She did not stop there. Without faltering, she moved further, pulling off her dirt-caked trousers in quick, deliberate motions.
She heard him stir—perhaps he had sensed what she was doing. The darkness hid her completely, but she felt her face heat anyway.
Still, her resolve held. She did not hesitate. She let the last of it fall away, and reached toward him.
“Don’t be startled, Leon. I’m trying to save you.”
He coughed at the touch of her hands on his shirt buttons.
“Cough—Kasha…?”
His voice was strange, roughened with something rawer than usual. Her hands moved faster.
“Just a moment. Just wait.”
She worked off his shirt, then his trousers. Her movements were quick and certain, leaving him no time to object.
Each time her fingertips brushed against the smooth, solid surface of his skin, she felt her hands want to curl away—but she held herself steady.
When it was done, the two of them lay stripped to their underclothes in the dark. An awkward, charged silence pressed in around them, thick enough to feel.
“Kasha, what are you…”
He started to speak, then went rigid—because in that moment, her bare skin came into contact with his.
She slid beneath the blanket slowly, laying her body against his. She wrapped both her legs around one of his, tucked herself against his left side, and pulled her arms around his torso as tightly as she could.
The solid, lean muscle of him—nothing but hard, sculpted warmth—pressed flush against her skin. Her heart lurched into a furious gallop.
The embarrassment hit her all at once. She was profoundly grateful for the dark.
I’m doing this to keep him alive. I won’t let myself feel ashamed.
That was what she had told herself. But with the full weight of his presence against every inch of her, she couldn’t gather a single clear thought.
She pressed her face into the broad warmth of his chest. His scent enveloped her, and beneath her cheek she could feel the rough, urgent beat of his heart. She almost worried the shock of it might do him further harm.
Summoning her courage, she began to move her hands. Carefully, methodically, she rubbed warmth back into him—his shoulders, his neck, his arms—back and forth, coaxing heat through friction. She kept to his upper body; she couldn’t find the nerve to bring her hands any lower than that.
Through it all, he was absolutely rigid. He couldn’t seem to move—not with his full will, anyway. His fingers would twitch occasionally, like a mechanism that had seized up. He clearly understood what she was doing, but the abruptness of it all had knocked him somewhere between paralysis and bewilderment.
She could hardly blame him. He was a holy knight who had sworn sacred vows before the gods—chastity among them, at least until marriage. That was, by no small irony, a significant part of why women across the empire adored them.
And Leon in particular—even during the period when the curse of lust had nearly consumed his soul—had never let it touch his body.
Come to think of it, she realized, I may be the first woman to touch his bare skin since he was a child.
The thought made her head swim with heat she had no business feeling. She forced herself to concentrate on warming him.
He was so large, and so injured, that she had to move with extraordinary care and delicacy.
Gradually—slowly—the trembling that had wracked the body pressed against hers began to subside. The heat they generated together, breath and skin and shared closeness, built into something that reached beneath the surface.
And yet Leon remained almost perfectly still. Only his fingers moved, twitching every now and then—like a marionette with a broken string.
At this rate, she was half afraid it wouldn’t be the cold that did him in, but the tension.
She made up her mind, and whispered into his ear.
“Alright, Leon. I’ll tell you. That story I promised.”
Silence.
“What ‘this life’ means. I’ll explain it all. It will probably be… a long story.”
His throat moved—she saw the sharp bob of his jaw. He still didn’t speak, but Kasha let her hands go still and wrapped her arms around his neck instead. Now that it had come to it, she was afraid.
He seemed to sense the shift in her. His left hand rose slowly and came to rest against her back, patting it in a quiet, steadying rhythm. It was the first time, since she had undressed him, that he had reached for her of his own accord.
Some of the tension left her. But in its place came a different kind—the kind that sparked along her spine everywhere his hand made contact with bare skin.
This was an entirely different species of nerves.
She let out something between a sigh and a murmur, and a brief silence settled over them.
She broke it herself, finally releasing the confession that had been circling the inside of her mouth for hours.
“I’ve already died once, Leon.”
Now that it was out, a wave of something—half freedom, half terror—crashed over her. Now you’ll think I’m mad.
“Can you… believe that?”
A startled movement rippled through him. He said nothing—but his left arm drew her thin frame against him more tightly. Don’t be frightened. It was that kind of hold.
Their bodies, already pressed close, now had no space left between them. The warmth they had been building passed back and forth between their skin.
The confession out, she grew a little bolder. She shifted upward just enough to press her cheek against his.
“And then I turned back through time, and woke up alive again. About four months ago—just before the Tyrot masquerade ball.”
Silence.
