TOOAFP Chapter 47: The Curse’s Backlash (3)

How much time had passed, he couldn’t say.

Leon noticed that Kasha’s breath had grown ragged, and with some reluctance, he pulled away from her.

He caught her as she sagged against him, her body going limp, and steadied her back with his arm. Exhausted, she let herself be held there quietly, her gaze drifting down to the floor.

The faint glistening at the corners of her eyes. Her lips, flushed and slightly swollen. The collar of her dress fallen into disarray, and beneath it, the fragile hollow of her collarbone deepening with every unsteady breath she drew.

Looking at her, Leon felt the blood surge through his veins all over again.

Alarmed by his own reaction, he helped her lean against the wall and then stepped back, putting a little distance between them. As though he were a man afraid of breaking something delicate and precious.

Fortunately, Kasha didn’t seem to notice. She rested against the wall and spent a long moment simply breathing, steadying herself. Leon watched her, his gaze distant — and then, all at once, he realized that something had changed. Profoundly, irreversibly changed.

His mind was clear.

A perfect sense of liberation, one he hadn’t felt in nearly a year, was washing through him from head to toe.

It can’t be.

The dark, suffocating lust that had coiled inside him like something living — it was gone. And in the place where it had been, there remained only the aching warmth of the kiss he and Kasha had just shared.

The feeling of being truly free rose through him, slowly, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

Kasha must have noticed something strange in his expression. Still leaning against the wall, she tilted her head and looked up at him — that rabbit-like look that never failed to make Leon go still.

He held it in his gaze, that expression, and spoke as though he still couldn’t quite believe it.

“I think you actually did it.”

At those words, the corners of Kasha’s eyes lit up immediately.

“Really… ?”

“Yes. It seems so.”

As he spoke, Leon drew his sacred power into his hand. In an instant, a blindingly radiant golden sphere formed in his palm.

He brought it slowly to Kasha’s forehead.

When that pure, holy current of healing flowed into her body, she shivered.

The fatigue she’d been carrying — accumulated from nights without sleep, one after another — dissolved at once.

The breathlessness from the long kiss quietly settled into calm.

“Thank you.”

“No. Thank you.”

Leon seemed to grow even more moved when he confirmed that, after using his sacred power, he himself was perfectly fine.

“Truly. You… kept your promise.”

His voice was low and slightly thick. At those words, Kasha smiled before she even realized it.

“Yes. I kept it. I finally did.” A quiet breath. “The promise I made to you.”

There was something in her voice — a fullness, an overflow — that left Leon faintly puzzled.

Tears had gathered, just barely, at the edges of Kasha’s eyes.

I really kept it, Leon.

I’ll save you.

I mean it. I know the way. I can get you out — out of this curse.

The holy knight who had given up on living, fading away alone toward a quiet death. The man who had been destroyed by her ignorance and her mistakes. The fact that she had kept the promise she’d made to him — the him of the life before — filled her with a joy too large for words.

But she caught the puzzled look on his face and quickly gathered herself, asking in a calmer voice:

“Is your condition genuinely improved?”

“Yes. Without question.”

He answered and lifted his sacred power into his open palm. As if reflecting his mood, the light that bloomed there was brighter than usual — radiant, bleeding softly into the air around it.

Leon looked at her.

“Then the curse — has it been fully lifted from me?”

“For now, yes, I believe so. But because the magic stone was exposed to force in the moment I tried to redirect the curse, there’s a possibility of some lingering aftereffects.”

“Aftereffects?”

“Like what just happened — you may experience another episode. Once or twice, perhaps. Until you’re fully free of the stone’s influence.”

Leon nodded slowly.

“That much I can bear. If the curse is truly broken, something like that is nothing.”

He meant every word.

He was a man who had once steeled himself to spend his entire life caged in that cursed desire, slowly losing his mind — so what he was feeling right now was nothing short of a miracle.

Leon opened his sacred power fully for the first time in a long while and began checking the flow for any blockages. Kasha, keeping quiet so as not to disturb him, let her gaze wander around the room — and it stopped at a religious painting on the wall.

It depicted a saint walking a stone path arranged by the divine, feet bound in shoes woven from thorns, moving toward the suffering.

Beautiful, but with something desperate in it. Something about the atmosphere of the painting reminded her, strangely, of Leon.

“That is Saint Antevain.” Leon’s voice came from beside her; he had drawn close without her noticing. Kasha turned to look at him. “The saint my mother loved most.”

“Why… do you think she loved him?”

“I’m not certain. He was a saint of extraordinary sacred power who saved countless people. My mother wished to be like him — and in some ways, she lived that kind of life.”

It was the longest Leon had ever spoken of his mother.

“She sounds like… a remarkable person.”

“She was. At least, to the outside world.”

His reply was wry and a little self-deprecating, but beneath that, oddly plain. Perhaps because he had just cast off the shackles of a curse that had punished him like a sentence — he looked, more than he ever had, like a man who had been let out of prison. Unburdened. Free.

On impulse, Kasha voiced the question that had floated up in her mind.

“What kind of mother… was she to you?”

“I’m not sure. She wasn’t a woman who spent many moments living as a mother.”

Kasha tilted her head slightly, and Leon continued, his voice dropping low.

“I have no memory of being held by her. From early on I was raised by a wet nurse, and even seeing her face was rare. The closest thing we had to a real conversation was in the year or so before she died — and even then, it was mostly her grievances against my father, her resentments. Strange as it sounds, I think I was glad for even that, back then. Though even that gladness faded in the end.”

