A few hours later, Juliet opened her eyes and found herself lying on a soft bed.
For a long, disoriented moment, she simply lay there — blinking at an unfamiliar ceiling, feeling the cool linen beneath her palms, listening to the silence. The fever had receded. The searing heat that had consumed her from the inside was gone, replaced by a dull, full-body ache that throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
Frankly, she felt far better than she had any right to.
*Could it all have been a dream?*
*⟨Finally, you opened your eyes.⟩*
*⟨Hey, mistress. I'm here.⟩*
Juliet stared at the ceiling.
*Of course. Just a delusion conjured by my fevered mind.*
*⟨The man. That man. He's not here.⟩*
*⟨I don't like it. Here.⟩*
*⟨Come on. Let's leave. Quickly. Hurry.⟩*
The butterflies — if that was even the right word for them — were still with her. But they had changed. They were smaller now, no larger than dewdrops, their blue-white glow dimmed to a faint shimmer. And their voices had changed, too — softer, simpler, halting. They spoke the way very young children speak, sounding out each word as though they had only just learned what language was.
Yesterday, they had been a roaring flood. Now they were a trickle.
*Strange. I must have been hallucinating when I couldn't speak. Delirious with fever and pain, hearing things that weren't —*
But they *were* there. Hovering at the edges of her vision, flickering in and out like embers caught in a draft. Real. Persistent. Impossible to ignore.
When Juliet tried to sit up, a bolt of pain lanced through her body — so sharp and sudden that her eyes clenched shut and a hiss escaped through her teeth.
*It still hurts.*
But the pain was manageable. Familiar, even — not the bone-deep, structural agony of the night before, but the heavy, bruised feeling of the day after brutal exertion. Every muscle ached. Her lips were raw where she had bitten them. A lingering dizziness tilted the room gently when she turned her head, and her throat felt as though she had swallowed gravel.
But she could move. She could stand.
She could walk.
Juliet ignored the pain and crossed the unfamiliar bedroom on unsteady legs. Her hand found the door handle.
***Creak.***
The young man sitting in the chair just outside startled to his feet, nearly knocking the chair over in his haste.
"You're awake already?"
He was handsome — strikingly so — with a tousled mane of red curls and an open, expressive face that looked as though it had been designed for easy laughter.
Jude Heyon.
Juliet knew the name. The youngest son of a family that had served the Emperor loyally for generations, Jude had caused no small stir in the capital when he abruptly left imperial service to pledge himself to the Duke of Carlisle. The gossips had feasted on that story for weeks.
And Jude, it seemed, knew her as well — because his expression shifted into something careful and solicitous, and he said:
"Um — Miss Montagu. You must be hungry. Let me have something brought up, and I'll send for the doctor —"
"No."
"Oh — so you *can* talk?" A surprised laugh escaped him, bright and genuine.
Juliet did not smile.
"Where?"
"Ah." Jude's laugh softened. "The Duke is away at the moment —"
"Not him."
"Not…?" The word died on his lips. His smile faltered. He studied her face — the hollowed eyes, the bloodless skin, the terrible stillness of her expression — and understanding arrived like a blow.
In the years to come, Jude would remember this moment and think that if he ever wanted to laugh again, he should think at least a hundred times before doing so.
"My parents," Juliet said. "Show me."
The grin vanished from Jude's face as though it had never existed.
---
"Miss Montagu — you shouldn't see this."
"Please. I need to see them with my own eyes."
"My lady, I must strongly advise against —"
"Please."
No one could break her.
Not the doctor, who spoke gently of shock and fragile constitutions. Not the head maid, who wrung her hands and cited the Duke's orders. Not even the Duke's secretary — a man accustomed to managing difficult situations with diplomatic finesse — could find a single argument that made her waver.
Juliet repeated the same words, over and over, with the same pale, immovable face. Her voice never rose. Her expression never changed. She simply would not stop asking.
Finally, the secretary exhaled — a long, defeated sigh — and turned to the guards.
"Let her in."
The doors to the cool underground room swung open.
The air inside was cold and still, thick with the scent of stone and something faintly herbal — preserving salts, perhaps, or dried flowers laid among the linens. The room was windowless, lit by a single oil lamp that cast a small, wavering circle of amber light.
And there, in that light, she saw them.
The bodies the Duke and his knights had recovered from the ruined temple the night before had been laid out with care. The Montagu couple rested side by side in a single coffin, their hands folded, their clothes changed, their faces washed clean of blood.
They looked peaceful.
They looked as though they were sleeping.
Juliet approached the coffin slowly, one step at a time, making no sound.
The secretary, who had braced himself for hysterics — for fainting, for collapse, for the kind of raw, animal grief he had witnessed at too many deathbeds — found himself unsettled by her calm. She stood at the coffin's edge and looked down at them, and her face showed nothing at all.
