*Stop. You need to think about something else. Anything else — the complete opposite of these thoughts.*
Juliet pressed her eyes shut and consciously steered her mind toward something pleasant. Something light. Something that glittered.
*Shiny. Beautiful. Frivolous. Think of that instead.*
And so, obediently, her thoughts drifted back to her glass slippers — or rather, to the dresses and jewelry she had left behind in the Duke's mansion.
She had not taken a single thing. Every gown, every bracelet, every pair of earrings he had ever given her remained in that elegantly furnished room, untouched and neatly arranged, as though their owner had merely stepped out for a stroll and would return before supper.
"If I could, I would have burned every last dress," she murmured to the empty air. "Just to get rid of this feeling in my chest."
A bitter laugh escaped her lips.
*What a sight that would have been.* A bonfire of silks and satins and hand-stitched lace, blazing in the courtyard — a funeral pyre for a dead affair. She didn't know the exact value of those gowns, but she suspected some of them cost more than entire houses in the capital's better districts. Reducing them to ashes would have been obscene. Wasteful beyond forgiveness.
And yet it would have been the right thing to do.
"Ah... and that necklace."
Her smile softened, turning inward, turning painful.
If she were the kind-hearted heroine of a fairy tale — the sort of girl who wept prettily into silk handkerchiefs and pined gracefully for her lost love — she would have been crying right now. But Juliet's thoughts were not occupied by Lennox's face, or his voice, or the warmth of his hands. They were occupied by the magnificent dresses and exquisite jewels she had abandoned in his home, and the sharp, petty sting of knowing she would never wear them again.
"Apparently, vanity isn't beneath me after all."
But Juliet had never considered herself sweet or kind, so she saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
A new thought surfaced, unbidden and unwelcome.
*What will happen when someone takes the place beside him?*
Lennox would forget her. He always did. His previous lovers had been discarded and replaced with the same effortless ease with which one changed gloves at the turn of a season. Before long, a new woman would occupy the seat at his table, the space in his bed, the role that Juliet had filled for seven years — and she would fill it just as capably, because the role itself required nothing more than silence, beauty, and the willingness to ask no questions.
But despite all of this — despite knowing she had no claim, no right, no ground to stand on — one thought clawed at Juliet with a bitterness she could not suppress:
*The things he gave me could so easily be passed to her.*
Of course it didn't matter to Lennox. Jewelry was jewelry. A necklace did not remember whose throat it had adorned.
Even if he draped every sapphire and diamond she had left behind around his new mistress's neck, Juliet had no right to protest. She was the one who had walked away. She was the one who had left everything behind. She had forfeited the privilege of outrage the moment she set her butterfly loose and vanished into the night.
So she did the only thing still within her power.
She made a wish — small, foolish, and fiercely private.
*Please. Don't let my necklace adorn the neck of a faceless woman. That's all I ask.*
"Maybe I should have left him a note," she mused, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. "'Don't let anyone else wear my necklace.' Or perhaps I should have asked him to sell it back to me at a reasonable price."
A quiet laugh — barely a breath — slipped from her.
But there had been no time for notes. No time for sentimental gestures or carefully worded farewells. What was done was done.
It was time to clear her thoughts. Smile calmly. And say goodbye to all of it — decisively, irrevocably, without looking back.
*If you wanted him so badly, you should have thought of that sooner. Juliet Montague, you are acting like a fool. An absurd, pathetic fool. This is exactly the ending you chose, isn't it?*
She had known from the very beginning that this day would come. She had known, with the same certainty with which she knew her own name, that one day she would run — exactly like this, under cover of darkness, with nothing but the clothes on her back and a heart full of things she had never said.
Her laughter died.
If she had taken more time — if she had prepared herself more carefully for this severance — perhaps she could have left without this unbearable ache lodged beneath her ribs.
Or perhaps, given enough time, *he* would have said goodbye to her first. Easily. Without regret. The way he always did.
"I really am completely stupid."
