“I heard you were unwell. Are you all right? Is your arm — has it healed?”
Her cool refusal had not touched him at all. It never did.
It had always been this way. Her lies. Her secrets. He could not have gone unscathed by all of them — and yet.
His clear eyes held nothing but concern.
Those eyes — a jeweler’s craft in violet, every shade and depth woven together until they caught the light like something rare and precious. They held more depth, more gravity, than any purple diamond set in any emperor’s crown.
Perhaps that was the reason.
Perhaps that was why Kasha, too, could not stop looking at him.
Why her heart kept startling her, the way it did for someone much younger and far less guarded.
She made herself look away.
“I am perfectly well. So please — don’t interrupt my walk.”
When had that started, she wondered. The absence of nervousness when she spoke in front of him.
She still stumbled over words sometimes — far less than before — but even when she did, it no longer made her shrink. The stumbling simply was what it was.
It was likely because of the way he always looked at her. Steadily. Without judgment.
Leon did not care whether she tripped over her words, or showed up with tangled hair and thick-lensed spectacles, or spent three hours talking about nothing but magical instruments. None of it changed the way he looked.
He simply saw her. The real her, hidden inside an unremarkable shell that everyone else had long since stopped bothering to examine.
From the beginning, he had not looked down on her. He had been the first one to reach toward her.
When she had revealed the secret of the curse and proposed their contract, he had been angry — but not once had he dismissed her or treated her as something beneath his consideration.
He looked into her eyes. He listened to what she said. Sometimes he simply followed quietly behind her and appeared with his hand outstretched precisely when she needed it.
She couldn’t say when it had begun — but every time he did those things, she found herself slipping into the strange, warm delusion that she might be someone important.
That delusion had, slowly, settled into something more solid. A small, quiet belief had taken root inside her: perhaps a person that someone as good as Leon values is genuinely worth something.
And with that, she had found herself stumbling less — not only in front of Leon, but in front of others too.
Only recently had she understood that what had grown inside her was called self-worth. It was something different from the fierce, surviving resolve she had cultivated after her regression — different from the bitterness, the instinct for survival, the need for vengeance.
And now, meeting Leon again after two weeks apart, Kasha felt something else she didn’t have a name for yet.
Simply being near him — feeling his presence, meeting his gaze — made something in her chest flutter and ache with a kind of fullness.
The late summer light that had been biting at her skin suddenly felt gentle. The slow river wind lifted his hair, and it was almost too bright to look at directly.
For one insane moment she thought she could be preserved in amber inside this exact instant, and she would not mind at all.
And the moment she recognized the feeling, a great tide of fear rose up and pressed the air from her lungs.
She pressed her hand to her sternum and tried to breathe.
“Kasha. Your color isn’t good. Are you still having trouble sleeping?”
He had been moving toward her — arms already lifting as though to steady her — and then he stopped. He had seen her face. The intensity in her expression — pale, almost frightened, the look of someone confronting something they desperately did not want to face.
Leon’s hand fell.
Kasha still could not take her eyes off that falling hand. The way his fist closed, slowly. His rough knuckles, worn by daily contact with a sword hilt. A warmth she knew too well now.
The mere act of recalling it made her pulse surge.
I’ve lost my mind.
She had told herself, only days ago, that she needed to put distance between them.
Even without Anthony’s warning, it had become increasingly undeniable that Leon was developing feelings for her — real ones — and he seemed to have no intention of hiding them. Not even slightly.
He doesn’t know who I am, or what I’m here to do. Why?
And right now was no different.
In full view of the capital’s nobility, with all of them watching and forming opinions, he had called her name at full volume and followed her without hesitation.
And still — those eyes. Those eyes that looked at her as though he were carrying something burning inside his chest.
“Kasha. I won’t ask why you left the villa so suddenly. You had your reasons.”
He doesn’t even press her.
Doesn’t ask why she switched rooms with Eve every night, or why she vanished without a word at precisely the moment when she might have been accused of killing someone.
Kasha took her hand away from her chest and turned to face him.
“Are you truly that naive?”
The words came out before she could stop them. Sharp and unguarded.
She couldn’t help it. Because what she was watching was Leon making the same kind of reckless, unprotected choices she had once made herself.
Not knowing he was being used — or perhaps knowing, and still unable to say a single word of suspicion aloud.
And if that was true, then what made Kasha any different from Simon?