"Would you mind," Juliet said quietly, "if I sat here alone for a while?"
"Of course." The secretary bowed his head. "Call for me if you need anything."
He stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him.
He had taken no more than three steps down the corridor when the sound reached him.
A cry — *wrenched* from somewhere deep inside her, raw and ragged and so full of anguish that it seemed to tear the air itself apart.
The secretary stopped mid-stride. His hand gripped the wall.
He did not go back.
Some grief was not meant to be witnessed.
---
## — The Darkened Room —
It was only toward the middle of the night that Lennox remembered her existence.
He had been occupied with work all day — correspondence, reports, the tedious machinery of managing a duchy from a distance — and the girl he'd pulled from the ruins the previous night had not crossed his mind once. He had assumed, with the easy confidence of a man accustomed to servants who anticipated his every need, that she would be tended to, fed, examined by a physician, and sent home the moment she was well enough to stand.
"Where is she?" he asked, as an afterthought.
"Ah —"
The servant hesitated. Then told him.
Lennox was quiet for a moment.
"…Where?"
He had not expected that answer.
---
The Duke's capital residence was sprawling — a vast, elegant structure with more rooms than any single occupant could ever use, most of them sitting dark and empty while their master spent the majority of his year in his northern palace.
One of these forgotten spaces was a semi-basement annex at the far end of the east wing. No windows. No natural light. A room designed for storage, not habitation — cold and silent, smelling of damp stone and disuse.
Lennox descended the narrow stairs and pushed open the door.
In the near-total darkness, he saw her.
Juliet was kneeling on the bare stone floor, directly in front of the door behind which her parents' coffin lay. Her hands rested on her thighs, her back was straight, and her head was bowed — not in prayer, but in the posture of someone who had simply run out of reasons to move.
She had been there all day.
"What are you doing here?"
Silence.
Only then did Juliet raise her head. Her eyes found his face in the gloom, but they were distant — unfocused — as though she were looking at him through water, her thoughts still trapped somewhere he could not reach.
And yet she must have recognized him. The butterflies drifting lazily around her cast just enough pale blue light to make out features in the darkness, and his were not the kind one easily forgot.
Lennox stepped inside and settled himself on a white-draped couch against the far wall with the loose, unhurried ease of a man sitting down in his own study. His gaze moved briefly to the luminous shapes still circling Juliet — fewer now, noticeably fewer than the swarm that had filled the temple the night before — and his expression remained blank.
"You still can't speak?"
"…No. I'm fine now."
Juliet frowned slightly as her own voice echoed strangely inside her skull — doubled, as though she were hearing it from both inside and outside her head at once.
Lennox, as though he had read the thought directly from her mind, said:
"You should be careful. If the master fails to fulfill her role, they will consume her body."
"Master?"
"Whose voice do you think they borrowed?"
A chill ran through Juliet — sudden and deep, as though someone had poured ice water down her spine.
She listened again to the small, halting voices that murmured at the edges of her consciousness — *⟨mistress⟩, ⟨here⟩, ⟨hurry⟩* — and realized, with a sickening lurch, that they sounded exactly like her.
The same pitch. The same cadence. Her voice, fragmented and echoed back at her through a dozen tiny mouths.
"I heard you wanted to see me," Lennox said.
"Yes." Juliet rose slowly from her knees, her joints stiff and aching from hours on the cold stone. "There's something I need to tell you."
But instead of speaking, she paused — and looked at him.
Really looked at him, for the first time since they had met again.
In the faint blue glow of the butterflies, his features were sharp and clean — the strong jaw, the black hair falling carelessly across his forehead, the red eyes that gleamed like banked coals in the darkness. He sat with one arm draped along the back of the couch, his long legs crossed, his posture radiating the kind of absolute, unearned ease that only the truly powerful ever possessed.
It was strange — profoundly, unsettlingly strange — to see again the face of the man she had loved in her first life. To stand before him and know that he did not remember her. That she was no one to him. A stranger. A curiosity plucked from the wreckage of a ruined temple and brought home like a stray.
*I hate you.*
But the moment the thought formed, she knew it was a lie.
What she felt — standing in this dark room, her parents' bodies behind one door and her murderer lounging on the couch before her — was not hatred. It was something far more tangled than that. Hatred and tenderness, knotted together. Resentment and longing, braided so tightly she could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
She understood, with painful clarity, that the Lennox Carlisle sitting before her now and the man who had ended her life were not the same person. Not yet. Perhaps not ever, if she played this differently.
Juliet had spent the entire day kneeling before her parents' coffin, turning the question over and over in her mind like a stone in her hand.
*What do I do now?*
She did not want to go through *that* again — the slow unraveling, the years of devotion poured into a vessel that would never fill, the inevitable, crushing end.
