The Duke of Carlisle's private audience with the Emperor lasted less than half an hour.
Elliot had spent every minute of it standing outside the chamber doors, hands clasped behind his back, spine rigid with the particular tension of a man who knew something momentous was occurring but had been given no information whatsoever about its nature.
When the doors finally opened, he bowed.
"Your Grace."
Lennox Carlisle emerged with the same unhurried stride with which he had entered—neither hastened by triumph nor slowed by defeat. His expression, as always, revealed nothing.
Elliot fell into step beside him, questions multiplying behind his teeth. What had the Duke and the Emperor discussed? What could possibly have been resolved in so brief a meeting? Had the Emperor agreed to whatever demand had been made, or—
Then Elliot noticed the Duke's hands.
Cradled in one broad palm—those elegant, scarred hands that had wielded swords and signed death warrants with equal indifference—sat a small figurine.
Silver. Shaped like a dove with half-spread wings.
The little bird was exquisitely crafted, each feather rendered in delicate detail, the curve of its outstretched wings suggesting the precise moment between stillness and flight. It fit entirely within the Duke's palm, fragile and luminous against the hard landscape of his fingers.
And it looked ***utterly*** wrong there.
The silver dove, with its gentle pose and quiet beauty, belonged in a lady's curio cabinet or on a child's bedside table—not in the hands of a man whose very name made seasoned soldiers lower their eyes. The contrast was so jarring that Elliot blinked, momentarily uncertain he was seeing correctly.
*Has His Grace ever owned anything like that before?*
Elliot tilted his head, studying the figurine with a faint frown. *A gift from the Emperor, perhaps? But no—it looks familiar somehow. As if I've seen it before, somewhere I can't quite…*
The thought dissolved, unfinished, when the Duke spoke.
"Elliot."
"Yes, Your Grace?"
"Return North with my knights." Lennox's gaze remained fixed ahead, his thumb tracing the curve of the dove's wing with an absent, almost unconscious motion. "And as soon as you arrive, begin preparations for the ceremony."
"The—I beg your pardon?"
The words registered a beat too late. *Return North with my knights* meant the Duke himself would ***not*** be returning North. And *ceremony*—what ceremony? What occasion could possibly warrant—
Elliot's mind scrambled to connect the fragments. The audience with the Emperor. The dove figurine. The word *ceremony* spoken as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
He seized on the most pressing question first.
"Your Grace—if you are not returning North, then where…?"
Lennox had already reached his horse—the massive black destrier that stood among the palace mounts like a wolf among lapdogs. He swung into the saddle with the fluid ease of a man born to the stirrup, gathered the reins in one hand, and looked down at his bewildered aide.
Something shifted in those cold gray eyes. Not warmth, exactly. Something closer to ***resolve***—the quiet, immovable certainty of a man who had made a decision and intended to see it through regardless of what the world placed in his path.
"I'm going to bring the priest."
Before Elliot could form a response—before he could even begin to parse what *bringing a priest* had to do with ceremonies and emperors and silver doves—the Duke turned his horse eastward and rode.
Elliot stood in the palace courtyard, watching the black figure diminish against the pale morning sky, and felt the distinct, disquieting sensation that the world had shifted beneath his feet while he wasn't looking.
— Aboard the Eastern Express —
"Oh…"
When Juliet opened her eyes, she found herself lying on the soft bed of her private compartment, swaddled in white linens that smelled faintly of lavender and engine oil.
The first thing she registered was pain.
Not sharp—not the white-hot agony of the severed magical connection—but a deep, diffuse ache that saturated every muscle in her body, as though she had been wrung out like a washcloth and hung up to dry. Her shoulders protested when she shifted. Her neck creaked. Even her fingers felt stiff and swollen.
*Why do I feel like I've been trampled by a carriage?*
Then the memories surfaced—disjointed at first, then cascading.
"That's right… yesterday."
The cage. The enormous wolf with fur like polished silver. Those burning golden eyes. The chains she'd unlocked with her butterflies. The bandits. The mother and child in the corner. The sword arcing downward. The devastating impact of being shoved to the floor by a shirtless stranger. The magical connection ***snapping*** like a bowstring cut mid-draw.
And then—impossibly, absurdly—*Romeo*.
*Romeo and Juliet.*
She pressed her palm over her eyes.
*It really did happen. All of it. It wasn't a fever dream.*
Though in hindsight, it certainly felt like one.
Juliet eased herself out of bed, moving gingerly, testing each limb before trusting it with her weight.
The first voices to greet her were, as always, rather demanding ones.
<You. Finally. Opened. Your. Eyes!>
<Mistress! Greetings. You. Good. Morning!>
A small constellation of butterflies drifted freely around the compartment, their wings pulsing with a soft blue luminescence. They fluttered near the ceiling, circled the lamp fixture, alighted briefly on the curtain rod before launching themselves back into the air—restless, energetic, practically *vibrating* with enthusiasm.
When they spoke their clumsy approximation of a morning greeting—*good morning*, as though they were human acquaintances meeting over breakfast—there was an unmistakable note of excitement in the fragmented words.
Juliet eyed them warily.