*Now* was the perfect time to end it. She had been deceiving herself for far too long already — living inside the fragile illusion that she could stay just a little longer, clinging to the flickering anticipation of a chance that was never going to come.
He would be the same Lennox Carlisle until the very end. Men like him did not change. She had promised herself at the outset that she, too, would remain unchanged — that she would endure without complaint, that she would not waver, that she would not break.
But in the end, she hadn't been strong enough. She broke first. She left first.
And unlike him, she had been preparing for this separation for the entire seven years they were together — though he had never known it.
If they had been on Carlisle lands — in the heart of the North, surrounded by his soldiers, his servants, his iron authority — escape would have been impossible. But she had planned this for a long time, waiting for the one moment when circumstance and celebration would conspire to give her a door through which to disappear.
And she had walked through it.
*It's done. Let it be done.*
---
Having banished her melancholy with the ruthlessness of a woman accustomed to silencing her own heart, Juliet surveyed her surroundings.
The station was sunk in shadow. The gaslights along the platform burned low, casting weak amber pools that did little to push back the darkness. She had been sitting on a wooden bench near the far end of the platform, away from the main concourse, waiting for a train that had yet to announce its arrival.
She frowned.
It was too quiet.
When she had first arrived, there had been other passengers — a handful of travelers scattered along the platform, bundled against the cold, their presence unremarkable but tangible. Now, the platform was deserted. The benches were empty. The air was still.
*How long has it been this silent?*
Something was wrong.
Juliet rose to her feet, instinct prickling along the back of her neck like the brush of cold fingers. Her hand found the hem of her dress and gripped it — an unconscious gesture, the body preparing for flight before the mind had finished its calculations.
Then she heard footsteps.
They echoed through the empty station with a steady, unhurried cadence — the sound of a man who was in no rush because he already knew his quarry had nowhere left to run. And somehow, impossibly, the rhythm of those footsteps was *familiar*. She had heard them a thousand times — crossing marble floors, descending grand staircases, approaching her in the dark.
Juliet froze.
A figure emerged from the shadows.
He stopped before her, and in the weak gaslight, she saw him clearly.
His clothes were in disarray — a state so foreign to his usual immaculate appearance that for a moment she almost didn't recognize him. His cravat was gone entirely. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing the strong column of his throat. His coat hung open, creased and dusty, as though he had been running through streets without a care for what it did to the fabric.
His hair — always styled with meticulous precision, every black strand in its appointed place — was scattered across his forehead in damp, windswept disarray. His chest rose and fell visibly beneath his shirt, each breath deep and labored, the kind of breathing that came from sustained, furious exertion.
And yet, despite all of this — despite the dishevelment, the heavy breathing, the evidence of a man who had torn across the city like a thing possessed — he *smiled* at her.
Calmly. Easily. As though they had simply run into each other at a garden party.
"Should I say it's been a long time?"
*Of course.*
Of course it was him.
"...Lennox?"
There was only one man in the world who could smile like that — as though the chaos he left in his wake were merely a minor inconvenience, as though the world rearranged itself around his desires rather than the other way around.
Lennox Carlisle.
"I never imagined you hated me so much," he said, his voice light, almost conversational, "that you'd choose to flee from me under cover of night."
"But how—?"
The question stalled on her lips. Her gaze, which had been locked on his face, dropped — and found his left hand.
It was wrapped in a bandage. Clumsily, hastily, the linen wound in uneven layers by someone who clearly lacked patience for the task. The white fabric was soaked through with crimson, the stain spreading and darkening even as she watched. Drops of blood fell from his fingertips in a slow, steady rhythm, striking the stone platform with soft, wet sounds.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
The breath left Juliet's lungs.
In that instant, she understood — understood *exactly* how he had found her — and the realization struck her like a physical blow.
