“I cannot take this.”
When I opened my eyes, I was in my own bedroom in the annex. The sun was sitting full and high in the sky.
I had passed out in Kael’s bed again.
“This man is genuinely trying to kill me!”
Perhaps that was, in fact, his plan. His actual intention was to end me through sheer attrition.
If I actually went ahead and married him, I might not survive to see old age.
And on top of everything else — as if to rub salt in the wound — he had personally delivered the contract to the annex.
‘I expect I’ll be occupied with business this weekend.’
‘You are free to go out as you please. Feel free to visit your family home.’
I stared at the absurd contract resting so neatly on the tea table, and ground my teeth.
The smugly worded note Kael had left beside it grated on me just as much.
‘Look at him, acting as though he’s doing me an enormous favor.’
After making me lose consciousness repeatedly last night and leaving me like this — of course today would go however I pleased. There was nothing left for him to take.
“I’m not letting this go.”
“Then what will you do about it?”
“…Well.”
That was the question, wasn’t it. I could hardly march up to him and challenge him to a duel.
Kael’s body was something of a natural monument. Dense, impenetrable, unyielding in every particular.
There had been a brief, fleeting moment when I had contemplated building up my own physical strength to resist him.
But I had quickly concluded that this plan would collapse before it began.
‘More likely I’d be flattened by the boulder before I ever got close enough to strike it.’
“Still, it’s remarkable, isn’t it. Rendering you unconscious every single time.”
“…Remarkable is one word for it.”
“How is it for you, though? Is it unpleasant?”
“It isn’t unpleasant.”
“What then? Is it… nothing at all?”
“…It’s… very good, actually.”
There was no use denying it.
Like floating somewhere high above the ground. Like a pleasant current sweeping from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet —
It had occurred to me more than once: he must have some innate, extraordinary gift for this.
Kael was my only experience, so to speak — but that much I could say with conviction.
Which was why the sessions did not end in an hour of suffering before unconsciousness. It was more that somewhere in the middle of that floating, luminous sensation, awareness simply… slipped away.
“That’s a relief, at least.”
“What is?”
“The sleeping together. Most women endure it out of obligation, from what I understand. It’s genuinely difficult to feel anything, and men who are actually good at it are rare.”
“…Is that so?”
“Yes. And women in titled households have the additional obligation of producing an heir, on top of everything else. In a way, it’s rather terrible. Especially in a loveless marriage — it must feel like something is being ground out of you, a little at a time.”
“…When you put it that way, it really does sound terrible.”
“Doesn’t it. Which is why I’m perfectly content to live this way — earning my own keep, answering to no one. The life of a noble wife seems extraordinarily difficult. Comfortable, certainly, in financial terms. But difficult.”
“You know a great deal about all of this, Emily.”
“Well, one doesn’t become a lady’s maid by accident. You see every shape the human experience can take.”
In my previous life, I had been alone — never dated, never been in a relationship. Every day had been work and study, one part-time job after another, nothing more.
After being reborn into this novel, the conditions had been much the same. Warm and well-fed, at least — but just as solitary. I’d had a fiancé assigned to me early, and my parents were conservative enough that the very concept of romance had remained out of reach.
“And yet I feel like I’ve completely lost my footing in the span of a single month.”
“Lost your footing?”
Emily looked at me with wide eyes.
“Yes. I feel like I’ve become rather debauched without quite meaning to.”
I had spent more than a few nights with him, and we weren’t even married yet.
I wasn’t a devotee of pre-marital abstinence — but it was something else. The feeling of having grown up enormously, and very quickly.
‘Pleasure is pleasure, but I can’t afford to let my guard down.’
The original novel had been rated for adults. Kael had a certain taste for dominance in that arena. He had apparently enjoyed some fairly unconventional things.
He was hiding it from me now, presumably because we weren’t yet married — but I had read every detail of his behavior in bed through the pages of the book.
‘Which is precisely why I was so startled when he slapped me earlier.’
Not that it had hurt, exactly. And it had only been that once. But still — if he started expanding his repertoire—
“This is no time to be sitting here. Emily, let’s go out!”
“Where to?”
“I’ve been given permission to go out! We need to make for home right now, before he changes his mind and says something completely different!”
* * *
Kael had been living these days on the small pleasure of teasing Ivelina.
