I opened my eyes to find the world sunk in absolute darkness.
I blinked slowly, several times, until my vision gradually adjusted.
No wonder I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My husband had fallen asleep with his arms wrapped tightly around me from behind.
Still too early to let my guard down.
I held my body rigid and strained every nerve.
Was he asleep? Or was he lying awake behind me, watching?
“…”
‘Regular breathing. Thank goodness. He must be deep asleep.’
I exhaled a silent breath of relief inside my chest.
And then—
‘…Wait.’
The realization hit me.
My husband was still inside me.
‘He’s absolutely out of his mind!’
If I moved, he would wake. But I couldn’t very well go on sleeping like this. It was simply too—’indecent’.
‘What do I do?’
I turned my eyes frantically, swallowed, and began to move—as slowly, as carefully as humanly possible—and gently extracted myself.
‘Slip.’
Oh.
I was free.
* * *
Past midnight. Just past one in the morning.
I was rummaging through the luggage like a thief in the night.
“Where are my undergarments?”
Every pair I’d brought had been destroyed by my husband, so worn through they couldn’t even be washed and reused. I needed new ones.
‘Emily said she’d packed them, I’m sure of it…’
Three full days had passed without a single moment to sort the bags. I would wake to find myself in the bathtub, lose consciousness again, come to in the bed. Then black out, wake up, and find my husband feeding me breakfast.
“Honestly. Is this even a holiday? Ugh. I keep getting fooled. There’s no one to blame but myself.”
Come to think of it, all those staff members leaving for holiday at exactly the same time had been suspicious from the start. Every last one of them fleeing the villa as though running from something.
‘Kael made them do it. He must have arranged for the entire place to be emptied out—not a single person left behind.’
I clicked my tongue at myself for being so thoroughly and repeatedly taken in, and began opening the luggage bags one by one.
“Oh—could this be it?”
I opened a large brown travel bag and came face to face with a red box.
“…”
‘Surely not. It can’t be.’
With trembling hands, I shoved my way through the contents. Nothing but red boxes, dozens of them, all the way down.
‘Emily…!’
She must have put them in the wrong bag by mistake.
I rubbed my face with both hands and sighed. Then I glanced down at the bare skin showing through the gap in my robe.
“I can’t just go around without anything on…”
He already undressed me when I ‘was’ dressed.
If I wasn’t even wearing underwear to start with—
The thought alone sent a chill crawling across my skin. Genuinely, truly, I might not see the outside of this room for an entire month.
‘There might be a normal pair in another bag.’ I tore open every single bag in the room.
There was not one single undamaged pair of undergarments to be found.
“‘Haaa’… What am I going to do.”
I sank down where I stood with a long, deflated exhale.
Without underwear I had a problem. But if I wore any of those—those ‘things’—I might be trapped here for several months.
To begin with: there was no one on this island who would take my side.
Second: there was no means of communication with the ducal household.
‘Janes is loyal to Kael anyway…’
Hugo had said so himself—Janes would be with me the whole time.
“W—wait!”
That meant Janes had been ‘listening’ to all those sounds—
‘There’s a limit to everything. We were at it all day, every day. Surely Janes could not have failed to notice…’
Mortification crashed over me in a wave and I squeezed my eyes shut.
I decided the only practical option was to borrow some of my husband’s undergarments.
He never wore the same pair twice, so he must have brought plenty—
‘Oh—perfect!’
My husband’s supply was indeed generous.
I stared down at a fresh pair from his stock and arrived at a decision.
“I—I at least need to be wearing something… I’ll just borrow a few.”
I had reached a satisfying justification, and I put them on.
“And these things must absolutely never come within Kael’s line of sight.”
I crouched down and began gathering up the boxes Emily had accidentally packed.
‘I’ll lock them up so tightly not even a corner shows. He must never, ever—’
“Ivelina.”
‘EEP!’
A low, unhurried voice came from directly behind me.
I startled so violently I nearly knocked everything over, then turned with shaking hands to find my husband leaning against the doorframe, draped loosely in a night robe, watching me.
“What are you doing? You should be asleep.”
“I—I just woke up for a bit…”
He crossed the room at an unhurried pace—not slow, not fast—and crouched down to meet my eyes level. He tucked my disheveled hair behind my ear and asked gently:
“Were you sorting through the luggage? By yourself?”
“Y—yes! I was looking for my undergarments—Emily must have left them out.”
“Why would you need undergarments?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m going to take them off anyway. Don’t bother.”
‘How utterly, characteristically sinister.’ He said it so pleasantly—and yet a full-body chill ran down my spine.
“W—well, I’ll keep that in mind. But could I borrow a few pairs of yours? Just to have something when we eat or go for a walk…”
“Mine?”
“When we’re having meals, or out walking, I can hardly go without—”
“Hmm.”
His reaction was not reassuring. He tilted his head slightly and stared into the middle distance—and the expression on his face suggested he was already imagining scenarios involving mealtimes and walks that I preferred not to contemplate.
“C—come on, let’s get back to bed! You haven’t slept nearly enough.”
I got to my feet and took his hand, pulling him along. He came without resistance.