She had known, in an abstract and theoretical way, that the capital's main temple housed a powerful artifact capable of tracking any individual within the city's walls. She had known of its existence when she planned her escape. But she had dismissed it as a possibility because the Duke of Carlisle had *no relationship* with the temple. He had been excommunicated. He had closed every house of worship in his territories. The priests despised him, and he regarded them with the contemptuous indifference of a man who had never once needed anything they possessed.
Until tonight.
"The Eye of Argus," she whispered.
He said nothing. His smile remained.
"You used a sacred relic."
The Eye of Argus — an artifact of immense holy power that required the user's own blood as a catalyst. A great deal of blood, freely given, offered in pain. It was not a tool designed for convenience. It was a tool designed for *desperation*.
And he had used it. He — the excommunicated Duke, the scourge of the faithful, the man who had never bent his knee before any altar — had gone to the temple in the dead of night, forced his way inside, and bled himself onto a sacred relic just to find a woman on a train platform.
"You didn't need to go that far," Juliet said quietly.
The smile vanished from Lennox's face as though it had been cut away with a knife.
"What about my child?"
The words fell between them like stones into black water.
"...What do you mean, *your child?*"
"The child in your womb. It's mine, isn't it?"
---
## — The Man Who Followed —
Every muscle in Lennox's body was coiled tight, vibrating with the effort of restraint.
He could not tell anymore whether his fury was directed at Juliet or at himself, and in this moment, the distinction hardly mattered. What mattered was that he had found her.
The instant he had seen the silhouette of a lone woman standing on a darkened platform — slim, still, unmistakable even at a distance — he had known. The recognition was not rational. It was something deeper, something lodged in his bones, in the architecture of his blood.
*There she is.*
Her clothes were carefully chosen — practical, understated, the wardrobe of a woman who intended to travel unnoticed. And when she saw him step from the shadows, she flinched. Her hand flew to the hem of her dress, fingers closing around the fabric, her body coiling with the unmistakable impulse to *run*.
There was nothing in any of this that should have wounded him. She was doing exactly what she had planned to do. Exactly what she had prepared for. And yet, seeing it — seeing *her* — poised to flee from him like a bird from a predator, anger erupted inside his chest with the sudden, consuming violence of a flame engulfing dry timber.
*You don't like it, do you?*
The thought arrived in a voice that was not quite his own, and with it came a memory — unbidden, unwanted — of a woman who had once smiled at him as though she understood him completely. A beautiful summer flower. A quiet, watchful presence that had occupied seven years of his life without ever demanding a single thing.
*Attachment and love — those two afflictions must be severed before they become a nuisance.*
He had always believed this. He had built his life around this principle. He had practiced it with every woman who had ever shared his bed, cutting the thread cleanly and walking away without looking back.
But this — *this* — was not clean. This was not rational. This was not him.
*Was there ever anything special about her?*
Juliet Montague had stayed with him far longer than any of her predecessors. But aside from being the first to leave before he dismissed her, she was not a special woman. There was no reason — no *logical* reason — to chase her through the streets of the capital, to bleed himself onto a temple relic, to stand before her now with his heart slamming against his ribs and his left hand dripping crimson onto the platform stones.
And yet here he stood.
He had sent his rational arguments to hell. He had shattered his own rules like the worthless brooch on that boy's shirt. He had surrendered to impulse and emotion — the two forces he had spent his entire life mastering — and let them drag him through the night to this dark and empty place.
Because he *had* to find her.
Because the alternative was unacceptable.
"I want to know what happened to my child."
"...What do you mean by *your child?*"
"The child in your belly. It's mine, isn't it?"
"I don't—"
---
## — The Misunderstanding —
*His child?*
Juliet, who had repeated the question almost involuntarily, felt her thoughts stutter and derail like a carriage hitting a stone.
*What kind of nonsense is he talking about?*
"No!" The word burst from her, sharp and immediate. "That's not true!"
Heat flooded her face — a fierce, mortified blush that burned from her collarbones to the roots of her hair.
And only then — only in the blazing clarity of that embarrassment — did she understand what had happened.