“…Was that when she fell ill? After giving birth to Eve?”

Leon’s platinum brows drew together slightly, as if he were reaching back through memory for a face that had grown dim.

“Yes. As you may have gathered earlier — my father took a mistress while my mother lay sick. An opera singer who had made quite a name for herself in the capital. My mother found it unbearable not only that she’d been betrayed, but that her rival was a woman like that. Her body was weakening, and her mind unraveled all the faster for it. In the months before she died, she cursed my father every single day with everything she had. A saintess, calling down curses on her husband.” A faint, bitter smile. “I imagine gossips would have loved that story, don’t you?”

Leon remembered his mother’s final days. A face worn to bone. Eyes that had already died. Her lovely silver hair gone coarse and white, and from her body — a body that had ceased to function — a smell of decay.

Leon. I don’t want to die. Pour more sacred power into me. Hurry, hurry.

The Saintess Larissa had clutched her son’s arm in a panic, begging him.

He had already been at her side for days, pouring his sacred power into her until he was utterly spent. The healer attending Larissa had cried out in alarm, moving to stop him.

You must not! At this rate, Your Grace will collapse too! I can supply the sacred power — please, my lord, you must rest—

Get away from me. Your pathetic sacred power can’t cure me.

Larissa, eyes rolling, snapped at the healer and grabbed Leon’s sleeve.

Leon, the sacred power you have — you inherited it from me, didn’t you? You’d only be giving it back. Isn’t that right? You wouldn’t begrudge your own mother that. Would you, my son?

Leon had to fight with everything in him not to turn his face away from the smell that came off her. The boy of seventeen — worked past any limit that could be called human — was already nothing but skin and bone.

The healer tried once more to intervene, but Larissa’s raging drove him from the room. The Grand Duke — the only person who might have stopped her — had long since stopped showing his face, too afraid of the curses she hurled at him.

And so there was only Leon. The only one left to keep watch at Larissa’s end. The only one who could receive what she unleashed.

Leon. I don’t want to die. I refuse to die like this. I don’t want to—

Leon placed his hand on her forehead, that smell rising around him, and began to pour his sacred power into her again. His body was shaking with exhaustion pushed past its edge — and when Anthony, who had come to see their mother, tried to stop him:

Stop, brother… you’ll die too if you keep this up!

Get out of my room this instant! You useless, powerless, good-for-nothing—!

Please… don’t speak to Anthony… like that… Mother.

Leon gritted his teeth against his swimming vision, pulled his hand from Larissa, and stepped in front of Anthony.

No! Don’t take your hands off me, Leon. Don’t abandon me, my son.

Brother, please stop. If you die too—

Anthony, trying to pull Leon away, was caught by Larissa’s nails and left bleeding. Even three-year-old Eve, who had witnessed it, burst into inconsolable tears.

Anthony. Take Eve and go.

Leon stayed alone at Larissa’s side in the end. And he wrung the last of himself dry, pouring every remaining drop of sacred power he possessed into his mother — even what should have been keeping him alive.

When at last his power gave out and he lost consciousness, Larissa breathed her last.

He did not witness his mother’s death. His body had been abused so severely that it was a month before he opened his eyes again.

When he finally woke and heard of her passing, what he felt was not grief. It was not loss.

It was relief. Only that. The relief of knowing he would never have to breathe that terrible smell again.

“That is the true story of the saintess and her holy knight son — so celebrated by the world.”

Leon finished speaking. At some point the two of them had left the painting behind and come to sit side by side on the long seat before the window.

His eyes were calm. Still. Not a trace of regret or longing in them — and somehow, for that very reason, they looked unbearably sad.

Kasha understood his sorrow completely. She too had known, in her previous life, what it meant to be denied and used and slowly stripped of every last hope.

She also knew that comfort, in matters like this, was useless.

She looked at him quietly for a moment, and then shifted the subject with a light touch.

“That space beside the fireplace… it looks like something large used to be there.”

Leon followed her gaze toward the empty wall and gave a faint, rueful smile.

“I played the piano for a long time. After my sacred power properly manifested, my mother had it removed — said I couldn’t afford to use my hands carelessly.”

Kasha looked at Leon’s large hands. Calloused. Crossed with old marks. Had they forgotten entirely how to play? The way he had come to believe, with absolute certainty, that happiness was not something meant for him?

Without thinking, she reached out and took his hand. He looked down at her, startled, and she curved the corners of her mouth into a small smile.

“Now… I can hold your hand like this.”

Leon looked at her face — at her smile — and squinted, as though something too bright had suddenly caught his eye.

“So you can.”

He seemed to consider something for a moment, but he didn’t let go. They sat like that, hand in hand, and looked out together at the sunlight coming in through the window.

It was a rest they had not had in a very long time. Especially for Kasha — who had lived through more years than Leon, had died, and come back.

Holding Leon’s hand — warm with a normal temperature, not the severed arm she remembered — something like maybe lifted its head in Kasha’s chest.

A perfect new life, built on revenge against the hidden shadow and against Simon and the rest of them. Could something like that truly be possible?

A future where Leon and Daryl and Margaret and Eve all lived together, smiling.

But the moment Eve came to mind, Kasha’s expression darkened swiftly.

Her hand drew back slowly — and slipped free of Leon’s.