Leon turned to her, his expression questioning.
She opened her mouth.
“Leon. There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
“What is it? Go ahead.”
His eyes moved briefly to the hand that had just pulled away from his.
“This summer — do you have any plans to leave the capital? It’ll be the height of summer before long, and most nobles travel to their resorts around then…”
Leon was quiet for a moment, thinking over the intent behind the sudden question, before he answered.
“I was planning to leave for the villa at Elore Bay at the end of the month and spend about two weeks on holiday.”
The summer holiday at the Elore Bay villa was a long-standing tradition of the Grand Ducal household.
Elore Bay was a beautiful coastal retreat that the Aranias family had claimed even before the empire was founded. Even now, it was lined with the grand villas of the highest-ranking nobles who carried imperial blood.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would never have considered taking a leisurely holiday while his body was in the grip of a curse. But the situation had changed.
And besides — Eve had been counting down to the summer holiday since spring. It was the one time of year when even her perpetually occupied father, and Leon, stepped away from their duties and spent time together as a family.
But the moment the words Elore Bay villa left his mouth, Kasha’s expression fell sharply. Leon noticed, with characteristic sharpness — and said nothing, waiting for her response.
“Is it… something you must do? Could you not spend the holiday in the capital instead?”
When she finally spoke, there was something almost desperate in her eyes.
“Is there a reason I should?”
“Well. Around that time, I think there may be… something I’ll need help with.”
“Such as?”
“That would be… it’s just that…”
She trailed off, hesitating — which was unlike Kasha, who was ordinarily quiet but always said exactly what she meant.
She’s hiding something.
Leon looked into her eyes — pale pink in the sunlight streaming through the window, translucent and clear.
And he thought of the question he had been putting off. He had meant to ask it before holding her hand. Before kissing her. Before she broke the curse. He had been postponing it, again and again — and he needed to know why. The strange feeling that came over him every time he looked at her. Before he could act on any of it, he needed to ask.
“Kasha. I have something I’d like to ask you as well.”
“Yes.”
Perhaps she sensed the tension in his voice. She straightened slightly and looked at him with full attention.
“You truly have never formally studied magic?”
“Pardon? That’s… yes. That’s correct.”
She seemed startled by the sudden question, but she answered readily. Leon’s expression, however, as he turned the answer over in his mind, was more serious than usual.
“…When you were dismantling the curse earlier, I heard you reciting incantations in the ancient tongue. I know little of ancient magic myself — but I recognized some of the words. And that magic capable of controlling a demonic curse — it could only be ancient magic. The question, however, is how someone who claims to have never formally studied magic could possibly know ancient incantations.”
Kasha’s blinking slowed. Then stopped. She looked away from him as she answered.
“That would be… from a book.”
“Even granting that you learned the incantations through written text, applying them in practice is an entirely different matter. If it were that simple, the world would be full of mages.”
Kasha kept her gaze lowered, offering nothing more of her face.
Leon felt something tighten in his chest.
Was she regretting it? Regretting that she had dispelled the curse’s source right before his eyes — that she had put herself in a position where she could now be pressed like this?
But it was precisely that unguarded quality — acting without calculation — that made Leon want to trust her.
If she had truly had ulterior motives, she should have made lifting the curse a condition. Demanded something in return. Or at least let him feel indebted afterward.
Instead, the moment she found the curse’s source, she had focused entirely on destroying it. There had been no calculation in her actions. None at all.
And when she confirmed that the curse had been lifted — the expression on her face had been one of genuine joy. It wasn’t a performance.
At least the Kasha he had come to know was not a person capable of performing that expression.
And yet — the undeniable truth was that there remained things about Kasha that did not add up.
…Kasha Rüschino is the villainess who unsealed the magic stone that plunged you into this curse.
The words from that letter still circled in his mind.
Who had sent it? What was their relationship to her?
Leon looked at the side of Kasha’s face — fixed ahead, stubborn — and spoke with careful weight.
“What you did just now — breaking the magic stone’s curse — I am genuinely grateful. Truly.”
At that, Kasha’s lashes gave a faint, barely visible tremor. Seeing it, Leon had to hold himself back from softening.
“However. The way you separated the curse’s core from its vessel — through ancient incantations — was very difficult to read as the work of someone encountering a magic stone for the first time.”
At that, Kasha pressed her lips together.
So she was regretting it.
Leon felt a dull ache in his chest. He was the one pressing her — so why was he the one growing unsettled?
“Kasha. I only want to know the truth. However painful the truth may be, I believe it is better than a lie.”
Kasha heard the tightening in his voice.
She closed her eyes, her expression full of a quiet torment.
The truth. The truth.
If she told him the real truth — would Leon still stand on her side?