“I still don’t know how. One moment it was my twenty-first birthday, and the blade was coming down on my neck at the guillotine—I can still feel it so clearly—and then the next moment, I was nineteen-year-old Kasha again, standing back in the Rüschino estate.”
His breathing roughened slightly against her ear.
“Are you listening, Leon?”
“I’m listening.”
His voice was low, quiet—settling around her like shelter.
Kasha turned her face against his cheek and let herself lean into the contact. It was partly for warmth, but it was also instinct—something reaching out to calm the anxiety she couldn’t quite contain.
What is he thinking right now?
Was he deciding that Kasha Rüschino was just as mad as everyone said? That she was a pitiable creature lost in delusion?
Then his left hand drifted up and traced the shell of her ear—light and unhurried, the way one might soothe a frightened child.
The gesture said more than words could.
It’s alright. Keep going. Don’t be afraid. I’m still here.
She focused on the sensation of those calloused, roughened fingers at her ear, and then she opened her mouth again.
“I died at the age of twenty-one, in the year 400 of the Imperial Calendar—on my birthday. I was executed by guillotine. By Simon Blanche, the one person I had trusted—and by a conspirator I never identified.”
Silence.
“You don’t have to believe me. I know how impossible it sounds—believe me, I know. Even the moment I woke up as nineteen-year-old Kasha again, I couldn’t accept that any of it was real.”
“I believe you.”
He said it without hesitation. Plainly and without qualification. His voice had recovered some of its strength.
“Don’t—don’t answer so easily. How can you say that so simply? How can you just believe something like this?”
Even her reproach did not move him. He simply tightened his hold on her, and she felt his hand begin to move across her shoulder in long, slow strokes. The sensation of it—slightly rough, faintly electric—made her toes curl against his leg.
He spoke after a moment.
“Because from the moment I heard you say ‘previous life,’ I never stopped thinking about it. What those words could possibly mean.”
She had gone to him the night before the expedition departed, and in an unguarded moment had poured out her confession to a man she believed was sleeping. He had been turning those words over in his mind ever since. Alone. With no one to help him understand.
What struck her most was this: he had not dismissed it as madness. Not for a single second. He had taken her words at face value and tried only to understand them.
“But no matter how long I thought, I couldn’t find a way to interpret it within the limits of what I know. Which means,” he continued, “it’s something that ordinary logic cannot explain.”
His voice had its strength back. The chill she had felt radiating from his skin was gone.
“So tell me everything, Kasha. Whatever it is, I’ll believe it. Because whatever you choose to tell me—that becomes my truth.”
As though there is no version of this where he doubts her. Not even one.
The moment she heard those words spoken in that steady, unyielding voice, something hot surged from deep inside her chest. Not anxiety—something vast and overwhelming that had no name she could reach for.
A perfect, unconditional acceptance she had never received from anyone—not in this life, not in the one before.
Her eyes burned. She pressed on quickly to hide it.
“Alright. Then let me start at the beginning. Do you know, Leon—in my previous life, I was known as ‘Kasha the Villainess’…”
It was early dawn when the light began to change.
Leon woke slowly to the sound of Kasha’s even breathing.
His temperature had returned to normal entirely.
The pale morning light spilling through the cave entrance fell softly across Kasha’s sleeping face, nestled against his side. She looked thin and worn, and the sight of it ached.
He let his mind drift back over the stories she had told him through the long night.
I’ve already died once, Leon.
By any ordinary measure, it was an impossible thing to believe. Time reversal—a return from death.
But in that moment, with every nerve attuned to her voice, Leon had known.
The weight of the confession she was carrying. The particular kind of loneliness that comes from bearing an unbelievable truth alone for months and months.
And beyond that—every inexplicable moment since he’d met her.
The look in her eyes at the masquerade when she first saw him—a gaze he had never been able to understand.
The hunting competition, where she had prepared the exact right magical tools as though she already knew what they would face.
At the Elore estate, moving to protect Eve before the attack came—as though she had seen it coming.
Knowing about the curse of lust, a secret he had shared with no one.
And the massive production of magical tools she had quietly arranged long in advance—preparation for a demon rampage that no one else had anticipated.
All of it was possible because she had already lived this future. Already survived it once.
And the future she had survived had been, by any reckoning, brutal beyond measure. For both of them.
The depth of her desperation—the frantic effort she had poured into every day since her return—made complete and total sense in an instant.
Leon shifted carefully, turning to face her. He slipped his left arm beneath her head, cradling it from the hard stone floor, and drew her gently against him.
The moment her body settled against his—nothing between them—a satisfaction so acute it bordered on pain bloomed through every part of him.
At the same time, the part of him that had been endlessly aware of her presence all night responded, insistently and without shame. An almost laughable directness.