Back in the bedroom, I threw the covers wide open and settled in. I patted the space beside me, encouraging him to lie down.
“Sleeping like a normal person for once. C—could we actually just ‘sleep’ tonight? I’m genuinely exhausted.”
Kael gathered me into his arms and pressed his lips firmly to my forehead.
“Of course. Sleep well.”
I nodded and buried my face in his chest. The moment I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of him—my favorite smell in the world—a pleasant, drowsy warmth spread through me.
‘Pat. Pat.’
His hand moved in slow, steady circles against my back. My consciousness began to soften at the edges.
* * *
Five hours later.
I woke before dawn, slipped out of bed without disturbing my husband, and escaped to the kitchen.
“Janes!”
“Oh—my lady!”
I seized Janes’s hands the moment I found him and swung them enthusiastically. As a shadow operative, he was a constant presence at my side without ever quite being ‘seen’—so moments of actual face-to-face contact were genuinely rare.
“My goodness, my lady. You’ve lost even more weight. You’ll disappear at this rate—if our dear, small, precious duchess simply ‘vanished’—”
“J—Janes! Have you eaten?”
I was not good with compliments. Janes’s talent for effusive flattery was considerable, so I redirected hastily.
“Ah, food? I was actually in the middle of preparing it. Today I was planning freshly caught grilled fish and a black tiger shrimp aglio e olio—!”
Janes suddenly seized a knife like a thirty-year veteran craftsman and ran a thumb along the blade.
“You’ll cut yourself! Actually, Janes—I’d like to cook today.”
“P—pardon? You, my lady? Yourself?”
“Yes! I’ll handle the cooking today, so why don’t you take the day off.”
“I could never. As a trained shadow operative, I would sooner give my life than leave His Grace and your—”
“T—that’s an order.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“An order from the Duchess of Hardeion!”
It seemed like this was the only thing that might actually work. It was the first order I had ever given in my life.
“I—if you insist! Well then. I have no choice but to comply. But why the insistence on cooking yourself, may I ask?”
“I want to cook for my husband myself today. You’ve been doing all the work alone for three days—one day off is the very least I can do.”
“Doing it yourself… you, cooking…”
“Yes, me! Don’t worry about Kael. I’ll handle it. Is that all right?”
I looked at Janes with my most pitiful, pleading expression.
“‘Ahh’! There it is again—temporary blindness! Please don’t look at me like that, my lady. I genuinely experienced momentary vision loss on the day of your wedding. Your beauty is truly—”
“So—you’ll do what I’m asking?”
“…I cannot defy the order of one so small, so dear, so lovely, so radiant. But are you quite sure you’ll be all right? If you were to hurt yourself, my head would be—”
“Yes, completely! I’ll set aside a portion for you too, so come back and eat. I’m a good cook, I promise!”
I had a long history of feeding myself as an orphan, which had made me a reasonably competent cook.
“Our lady making food herself… that is something I’d actually like to taste.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. Understood. I’ll follow your orders and—ahem—’leave’, that is to say, rest, for the day.”
Janes showed me where the ingredients were kept and walked me through the equipment. Then he held out a fresh apron.
“Please do not hurt yourself, my lady. If you do, the master will have my head.”
He looked very much like a man setting a seven-year-old loose near a body of water. I simply smiled at him brightly.
“I mean it. I am absolutely serious.”
“I know. Go rest, Janes. Leave this to me!”
Janes vanished like the wind, true to his calling.
I tied on the apron and hummed to myself.
‘This is what I’ve always wanted.’
To cook something myself and share it with the person I love—a simple, long-held dream. I had spent so many years eating alone that the idea of sitting across from someone I loved, a meal I’d made myself between us, talking quietly—it had stayed with me as the most ordinary kind of wish.
‘Chop chop chop chop.’
I cleaned the vegetables and cut them into thin, careful strips. I was absorbed in it, and happy.
“There you are.”
Without any sound at all, my husband appeared behind me and drew me into his arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Cooking! And this was very, very hard to arrange—Janes was absolutely against it until I begged him endlessly—so you are not allowed to say a single critical word to him about it. This is my ‘dream’, do you understand?”
“Far be it from me to stand in your way, my love.”
‘Quiet laughter.’ He pressed his nose into the curve of my neck and laughed there, warm and low. ‘This’ was the scene I had always imagined—this exact warmth, a kitchen full of love.
I basked in it, chattering happily.
“I’m a better cook than you’d expect. I’m going to make something delicious and feed it to you myself.”
“By the way. Ivelina.”
And then his hands began to move—creeping upward and pushing through the gap in my apron.
“Hey—’hey’! Oh, not again, truly—”
He cupped my chest through the apron and began to knead it slowly, rolling a fingertip over the crest as he whispered against my ear.
“I’d like to eat something else first.”
“That doesn’t even make sense! Wait—stop—you’re undressing me again—’mm!'”
He pressed a firm hand between my shoulder blades. I found myself bent forward before I’d quite registered what was happening.
“‘Hh’—wait—! I was ‘cooking’! I was in the middle of—’mm—'”
* * *
