The truth was, his body had been in that state since the moment she had begun to undress him the night before.
The sheer effort it had cost him—to not let her see, to hold himself still while she cared for him—was more grueling than most battles he had fought.
He was deeply, profoundly grateful she had not brought her hands below the hem of his underclothes.
If she had—he was not entirely sure he could have held himself accountable. The thought alone sent a cold sweat along his spine.
I spent the entire expedition trying not to lay a hand on you, Kasha. And you undid everything I’d worked for in a single night.
Not that he was complaining. He added the caveat quietly, to himself.
In order to redirect the blood that was pooling in wholly unhelpful places, he turned his mind firmly elsewhere.
Has the holy power returned?
He closed his eyes, recited a prayer inwardly, and turned his attention to the flow of energy within him.
To his relief, it answered almost immediately—gathering at his call with speed. She had poured such desperate effort into caring for him through the night. Without that, a recovery this swift would have been impossible.
He reached out and pressed his hand to Kasha’s forehead first.
The golden light of his holy power absorbed into her skin, and the sickly pallor faded from her face at once, replaced by her natural color. The scrapes and small wounds she had collected—dragging him to the cave, racing through the underbrush for herbs—healed cleanly and without a trace.
Only when he was certain she was whole did he finally turn the healing toward himself. He worked on his broken wrist and battered ribs. The internal damage had already been slowly mending on its own as the holy power circulated through him; applying it directly now, the bones knitted together, and the blood loss finally corrected itself.
He had never been so grateful for his own power. It was counted among the strongest in the empire, and at this particular moment he was enormously glad of it.
Within minutes, his body was entirely recovered.
He drew her back into his arms and rested his cheek gently against her forehead as she slept.
Last night, each time her touch had grazed him, he had been reduced to inwardly reciting prayer after prayer—and still it had barely worked. By the end of it, he had nearly wished he would simply lose consciousness again.
But now she was asleep, and for once no effort was required of him.
He let himself be a little like a boy for a while—quietly, almost shyly delighted—surrendering entirely to the softness of her skin against his. He breathed in the clean, clear scent of her, which moved through him like something clarifying, filling his lungs until he felt purified from within.
He felt, in the most uncomplicated way possible, as though he might live forever.
For this moment, it didn’t matter that they were sealed inside a barrier, or that they might as well have been trapped in hell. If someone told him he had to spend the rest of his life in this cave, he thought he might simply nod and agree.
And then—
His body moved. Without his permission.
The color drained from his face in the same instant his instincts threw him backward, pulling away from her with sharp urgency. He pressed his fist hard against his mouth and curled in on himself.
No.
He refused to believe it. That here—now—the cursed lust was cresting inside him. That wretched, sickening sensation, rising from somewhere deep in his core.
He could tell them apart clearly now. The difference between what he felt for Kasha naturally, as a man, and this—this thing that was something else entirely.
What was moving through his body at this moment was the curse. Its aftermath, flooding in through whatever gap his injury had left undefended. And it had chosen to arrive now, of all moments—when Kasha lay asleep, defenseless, bare, within arm’s reach.
Abnormal heat erupted through him all at once. The curse circulated through his veins without courtesy, goading every sense. The muscles packed along his frame went rigid with extreme, coiled tension.
Had using so much holy power in a weakened state left him vulnerable? Had the severity of his wounds eroded whatever barriers he had built against it?
The curse had found the crack and poured itself in.
His breathing tightened.
The sound must have reached her—because without warning, Kasha, who had been lying utterly still, stirred.
“Leon? Are you alright?”
She was on her feet before he could respond, blanket pulled around her, already turning to him.
He clenched his teeth and forced out a sound like a growl.
“Run, Kasha. Please—go. Now.”
He was panting, barely human. Her eyes went wide.
She stared at him for a long moment—and then, instead of fleeing, she moved closer.
Her smooth knee made contact with his back where he lay turned away. A raw, involuntary sound escaped his throat.
Seeing the way he was cornered inside himself, Leon bit down on his own wrist—a desperate measure, pain leveraged against desire.
“Stop that!” Kasha’s voice rose sharply. “Leon, what are you doing?”
“Run. Kasha. Please.”
He was shaking.
And in that moment, something shifted in her—a recognition. She had seen this before.
The fallen holy knight in the abandoned shrine.
Go away… I told you to leave… Ugh. Aren’t you afraid of me?
She inhaled sharply. The sound that left her was almost a lament.
“Leon. The curse has returned. The aftereffects…”
“Go away… I told you… ugh!”
He snarled the same words as the knight she remembered, eyes gone dangerously red.
But she was not afraid of him. Not at all.
She crossed to him without rushing, took the wrist he had bitten, applied clotroot to the wound, and bound it neatly with her handkerchief.
Through it all, Leon begged her.
