Leon stretched an arm past the chair’s armrest toward the side table, his jaw taut. He fumbled in the drawer and pulled out a cigar.
He cut the end with quick hands and put it between his teeth.
Hiss.
He struck a match and held it to the tip, drawing deeply. The reflection of the small flame turned his violet eyes the color of something very deep and very dark.
Kasha felt guilt pressing around her heart.
She bore responsibility for this man’s suffering. She did.
I will find the people behind all of this. I will find them. And when I do, you’ll be free of this.
Sss.
He pulled the smoke deep. The ember crackled softly.
When the smoke settled into him, some of the tension drained — slightly. He blinked, slowly and with an almost languid quality.
The decadence of it was entirely at odds with the title of Holy Knight and suited him absolutely.
He let out a long exhale and rubbed his forehead.
“I could walk into my father’s rival’s household and hand them your leverage, and get anything I wanted in return. Yet you came to me. What exactly is it you want, Kasha Rüschino?”
The study was saturated with the dark, weighty smell of the cigar. Kasha opened her mouth.
“You.”
“……?”
He tilted his head, the cigar still between his lips. His still-damp platinum hair fell across his forehead.
“What did you just say?”
“I want you. Leon Milojonif Aranias.”
The clean line between his brows drew together.
“And what kind of nonsense is that?”
“I want to enter into… a contractual relationship with you. A fake courtship.”
“A fake…courtship?”
He exhaled in what might have been a laugh, the smoke curling out with it.
Kasha looked at that oddly appealing sight and replied, without any change in her tone.
“Exactly what it sounds like. A relationship formed for mutual benefit — by agreement.”
“Mutual benefit.”
“I can help you out of the curse.”
“How?”
“There must be a medium somewhere nearby that’s binding the curse to you. We find it, and that’s the key.”
“Ah. You said something like that at the ball too. But is it really that simple?”
“I have a method.”
“…And in return. What you get?”
“I need someone to play the role of a suitor. Right now, immediately. Someone who can serve as a barrier — to keep a certain person from approaching me. Someone strong, with standing, and with—”
Kasha held his gaze steadily.
“—the kind of appeal that makes it completely believable to everyone that he fell for someone.”
Ha.
Leon let out a short exhale. He drew on the cigar again, watching her serious eyes.
“And who is this certain person?”
“…….”
“The one you’re trying to keep out. The one who’s threatening you enough that you need a shield as dangerous as me. Who is it?”
Kasha blinked.
“…You’ll know eventually.”
He gave a brief, dry smile.
“Too many secrets for someone making a proposal.”
She added, quickly:
“There’s nothing in this arrangement that would hurt you either.”
“Why?”
He blew out another stream of smoke.
Kasha thought for a moment.
Objectively — the most sought-after match in the empire, entering a fake courtship with someone like Kasha Rüschino. There was no version of that equation that made sense on paper.
But if things stay as they are, you’re going to—
She hesitated, then opened her mouth again.
“Leon. Are you planning to marry… Miss Odette Tyrot?”
Caught off guard, he pulled the cigar from his mouth.
“…What does that have to do with anything?”
“Grand Duke Oscilote is already pursuing a match with the Tyrot family, isn’t he.”
Leon’s brow tightened.
“I’d be curious to know how you’re aware of a courtship discussion I know nothing about.”
Because you told me yourself.
Kasha lowered her eyes.
Before her return, in the ruins of the temple, Leon had mentioned his unhappy marriage in passing — briefly, as though the memory were too corrosive to hold long. But even that brief accounting had been terrible to hear.
She had already disliked Odette before. After listening to Leon, she had been free to hate her with full feeling and no ambiguity.
You really have the most wretched luck with women.
She thought it with a dry, tired bitterness, and answered.
“I imagine it hasn’t escaped your attention entirely, either.”
That unexpected precision made him pause.
It was true that from around his nineteenth year, his father had made steady attempts to arrange his marriage. At twenty-four, the timing was reasonable, even by generous reckoning. And his father had brought up the Tyrot name more than once in recent months.