*Oh my God.*
*He thinks I ran away carrying his baby.*
The absurdity of it was so immense, so staggering, that for a moment she could do nothing but stare at him — this furious, bleeding, magnificent fool of a man — while her mind raced to piece together how such a monumental misunderstanding had taken root.
When she failed to respond — when she simply stood there, lips parted, eyes wide, rendered momentarily speechless by the sheer scale of the error — Lennox's expression grew colder still. His jaw tightened. The red of his eyes seemed to deepen, darkening like embers being fed.
"The pharmacist brought an order form," he said, his voice low and dangerously controlled. "It showed that you ordered two medications — one to terminate a pregnancy, and another to support fetal development."
*Oh.*
And then the entire picture snapped into focus.
*Donovan.* The pharmacist's son. He must have gone to the mansion looking for her, and somehow Lennox had gotten hold of him — and the prescriptions.
Silphium flowers. Mistletoe. Laid side by side on a piece of paper, they told a damning story: a woman hedging her bets, ordering the means to end a pregnancy and the means to protect one, unable to decide which path to take.
But his conclusions were ***wrong***.
Could she — *would* she — ever have allowed herself to become pregnant, knowing with absolute certainty that she would have to leave? Could she have condemned an innocent child to be born into the wreckage of a relationship that was never meant to last — fatherless, caught between a mother who fled and a man who did not know how to love?
She had taken the silphium tea faithfully. Every day. Without exception. The contraceptive had been her quiet, private discipline — her one concession to the reality that the fairy tale would end and the glass slippers would shatter.
But the silphium flowers and mistletoe she had ordered several months ago were never intended for her.
They were for her maid.
The girl — one of the Montague household's last remaining servants, who had been with Juliet since childhood — was not one of Lennox's people. She had served Juliet loyally for years, and she had been planning to leave service soon to marry her sweetheart, a young sailor.
Two months ago, the maid had come to Juliet with tears streaming down her face and terror in her voice.
"I think I'm going to have a baby, miss."
Her fiancé's ship had departed weeks earlier and failed to return on schedule. Rumors circulated — storms, pirates, wreckage spotted off the coast. The maid, consumed with worry for her missing beloved, had only belatedly realized that she was carrying his child.
Juliet had held the weeping girl's hands and spoken to her gently, promising that she would help her no matter what she decided.
Then she had ordered the two medicines — explaining carefully that if the maid chose to end the pregnancy, a mixture of mistletoe and silphium flowers would allow her to do so safely and discreetly. And if she chose to keep the child, mistletoe alone would help protect the growing life within her from harm.
The choice, Juliet had told her, was hers and hers alone.
Fortune, for once, had been kind. The missing sailor returned safely not long after — delayed by weather, not disaster — and the maid married him in a small, joyful ceremony. She left Juliet's service with tears of gratitude and a belly just beginning to round. The couple now lived in a distant town, happily awaiting the birth of their first child.
Juliet had been genuinely glad. She had even planned to send a gift when the baby arrived — a small, quiet act of love from a woman who suspected she might never hold a child of her own.
*But how do I explain all of this to Lennox now?*
The situation was so absurd — so perfectly, catastrophically absurd — that Juliet couldn't help herself.
She laughed.
It was a soft sound, helpless and incredulous, rising from somewhere deep in her chest — the kind of laughter that comes not from joy but from the overwhelming recognition that the universe has arranged itself into a shape too ridiculous to bear with a straight face.
But Lennox did not hear what she heard. He did not see the absurdity. He did not feel the relief or the exasperation or the bone-deep weariness that made the laughter spill from her lips like water from a cracked glass.
What he saw was this: a woman he had chased across the city, who had drugged his guard, deceived his servants, and vanished into the night — laughing at him. In the dark. With his blood still dripping onto the stones between them.
His calm expression ***shattered***.
What replaced it was something raw and wild — something that had been caged behind that easy smile since the moment he stepped from the shadows, and now, at last, broke free.