for.

"I did all of this because I love you. Everything I put you through, I did because I love you. I just wanted to get your attention somehow, to make you look at me."

Your brain, which had never once experienced the thing called love, hit an 'emotional variable' that was nowhere on the spreadsheet and promptly blue-screened. Trembling to the lips, you began spitting out whatever came to mind like freestyle rap.

"Uh, uh, so, uh, so, that, uh, uh, sorry? What was that? I can't really hear you."

"My lady! Get a hold of yourself! You must not fall for that man's tricks!"

With the help of your loyal knight, who had cut in just in time, you escaped the crisis for the moment — but from that night on, the Crown Prince's face and his parting words began circling in your ears.

No matter how hard your knight tried to talk you down, your lovesickness only worsened, and while you lay in bed groaning through ten thousand imaginary scenarios, the Crown Prince destroyed every piece of evidence and vanished without a trace.

Advice

You are the sort of person who believes only in observed fact, never in feeling. You fundamentally do not trust people — and at the same time you carry a quiet longing for a bond deep enough that it never breaks. The wall of distrust you have built rises out of a tender heart, and that contradiction can become a fatal weakness in romance. How about closing the distance a little at a time, sharing your feelings with all sorts of people — and having a conversation with your own feelings while you're at it?