“Don’t, Kasha. Please…”
“It’s alright, Leon. You would never hurt me.”
But he kept fighting his way away from her, frantic.
“You don’t understand. When I was under the curse—the dreams I had every night—in them I was mad with it, and I violated and killed so many people. Every time, the end of the dream was soaked red.”
His beautiful face twisted with self-loathing. And yet—his body’s response moved in the opposite direction entirely.
Uncontrollable heat blazed across his skin. The veins along his arms and neck rose, dangerous and prominent.
Kasha watched, and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek.
His right arm appeared to be healed—he must have used his holy power to repair himself. But inside this barrier, she had no way of knowing how the curse’s aftershocks might behave.
And then she thought: Resistance may not be the only answer here.
Above all else, she trusted him. Even now, with the curse tearing through him, she was absolutely certain he would not harm her. She believed it without qualification.
And if that was true—why should she simply stand by and watch him suffer?
She had spent the whole of the previous night burning with her own quiet battle.
It was hardly normal—or even remotely natural—to lie with bare skin against someone she cared for and feel nothing. The truth was that she had wanted him. All night.
She had kept her hands to his upper body for one reason only: touching him while he was hurt and vulnerable would have been a kind of cruelty—a taking advantage that she had refused herself. But she had noticed everything. She had been perfectly aware of his body’s response to her.
And she had been flushed herself, embarrassingly and undeniably.
Kasha made her choice. The fist her hands had been clenched in slowly opened—and she laid her palm flat against his back, the muscles trembling beneath her touch, and smoothed it slowly downward.
He groaned and bit down on a curse.
“Kasha, please—”
“Leon. Look at me.”
“What are you—”
He turned.
His eyes were red, bloodshot and burning.
Kasha held his gaze, and then—quietly, deliberately—let the blanket she had been holding fall.
Her pale, slight form was suddenly bare in the dim light. Leon’s eyes flew open wide, and from somewhere deep in his chest came a sound of undisguised, agonized want.
“Leon. Did I ever tell you?” Her voice was low and even. “When I woke up in this new life—I decided something.”
Silence.
“That I was going to find what I wanted—not wait for someone to drop it in my hands out of charity—and go take it for myself.”
“…Kasha.”
“You’re one of those things. What I want. The man I want.”
Leon’s expression fractured with something between longing and anguish.
“Kasha, but right now—the curse—”
“I’m not afraid of the curse. What I’m actually afraid of is standing here, watching the pain of someone I want—and being powerless to do a single thing about it.”
In her previous life, she had watched the holy knight die alone and quietly in front of her. He was alive now. Standing before her.
Before, she hadn’t even understood her own feelings well enough to name what she wanted from him. But things were different now.
Kasha Rüschino, shame of the Rüschino household, wanted the beautiful holy knight Leon Aranias.
She wanted to pull him out of his pain. She wanted to live alongside him and take hold of every good thing they had both been denied in another life.
And Leon, hearing her quiet words—knew.
That she meant every syllable. That she was not afraid of the cursed, broken thing he became. That she genuinely wanted him.
And in the instant he understood that, something warm, something overwhelmingly tender and enormous, surged upward through his chest.
Only she had ever made him feel this. That specific warmth that made something flutter behind his ribs. The feeling that had pulled him back from the edge of the curse, more than once.
The need to protect her entirely. The need to do whatever she required. This feeling—what other people called love—he recognized it for what it was.
And then, out of nowhere, the strange certainty he had felt that first day in the imperial library—the day he had used his holy power on her—returned to him.
That he would not harm her. That the curse could not make him.
The coiled tension in his muscles began to release, one strand at a time.
You’re right, Kasha. If what you told me is true—then this is my second life, too.
In the life she had described, he had died pointlessly and alone, leaving her behind. He had never recognized the one person who had truly believed in him and tried to protect him.
This time would be different. For both of them.
Leon slowly uncurled himself. The ferocious, consuming redness in his eyes receded, and the color that returned to them was something new—something that his colleagues would not have recognized as belonging to their cold and distant captain at all.
This was the look of a man who had chosen, for the first time, to let himself want something openly. To stop pretending otherwise.
His eyes curved at the corners, low and intent.
“Wanting what I want—when it’s right in front of me—and refusing to take it… yes.” A pause. “That would be hypocrisy.”
He said it quietly, his back still against the cave wall, and opened his arms.
Kasha moved to him without hesitation, without embarrassment, without a single moment of second-guessing—and folded herself into his hold, her face against his chest.
Her cool skin settled against him, and what woke behind his eyes was not the dirty, degrading force of the curse—but something clean and blind and absolute. The desire of a man who loves.
“So. May I have you, Kasha Rüschino?”
His voice, low and heated with unmistakable want, grazed the curve of her ear.
She shivered, and tilted her head back.
As if that were the signal, Leon’s burning lips came down and covered hers.
