“Father. Surely you cannot be serious about going there.”
Leon’s voice was quiet — just barely held together beneath the weight of revulsion and the self-contempt that followed it.
Kasha sensed immediately that something was wrong. She reached out toward Eve, and Eve, as though she had been waiting for exactly that, flung herself into her arms.
The Grand Duke, however, seemed oblivious to all of it. He furrowed his brow with shameless indifference. His eyes — threaded through with red — drifted without focus from one corner of the room to the other.
“Did you not hear me? I said we’ve been invited! Go and change into your dress uniform at once. We must go and show the world that House Osilote still stands!”
His voice was imperious. His eyes were murky with the certainty that his own nonsense made perfect sense.
“Father.”
Leon said the word and then drew a long, slow breath.
Conversations with his father had grown exhausting — infuriating — and to endure them while bound inside a cursed body had never been easy. Leon himself had always been on the verge of erupting.
The sole reason he had never let himself was the single fact that this man was his father.
For Leon, family was the first thing worth protecting. It was the only shelter he owed his younger siblings — poor Eve and Anthony. And his father, whatever else he was, was supposed to be the one who built and maintained that shelter.
Leon’s adolescence had been consumed by the effort to understand this man.
He had wanted so desperately to believe there was a reason — that someone who betrayed his own blood in pursuit of nothing but greed, who schemed in the filth of his own ambition, must have had something driving him to it.
He had held onto the hope that sooner or later, when his foolish course ran its end, his father would turn back to his family. Would finally understand what they were worth.
And yet even now, at this point, the family his father spoke of was not Leon and Anthony and Eve.
The family his father wanted was not here. Only the imperial palace. The imperial bloodline. The direct line of succession. That was the only shelter he had ever sought.
And so here he was — calling the crown prince he had helped to ruin family, ordering Leon to come with him to that party, to stand there and receive whatever humiliation the prince saw fit to offer.
There had been a time when Leon bore those quiet humiliations at his father’s side, telling himself that this, too, was family, and therefore unavoidable.
After the curse of lust had taken hold of him, he had lost even more ground to stand on. How could he, stained with that filthy transgression, dare to push back against the crown prince on his father’s behalf? He had believed it fully. Had even welcomed it as a kind of penance.
And then, into a life where he had grown accustomed to surrendering every happiness, Kasha had appeared one day and held out her hand.
I want you to be happy.
The right to be happy is something you earn for yourself. It isn’t given to you. So don’t give up yet.
She had said it with an expression so utterly sincere that he could not dismiss it as a careless joke.
And then she had made good on it. Had freed him from the curse.
She had restored him — miraculously, against all odds — when every prayer he had ever memorized and every sacrifice he had ever offered had failed. When even his god had not.
The very person he had most guarded himself against, the one he had suspected above all others — she had done it. She had pulled him out of a secret that no one, not even family, had seen. Had given him back his freedom.
So then — who was he meant to protect, now?
Leon felt the fog that had clouded his vision beginning, at last, to lift.
…Kasha Rüschino is the villainess who unsealed the magic stone that plunged you into this curse.
Even if that letter had spoken the truth. Even if she truly was the one who had broken that seal — there must have been a reason.
Because that was the person he had come to know in her. Distant, yet kind. Unhurried, yet passionate. Carrying inside her a fire that burned quietly, for herself alone.
Someone who took a wounded child’s hand and offered comfort. Someone who looked at a holy knight rotting inside a foul curse and told him he deserved to be happy.
A person like that did not do something like that without reason.
And if she could not bring herself to tell him the truth, that too had its reasons — he was certain of it.
So from this moment forward, Leon would be her shelter.
She seemed entirely uninterested in protecting herself. So he would do it for her. Whatever threatened her, whatever form it took.
The emotion that had been slowly taking shape since the moment he first met her — now its nature was clear. And the instant he acknowledged it, Leon felt a steadiness rise in him that he had never known before.
He was no longer unsettled. No longer afraid of anything.
Because this was not a responsibility handed to him at birth. It was his own choice. And he had come, somewhere deep in himself, to already love that choice.
Leon looked his father directly in the eyes. The Grand Duke flinched — and Leon found, to his own surprise, that the sight no longer moved him.
“Who exactly is waiting to welcome us there, Father? The crown prince is summoning us for one purpose only — to mock us. You know this. You cannot pretend otherwise.”
Leon kept his voice even, for Kasha and Eve’s sake. But the Grand Duke reacted as though he had been told something obscene.
“Mock us? Who would dare mock us! Me — the brother of Ramon himself! What does he have over me besides the accident of being born first? He should know that he owes me his life — I was the one who saved him during the conquest of Gilenoa!”
The Grand Duke spat the emperor’s name without a shred of deference. It seemed to occur to him not at all that the guards and maids stationed here could report him for imperial defamation on the spot.
He had always been a man seized by foolish ambitions — but his judgment had never been this impaired. How had it come to this? Was this something worse than stupidity? Was he losing his mind?
Still — however much they spoke over each other, his father needed to face reality.