But if she did nothing — if she walked away from this room and this man and tried to rebuild her life alone — then the same things would happen. The same patterns would repeat. The same ending would find her.
And there was Dahlia.
The moment Dahlia appeared, Juliet would be discarded — cast aside like a tool that had outlived its usefulness. It had happened before. It would happen again.
In her first life, Juliet had given Lennox everything. Her heart, her loyalty, her very existence. And to him, she had been nothing more than a means to an end.
If she changed nothing, the ending would be the same.
But Juliet could not deny the cold, practical truth that had crystallized in her mind during those long, silent hours beside the dead.
She needed him.
"I thought you said you had something to tell me," Lennox said, a thread of impatience in his voice.
"Yes."
Juliet thought of what he had whispered to her the night before — *stop using your mana, otherwise you will die* — and a memory surfaced from her first life, clear as glass.
It was from the early days of Dahlia's arrival at the Duke's palace — back when Juliet had still been living there, still believing herself loved, still orbiting Lennox like a moth circling a flame. She had overheard a conversation between two of Dahlia's maids, spoken in the careless, gossipy tones of women who assumed no one was listening.
*"Don't be silly — don't you know what it means to 'control mana'? It means they have to sleep together!"*
When a person first awakened their magical ability, the flow of mana through their body was volatile — wild and unstable, like a river in flood. Some rare individuals possessed an innate gift for managing this flow, as natural to them as breathing. But for most newly awakened mages, uncontrolled mana was *dangerous*. Left unchecked, it would burn through the body like fire through dry wood. Learning to regulate it properly — to channel and contain and release it with precision — typically required five or six years of careful study under a skilled mentor.
Juliet did not have five or six years. What she had was a body hemorrhaging mana at a rate that would kill her long before she learned to stop it.
What she needed was a partner.
Someone who could manipulate mana with the skill and precision to absorb her excess — to draw the overflow from her body through direct contact and keep her stable while she learned control. The method worked through touch: skin against skin, the partner's steady current anchoring the novice's chaotic one.
And the closer the bond between them — the deeper the trust, the greater the intimacy — the more effective the transfer became.
*That* was why Lennox had kissed her in the forest.
Not tenderness. Not whim. A calculated act of stabilization — the minimum contact required to keep her from dying on the spot.
But the fastest way — the most efficient, most reliable method of sustained mana regulation — was for the two partners to become lovers.
Juliet met his eyes in the darkness.
"Your Grace — I know exactly what you've been searching for."
Even in the gloom, she caught it: the sharp, immediate flash of crimson. His gaze, which had been idle and half-lidded a moment before, locked onto her with the sudden, focused intensity of a predator that has just scented blood.
In her first life, there had been powerful figures across the empire — the Duke of Carlisle among them — who spent years hunting for certain relics. To the untrained eye, these objects appeared ordinary: a gemstone, a ring, a fragment of carved bone. But in truth, they were artifacts of extraordinary rarity, capable of granting immense power to their possessors — even those who could not wield mana or divine energy.
And the relic Lennox had been seeking — obsessively, relentlessly, for over a decade — was a long-lost heirloom of the Carlisle bloodline.
The item itself was important. Its power was real, and it would be essential in the conflicts to come.
But the person who had disappeared with it mattered more.
***Dahlia Frann.***
Lennox's childhood friend — a girl as lovely as the flower for which she was named.
When Lennox's father died and the Northlands descended into chaos — his relatives circling the vacant throne like wolves, each more vicious than the last — Dahlia's parents, who had faithfully served the late Duke, had fled with their daughter.
They took the relic with them.
From the moment Lennox returned with an army at his back and seized the duchy by force — reclaiming by blood and iron the title that was rightfully his — he had been searching for the heirloom. And perhaps, beneath that search, he had been searching for Dahlia as well.
Juliet already knew how the story ended. Seven years from now, Lennox would recover the relic — and with it, the woman he had believed dead. Their reunion would be the beginning of everything Juliet remembered. And the end of everything she had been.
*But I will not tell him about Dahlia.*
How could she? How could she possibly explain that she knew a secret so deeply buried that not even Lennox's most trusted confidants were aware of it? To reveal knowledge of Dahlia would demand an explanation she could never give — not without unraveling the entire impossible truth of who she was and where she had come from.
No. She would offer him only the relic. The bait without the hook.
"So?" Lennox's voice was flat, unimpressed — but his eyes had not left hers, and in their depths, something watchful and dangerous had awoken. "Is that all you wanted to say?"
"I —"
"Because it sounds," he continued, a mocking edge sliding into his tone, "as though you intend to *blackmail* me with this."
*Blackmail?*
Juliet was silent for a moment. She let the word settle between them, turning it over the way she had turned the key between her fingers just two nights ago — examining it from every angle, testing its weight.
Then she spoke again, choosing each word with the care of someone laying stones across a river.
"I want to make a deal with you."