One well-placed remark was all it took — and she would produce the most extraordinary array of expressions, flapping and quivering and bristling with suspicion, all at once.
‘”W-we were in the middle of a conversation! Why did you kiss me?!”‘
‘”That is completely unreasonable! I might actually faint!”‘
‘”Don’t — don’t slap me there! You deviant!”‘
She was like a mild-tempered dog with a bad attitude. Cowering with fright one moment, then stumbling over her words as she charged at him the next — the sight of it was endlessly entertaining.
There was something genuinely interesting about watching her.
To be truthful, Kael had never felt the slightest interest in any woman before. The smell of powder and perfume alone had been enough to make his stomach turn. He had concluded, long ago, that he would sooner die alone than take a wife and tolerate all that proximity.
But Ivelina smelled of strawberries.
And it wasn’t only the smell. The warm, yielding softness of her set something in motion in him that he found quite difficult to ignore.
He could not, as a rule, fall into deep sleep. But with Ivelina, it was different. When she was there beside him, he could sleep deeply. Which was why, on that first night she had spent under his roof, he had — unfortunately — let her slip away.
‘Knock, knock.’
A crisp knock pulled Kael out of his thoughts.
“Your Grace. I’ve been informed that Lady Ivelina has gone out. She says she’s heading to the Florence estate.”
“I see.”
Two days, or at minimum one full day, then, without a sight of her.
She had bolted out the door like a racehorse the moment he gave her a breath of fresh air.
‘Hm.’ An odd feeling settled in him.
“Also — this arrived for Your Grace. A report from the escort knight assigned to the lady.”
Kael accepted the folder and read through it.
It was a report compiled by the secret escort knight he had assigned to follow Ivelina — a detailed account of her every movement.
He had assigned the knight for reasons of safety. Naturally, receiving a full accounting of her whereabouts was also a matter of safety.
The duke’s fiancée could expect a great deal of attention from a great many quarters. That kind of exposure came with its own dangers.
Kael was reading through the report at a measured pace when Hugo, unable to contain himself, broke in.
“Your Grace, if I might ask — how far have you read?”
“The dessert café. Macaron purchase.”
At the blunt reply, Hugo’s lips moved restlessly. Unable to hold back any longer, he lobbed the opening.
“The thing is, Your Grace — the future mistress made a donation. A rather… substantial one.”
“A donation?”
Hugo had begun referring to Ivelina as the future mistress without thinking. In truth, he wasn’t the only one — Madam Mary and most of the other household staff had fallen into the same habit long since.
Everyone in the house had quietly begun to hope that Ivelina would become its mistress in truth.
“Yes. Here, please take a look. A letter of thanks arrived from the almshouse. A record of the donation was enclosed as well.”
Kael took the brown envelope from Hugo and asked:
“She went to an almshouse? Ivelina?”
“Yes, it’s in the back pages of the report.”
Kael raised an eyebrow.
From the report, Ivelina had made straight for the square shortly after the jeweler’s visit. She had gone to an almshouse — was that really the grand excursion she’d been racing toward?
He opened the brown envelope and drew out its contents. A letter of gratitude addressed to the House of Hardeion, expressing thanks for the duke’s patronage, along with a donation record specifying the amount. The sum matched the entire amount of the personal allowance that had been given to her in cheque form.
“…What.”
“The future mistress was out and about all day yesterday, as you know. I was curious about the trip to the dessert café — wondering why she’d gone on to the almshouse from there.”
“And?”
“As it turned out, the reason she went to the café in the first place was to buy treats to give to the children there.”
“……”
“And once she arrived, she donated all the cheques she had on her as well.”
Hugo, thoroughly energized by this point, poured out his feelings in an uninterrupted stream.
“I mean — is she not an angel sent down from the heavens? On the very day she receives her personal allowance, she goes straight to an almshouse and donates every coin. And she didn’t keep a single thing for herself, Your Grace. She and Emily spent the entire day eating three chicken skewers between them, apparently.”
‘Truly remarkable.’
Hugo’s exclamations came one after another without pause.
“And donating under Your Grace’s name, on top of everything — if that isn’t the work of a perfect angel, I don’t know what is. I don’t think I need to go to the temple for prayers for quite some time. With the future mistress in the estate, what would be the point?”
* * *