The Tyrot match was, on its face, an excellent choice. Given his father’s current position at court, the urgency behind the push was understandable.
But the Tyrot girl…
Leon drew deeply on the cigar.
He remembered. The last ball at the Tyrot estate, attended under his father’s pressure.
That was where he’d encountered this Kasha.
He remembered Odette’s confrontation with her. And he remembered—
An unbearable smell.
Most of the people in the room had had their own particular odors. But Odette had been exceptional.
When he’d left his conversation with Kasha and hurried toward the exit — the symptoms worsening — Odette had swept toward him with her bright smile.
Her hand reaching for his arm. The desperate urgency of someone trying to close distance quickly.
But the stench radiating off her had made the nausea spike so violently he’d had to flee without ceremony.
A sewer smell. Pure and thick.
He remembered the expression on her face as he made his hasty exit — those blue eyes bright with humiliation and rage. That arrogant, twisted look, deeply unpleasant in a way that lodged in the memory.
Kasha’s voice drew him back.
“If she’s not particularly to your liking… our arrangement could give you reason to delay things.”
“…….”
“And if you find someone you genuinely care for — whenever that happens — the arrangement ends. With agreed terms, naturally.”
Leon turned the proposal over quietly.
She was offering to lift the curse on him — the curse that threatened himself and his entire family — in exchange for a pretend courtship.
He finally looked up.
“Is that really all? The scales feel uneven.”
Leon’s own survival and his family’s standing — against a false lover. The imbalance was obvious to anyone.
Kasha answered as though she had been waiting.
“There is one more thing.”
“What?”
“I’m developing magitools that can be powered by holy energy. I want your help with that research.”
He let out a slow breath with the smoke.
The smell of the cigar was starting to sting the back of Kasha’s throat.
Cough.
A small, involuntary sound.
Leon looked at her for a moment. Then, without explanation, he pressed the cigar into the ashtray and put it out.
He gave a faintly self-mocking smile, the corner of his mouth turning.
“I genuinely cannot work you out.”
“…….”
“But let me ask you something. Are you actually sure about this?”
“About what, exactly?”
He let out a slow breath. Then he rose from his chair.
Kasha rose too, slightly off-balance, half a second behind him.
He looked at her — slowly, with that dark, unhurried gaze — and let it move over her.
From the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
She felt his eyes trace the exposed curve of her ear, the line of her jaw, the hollow of her collarbone above the neckline of her dress, the slenderness of her arms, the shape of her body beneath the fabric.
She felt like an antelope in front of a lion.
But she felt no fear.
She already knew. No matter how extreme the circumstances, he would not take anything from her by force. Not this man. Not even at the end of the world, in a place with no witnesses and no one to stop him, had he surrendered to the curse.
He was a man incapable of finding the easy, selfish way out. Stubbornly, absurdly, to the bone.
Something in her unflinching gaze seemed to interest him. He spoke, slowly.
“You just told me you want to be the companion of a man under a curse of lust. Do you understand what that means?”
Kasha said nothing.
He was asking if she was willing to walk into the open mouth of the beast.
The threat in his eyes made it difficult to breathe evenly.
She considered it for a moment. Then made up her mind.
“That’s one of the reasons you should accept.”
“…What do you mean?”
“You can’t solve anything by simply suppressing every impulse indefinitely.”
“So?”
“Like this.”
Without warning, she reached forward and took his hand.
The same unhesitating motion as at the ball.
Leon startled and tried to pull back. Kasha didn’t let go.
“I’ll endure the curse alongside you.”
Leon’s eyes swelled with what looked like imminent anger.
As though he was about to coldly dismiss her impudence and shake her off at any moment.
But — very slowly — something in the set of his eyes began to ease.
The jaw that had been clenched against whatever he refused to admit trembled with confusion.
A man carved by some divine hand to be strong and untouchable — coming undone inside her grip.
Like a beast caught in a snare.
Caught in the hold of a pair of wrists so slender they looked as though they’d snap at a touch, he stood there not knowing what to do.
Kasha watched the change in him and whispered.
“I know that you’ve been lonely.”