I came with the intention of using him, just like Simon did.
Self-disgust rose in her throat alongside the fear of what she might do to him, and her face twisted with it.
“Kasha.”
He had heard the blatant insult. It hadn’t touched him. He was still looking at her the same way.
A cold, cutting smile rose to Kasha’s lips.
“…Or a fool, perhaps? A man with a flawless reputation as both a warrior and a scholar — a holy knight without equal. Perhaps that was all… an empty legend, after all. It seems I made rather a poor choice of… c-contract partner.”
“……”
She had not known she was capable of saying things like that to another person.
And that it was directed at someone who cared for her — someone who had given her the first purely warm, uncomplicated flutter of feeling she had ever known in her life.
That awareness hit her at the same moment as the realization that she was stumbling over her words again — and it was so unbearably pathetic that she almost wanted to laugh.
She felt the deep ache of it — like something driving straight into the center of her chest — and deliberately lifted her eyes in what she hoped looked like contemptuous dismissal.
She had to. If she hurt him enough, he would draw back. He would finally keep a safe distance.
I should never have proposed a contract in the first place.
If her guess about the identity of the shadow was correct, then she and Leon were a trap for each other — teeth closing on both sides.
And the danger Leon was already in was far greater than she had calculated.
I cannot become his weakness on top of everything else.
What drove her to the edge of distraction was the knowledge that even if she told him everything, right here and now, he would not turn from her. He would use every last piece of himself to protect her.
She had already watched the quiet certainty accumulate in his eyes day by day, and she knew it.
The quality people often dismissed as mere rigidity. That uprightness of his. It was far stronger than she had imagined. Stronger than conventional wisdom, stronger than instinct.
No. I came here to protect you. Not to drag you into greater danger.
She kept her spine straight. She made her eyes as cold as she could manage. She borrowed the tone she remembered from the proudest women she had ever encountered — Odette, Jasmine — and tried to take it for herself.
“Leon Aranias. I have a great deal to attend to. I would prefer not to be disturbed right now. So please — leave me in peace. Unless there is something I am still required to… resolve for you.”
She shaped the end of the sentence deliberately into something bordering on mockery — the particular way certain women of the social world had of diminishing their target while pretending to be perfectly polite. She had heard it so many times in her previous life that she could produce it without effort.
It was then that Leon’s expression, for the very first time, dimmed.
Which had been precisely the point. And still, for just a moment, her heart lurched.
Because she might have genuinely hurt him.
He watched the confusion pass through her eyes like a reflection in still water, and then slowly, deliberately, he began to speak — his expression the look of someone who had decided something.
“You’re right. There is something you need to resolve.”
“…What?”
She hadn’t expected that. Her voice lost its shape.
And then Leon bent toward her, angling his face close to her ear.
His broad chest filled her vision. Startled, she looked up — the clean line of his throat, the line of muscle visible at the open collar of his white uniform, and when she turned slightly, the sharp angle of his jaw, the curve of his ear, all of it close enough to touch.
She felt like a small creature that had been caught.
“Kasha.”
His voice, low and warm, brushed her ear directly. She shivered — and because of that shiver, it took her a moment to understand what he said next.
“The aftereffects of the curse seem to have returned.”
“…What? What do you mean?”
She pulled back sharply, startled, and searched his face.
She had thought he seemed fine. Had he been suffering through the aftereffects alone for the past week, while she had left him there without a word?
Guilt moved quickly through her eyes as she scanned his expression, his breathing.
His eyes are a little bloodshot — but that looks more like exhaustion than anything else. Though his ears are slightly flushed…
She reached up to check for fever, pressing her palm to his forehead.
A small, sharp sound escaped him.
It was unmistakable — a low, involuntary exhale carrying the unmistakable weight of something far more present than pain.
Kasha snatched her hand back.
And in the same instant, Leon caught her retreating wrist.
The movement was fast, exact — the kind of reflex that belonged to someone who had caught falling things for years. The warmth of his grip was immediate.
Kasha lost all her words.
“So you see — I need you, Kasha.”
“……”
“Call me naive, or a fool, or whatever you like.”
He drew closer, holding her wrist.
Their bodies were nearly touching. His warmth reached her. Somewhere nearby, a heartbeat sounded — neither could have said whose.
“If it is you saying it — whatever the name — Kasha Rüschino.”