The truth that she was the root cause of all of it. That Leon had already lost everything, once, and died a terrible death. That Kasha herself had returned from a nightmare of a death and was living her second life.
If she confessed all of that — would anything remain the way it was now?
If the thread between them snapped right now, she might lose the very chance to find the hidden shadow. And if that happened, everything would return to nothing.
Leon, too — however free of the curse’s grip he was at this moment — without knowing the identity of the shadow, he could fall into danger again at any time.
And so I cannot gamble on confessing everything — not even trusting only you.
With that thought settling in her chest, Kasha exhaled a long, heavy breath. All the while, she felt his gaze on her. She finally opened her mouth, the words slow and reluctant.
“I learned… from my mother. Magic.”
“Your mother?”
An unexpected figure. Leon asked carefully.
From what he had looked into, Kasha had lost her mother at twelve and been taken in by the Rüschino count’s household. Since the countess had already been deceased by the time of her adoption, the mother she referred to had to be her birth mother.
“Yes. My mother was… not entirely sane. An outcast, until the day she died.”
Not knowing what to say, Leon simply watched her, quietly.
“We lived in the northeastern part of the continent — in the Arakti mountain range. Just the two of us. My mother and me.”
The winters there had been long. Half the year buried in snow, everything frozen solid and still.
Kasha’s earliest memories began in a house set apart in a mountain valley. Except for the occasional trips down to the village to get food, it had always been just the two of them.
The villagers had despised Kasha and her mother — and feared them in equal measure.
Because her mother was not only a madwoman. She was a witch.
There were whispered stories: anyone who hurt Kasha always came to grief afterward. The villagers disliked them, but never tormented them openly.
What little livelihood they had came from her mother’s magic.
Where her mother had learned it, Kasha never knew. Her mother never spoke of the past — only offered the drifting, incoherent murmurs that were the language of madness.
But on the rare occasions when her mind grew clear, her mother would teach Kasha magic. The lessons were always interrupted, of course, by the fits that came without warning — but they came.
And since Kasha, unlike her mother, had been born without magical ability, she never fully mastered the casting of spells.
What she did have, though, was an instinctive grasp of how magical power worked and how it moved. And a hunger for knowledge that never quieted.
As a child, every time she came down to the village, she would find books wherever she could and devour them. She dreamed, alone, of finding new ways to bring what she knew of magic into the world.
It was that dreaming — those solitary years of study — that had eventually led her to begin building magical instruments.
“That is how I know what I know. Not proper magic — more that I’ve studied the principles closely enough to understand a handful of incantations deeply enough to actually use them. The magic stone, too — I came to know about that from my mother, in truth.”
Kasha’s calm, matter-of-fact confession was extraordinary in many ways — and yet it explained a great deal about her.
The way she sometimes seemed to lack the ordinary social instincts of someone raised among people. And yet her knowledge and skill moving so far beyond what that upbringing should have produced.
Leon considered whether to believe her and let his suspicion rest.
His feelings toward Kasha had already tilted to a degree he could only call embarrassing — so thoroughly that denying it would have been pointless.
And yet. He felt, still, that she had not told him everything.
It was a kind of instinct — one he had developed, almost without meaning to, having grown up surrounded by lies and pretense from his earliest years.
…She approached you with intention. Keep your distance. This is a warning given for your sake.
The damned letter surfaced in his mind again. Leon closed his eyes. He was confused. The beautiful lines of his face pulled taut.
Then, after a pause, he made his decision. His eyes opened.
“…I see. I understand what you’ve told me. For now.”
He spoke quietly, and Kasha looked up at him with poorly concealed anxiety.
“Whatever the circumstances, you fulfilled the terms of our agreement with integrity. So the arrangement between us — it will remain in effect.”
The pallor began to ease from Kasha’s face. A little color returned.
The tension had loosened, clearly. Even though he himself had been tense — the urge rose sharp and sudden in Leon: to take her hand, which must have grown cold by now, and warm it with his own.
It had been that way throughout her confession. She had spoken plainly, offering only facts — but in her telling, he had read the shape of her childhood. Cold. Lonely.
He had wanted to hold her. To tell her, with no particular reason given, that everything would be all right now. He pressed down on those impulses and continued.
“But I cannot stop suspecting you. Not until you decide to tell me the complete truth.”
A silence.
It was a line he had to draw — as someone who had been the victim of unexplained curses and deliberate schemes, for the sake of his family and everything he was responsible for protecting.
Even so, meeting Kasha’s eyes as she looked up at him after hearing those words — that was harder than he had expected.
“It is the best I am able to offer you, for now.”
And my own selfishness — to keep you near me.
He added it only to himself, with a quiet, private bitterness.
