That overwhelming, cutting voice — the voice that crushed and subdued — was entirely at odds with Axel’s face, which had twisted into the expression of someone who had been wounded.
His eyes, carrying something that was almost desperation, found hers in the empty air between them. Something in his chest ached sharply — and alongside it, something very close to fury rose.
He looked at Judith, who could do nothing but move her lips over and over without finding words.
“No — it’s not like that… Your Highness, it isn’t—”
Nothing but a repeated denial. At the sight of it, something called exhaustion bloomed in Axel’s gaze.
All the strength had gone out of him.
Just the truth. That was all he had needed.
Axel dragged his hand roughly across his face. Fragments of the time he had spent with Judith rose in him unbidden.
It had all been utterly absurd. But he hadn’t been unhappy.
Perhaps that was why. The betrayal, the hurt — neither of them would stop growing.
Calm down.
He pressed his palm against his eyes, hard. His chest expanded and contracted as he tried to rein in the emotions that careened between extremes.
“…I suppose I only have myself to blame. Knowing she could never truly care for me — knowing that — and still choosing to believe it. The contract should never have been accepted. I should have kept my distance from the start.”
If I had, I wouldn’t be feeling any of this.
Axel looked at Judith with eyes that had lost their light, and spoke.
“It’s over now. Everything. Lady Melberine — I sincerely hope we never have need to meet again.”
With those cold and final words, Axel turned his back on Judith entirely. The distance between them grew wider, further apart with every step — as though this was how it had always been meant to be. The natural state of things between them.
Yes. It was an impossible arrangement from the start. Ending it like this was right.
The jaw he was clenching trembled. He had wanted to look back — he knew this was the end — but he held himself from it.
Because if he looked back even once, he knew he would give her another chance without meaning to.
And so he walked forward. With every step he took, he hoped the memories of Judith would fall away behind him.
An unsteady voice settled against his ear. At the sound of it, Axel’s fists clenched tight.
Don’t look back.
If I look back, I’ll be foolish. I’ll be weak. Don’t look.
He kept his composure with everything he had — but then the sound that followed reached him, and without thinking, he turned around fast.
Crash.
Axel’s face crumpled.
That woman — Lady Melberine — had been running and had tripped, and was now rolling across the ground.
She should have protected herself. Instead, both her arms were scraped and bleeding — and she was clutching that ridiculous bag against her chest as though it were her most treasured possession.
“Oh! The — the vision orb—!”
She didn’t spare a glance at the blood rising in blossoms over her arms. She was already prying the bag open with urgent hands, rummaging inside — and then, upon confirming that whatever was in there had survived intact, she actually gave a faint, relieved smile.
At the sight of it, the anger Axel had been carefully burying stirred back to the surface.
Was the contents of the bag truly worth more to her than her own body? What did those photographs of him amount to, that she would do this?
She was a foolish, reckless woman.
Axel pressed his fists together and spoke, swallowing the fury down.
Judith came toward him as though she felt no pain at all.
When the bag shifted and scraped her injured arm, Judith’s face tightened slightly — but she seemed to regard that as secondary. Without looking at her wound, she kept searching through the bag, reaching for something.
Her arms and hands were trembling, and she kept missing her grip, but at last she managed to pull out the vision orb. The palm she held it out in was already smeared with blood, and the photo cards that had come loose inside the bag lay scattered across it alongside the orb.
At the sight of her, Axel felt his anger build — but.
Right now…
He looked at the bloodstains on and around the bag. At the arm, which looked even worse up close. At the vision orb held out to him on a blood-marked palm.
He could not make sense of it.
This.
What on earth does this amount to, that she would—
Judith, oblivious to what was happening inside him, tapped the orb lightly.
“Oh, just a moment. If I do this—”
The orb began to glow — and in the same instant, Axel struck Judith’s hand away with sharp, hard force.
The vision orb and all the photo cards flew from her grip and scattered across the ground. The vision orb landed with a sound almost too cheerful for the moment, and split.
“Ah—!”
And it wasn’t over. As Judith reached for it, the orb rolled down the slope — and fell into the pond with a soft, clear sound, and was gone.
Judith’s eyes moved desperately between Axel and the pond. Then, as though she had resolved something, she set her jaw and turned toward the water.
But she couldn’t move. Her wrist had been caught.
When she turned, Axel was there — expression twisted, teeth clenched — watching her with eyes that could cut.
His mind felt like something had been raked through it roughly, back and forth. With nerves scraped raw, he spoke to Judith in a rough, harsh voice.
“Or if not that — go back to being the insufferable, untouchable girl you were before. Stop making things worse with this kind of act.”
At those words, Judith fought harder — more desperately than before — twisting the wrist he held in every direction, as though nothing would make her stop.
Axel was revolted by it.
He looked down at Judith as though looking at something monstrous.
He released her wrist with force. The moment he did, she ran for the pond — and Axel bit down on his lip, watching her go, and said something quietly.
He turned away, cold and composed, and began to walk. Behind him — the sound of water being disturbed. The sound of something being pulled from it.
He kept walking. This was no longer his concern. She was no longer within the boundary of what was his to think about.
“No longer my concern…”
Axel looked down at his black leather gloves and murmured it. On the surface of the leather, a dark red mark had transferred from Judith’s wrist.
Something lurched in him, and he crushed his fists tighter. He didn’t know why, but the area around his heart had begun to ache — the way a wound does, raw and stinging.
He was as much a wreck as she was.
After that, Axel’s days grew bleaker with every one that passed.
He threw himself into work as though he had decided to leave himself no room for anything else.
But the hollow, unfocused gaze that sometimes came over him — as though he were drifting somewhere far away — and the atmosphere that surrounded him, like a man walking across cracked ice, made it immediately apparent to those around him that he was not himself.
He might have looked composed on the surface. But he alone seemed not to realize that inside, he was anything but.
Today, as every day, an image surfaced unbidden in his mind, and Axel scowled at it, crumpling the document in his hand.
Damn it. Why again—
Why did Judith keep appearing to him?
The harder he tried not to think of her, the more her image seemed to laugh at his efforts and settle even more firmly in his mind. Her clear, easy laugh. The corners of her eyes curving warmly toward him. The soft whisper of her voice telling him she cared for him, cheeks flushed pink.
All of it felt as vivid and immediate as something that had happened moments ago.
Axel’s gaze drifted to the office door.
He knew it was impossible. And yet he kept half-expecting that if he waited just a little longer, the door would open and Judith would walk in, as though nothing had happened.
What am I thinking.
He caught the thought, unformed and involuntary, and his expression darkened into something ugly. He closed his fist.
Axel looked at himself — at this — and arrived at only one conclusion.
He was, without question, losing his mind.