Leon fixed his father with a cold, unsparing gaze. The force of a man who had grown up without protection and had become his own, entirely, was more than enough to unsettle the Grand Duke.
“…The brother of the very emperor you speak of — the crown prince’s own uncle by blood — did not he attempt to harm the crown prince’s mother, the Empress herself? Do you truly mean to tell me you have forgotten that she still lies in a coma, and has not woken to this day?”
“What — that kind of — that’s the sort of nonsense only riffraff believe! How dare you say such a thing to my face!”
The hollowed cheeks of the Grand Duke trembled with rage. But in that same moment, behind the fury, Leon read something dark and churning in his eyes.
Fear.
The assassination attempt on Empress Anne.
It had been an event that turned the imperial court — and the entire empire — upside down, several years ago.
At the time, Empress Anne’s influence had been formidable. She had her sons — the brilliant and beautiful First Prince Nigel — and the Princess Melissa. Her family, the Viscount House of Vistas, was still a power in its own right.
That had all been before the variable called Imperial Consort Alissa appeared.
She was a woman of extraordinary beauty but modest origins — from a mere count’s family — and no one was unaware that it was the Grand Duke of Osilote’s hand that had elevated her to the position of imperial consort. The Grand Duke, at odds with the Vistas family who backed Empress Anne, had arranged for Alissa — daughter of Count Quirion, one of his vassal houses — to enter the palace, hoping to restore his footing at court.
Within a single year of her entry, Imperial Consort Alissa produced a son. It was the birth of Second Prince Arthur — and the bloodstorm he would bring to the imperial palace.
The emperor had been openly besotted with the beautiful consort. And young Arthur had shown himself extraordinary even at three years old, already learning to read. This lit a fire under the ambitions of Alissa and the noble faction loyal to her — ambitions that should have stopped at simply checking Empress Anne’s power.
One afternoon, Empress Anne collapsed while taking tea in the usual manner, coughing up blood.
A poisoning attempt on the empress who had produced the legitimate heir.
By all the circumstantial evidence, it was clearly an assassination attempt by Alissa’s faction — but proof was nowhere to be found.
The empress teetered on the edge of death for several days before barely surviving. She did not wake.
An investigation was conducted, of course — but between Alissa’s influence at the time and the emperor’s quiet complicity, it was brought to its hollow conclusion: a nominal culprit was arrested and executed, and the matter was considered closed. No evidence was ever produced connecting Imperial Consort Alissa, the Grand Duke of Osilote, or any of their allies to what had happened.
The Vistas family and the few remaining nobles loyal to Empress Anne fought desperately to keep her within the palace walls, and they managed it — though she was confined to the most remote detached palace, removed from all affairs. First Prince Nigel, who had been due to be formally invested as crown prince upon coming of age, was sent abroad to the Kazim Kingdom under the guise of study — effectively exiled.
Through all of it, Alissa and her faction only continued to rise.
Until the day Second Prince Arthur met his sudden and terrible end.
Arthur had been accompanying Alissa on a visit to her family’s estate when unknown assailants gave chase. The carriage plunged off a cliff — and what awaited him below was worse: a wild beast that had appeared as if from nowhere tore him apart.
Alissa had been trapped inside the wrecked carriage at the base of the cliff, watching her son’s death with her own eyes. She lost her mind. Night after night, tormented by visions of her son’s ghost, she took her own life not long after.
The group of attackers who had caused the carriage to go off the cliff disappeared without a trace. Only the soldiers, maids, and attendants who had accompanied them that day were blamed — unjustly — and put to death. Since most of Alissa’s personal attendants had been children of nobles in her faction, the imperial palace fell into a silence stained with blood.
And then, with a timing so precise it could only be called deliberate, First Prince Nigel returned from the Kazim Kingdom. He stepped back before the eyes of the court, and the absence of the Second Prince thrust him immediately into position as the sole heir to the throne.
In the years the world had paid him no attention, Nigel had transformed entirely. His intelligence, his charm, his composure — all of it had grown beyond comparison to what he had been. The noble class and his own father the emperor were captivated at once.
He was formally invested as crown prince before the mourning period for Alissa had even ended. Every last piece of it had happened within the span of a few months.
And so Alissa and her faction had collapsed — in precisely the same manner in which they had once dismantled Empress Anne.
The Quirion family, Alissa’s family by birth, and most of the consort’s faction were quietly dismantled one by one thereafter — entangled in corruption charges or whispers of sedition, in ways that bore no outward connection to the original poisoning. But everyone understood.
Only the Grand Duke of Osilote survived that quiet purge. His influence was a ghost of what it had once been, but he was alive.
Most people assumed he had survived because he was the emperor’s younger brother — that the emperor could not bring himself to dispose of his own kin.
Some recalled the story from the war of conquest against the Gilenoa Kingdom, years ago — how the Grand Duke had saved the emperor’s life when a princess of that kingdom nearly killed him. They speculated that the emperor could not discard the brother who had once given him his life back.
Leon, too, had once believed this — had once resolved that he would find some way to repay the crown prince, in gratitude for that mercy.
But as the years passed, that belief had shifted.