*Is it my imagination, or is the demon getting better at imitating human behavior?*
It wasn't her imagination. Each day, the butterfly's speech patterns grew slightly more sophisticated, its mimicry of human customs slightly more convincing. The progression was subtle enough to dismiss in isolation, but over weeks and months, the cumulative effect was… disconcerting.
"…Yes. Hello," Juliet replied, deliberately flat.
She had learned through painful experience that excessive politeness only encouraged him. Show the demon too much warmth, and he became insufferable—a needy, chattering presence that followed her every movement and commented on her every action with the relentless enthusiasm of a child starved for attention.
<Hello?>
The butterfly seized on the word like a dog catching a thrown stick.
<Hello. Good. Morning.>
<Hello! Hello!>
He repeated it eagerly, rolling the new word around as though tasting it, testing its shape, committing it to whatever served as memory in a being made of mana and hunger.
Juliet poured herself a glass of water from the bedside carafe and drank deeply, ignoring the chorus of greetings echoing around the compartment.
*He's like a petulant five-year-old,* she thought, watching a butterfly land on the rim of her glass and peer at the water with apparent fascination. *Sulks if you ignore him. Preens if you praise him. Throws tantrums if he doesn't get his way.*
She recalled, with a faint snort, the demon's grandiose claim about his true nature.
*"A powerful demon living in another dimension."*
*If this is what a powerful demon looks like, I shudder to think what the lesser ones are.*
Still, there was no denying that the butterflies were in unusually high spirits this morning.
Juliet noticed it as she made the bed—watching them from the corner of her eye as they traced lazy spirals through the slanting sunlight. Their wings glowed with a richer, deeper blue than she had seen in months, the color saturated and vivid, like sapphires held up to candlelight.
*There's only one explanation for that.*
"You had quite the feast yesterday, didn't you?"
The butterflies' luminescence intensified—a guilty flicker, quickly suppressed.
The bandits on the train had provided the demon with exactly the kind of sustenance he craved: dark, potent fear, drawn from minds steeped in violence and cruelty. The richer the emotions, the more nourishing they were. And yesterday's meal had been a banquet.
"And of course," Juliet added, pulling the bedsheet taut with more force than necessary, "today you managed to escape my control again."
She sighed.
It wasn't a coincidence. It was a pattern. Over time, more and more butterflies had been slipping free of her command—manifesting without permission, speaking without being addressed, acting of their own volition. Each occurrence was minor in isolation. Together, they formed a trend she could not ignore.
The demon was growing stronger. And stronger meant harder to contain.
While Juliet changed out of her nightclothes, the butterflies drifted near the open window, their blue wings catching the morning breeze. Their contentment was palpable—a warm, buzzing satisfaction that pressed against the edges of her awareness like sunlight through thin curtains.
She could guess the reasons easily enough.
The first was hunger, now sated. A well-fed demon was a happy demon.
The second was far more significant.
*I left the Duke.*
The butterflies had never hidden their feelings about Lennox Carlisle. From the moment Juliet had first summoned them in the North—tentatively, fearfully, in the privacy of her empty chambers—the demon had recoiled from the Duke's presence like a flame from water.
Not merely disliked him. ***Feared*** him.
The distinction was important.
Juliet had pressed for an explanation many times. *Why do you hate him? What is it about the Duke that frightens you?* Each time, the demon either deflected with evasive silence or refused to engage entirely, retreating into the wordless hum of wings against glass.
Until one day, when persistence finally cracked the wall—just barely.
She had asked the question again, expecting the usual silence. Instead, the butterflies had erupted into agitated motion, spiraling through the air in tight, anxious loops, and produced a string of fractured words that seemed torn from somewhere deep and reluctant:
<I hate. The man. The shadow. Nearby.>
<Crossed. Hound. Border. Before.>
<Traitor. Cat.>
<Mistress. Everything is fine. Don't worry.>
Juliet had stared at them, baffled.
*Shadow? Hound? Traitor cat?*
The answer was so fragmented, so riddled with words that bore no obvious connection to one another, that she couldn't extract meaning from it no matter how she rearranged the pieces. It was like trying to read a book with every third page torn out—shapes that suggested a narrative, but no coherent story.
It was the only time the demon had ever attempted to explain his fear. After that single, cryptic outburst, he had returned to his usual deflections.
<Man. I hate. But not you. Only you.>
<My mistress. Kind. Yes?>
The conversation had dissolved, as it always did, into flattery. The demon's preferred escape route.
In any case, one thing was certain: after the day Lennox had allowed his mana to flow through Juliet's body, the butterflies had not once escaped her control. The Duke's power—cold, vast, suffocating—had acted as a leash far more effective than anything Juliet herself could impose.
Now that leash was gone.
And the demon was *celebrating*.
<Mistress. Are you tired?>
The question drifted to her as she fastened the last button of her traveling dress.
She didn't answer.
<Mistress? Are you in pain?>
*I'm deciding how to manage a chatty demon without a Duke-shaped muzzle,* Juliet thought dryly. *Give me a moment.*
She sighed, smoothed her skirt, and opened the compartment door—
And found herself staring at a silver-haired man who was fast asleep against it.
"…Roy?"
He had been leaning against the outside of her door, his long body folded into an improbable arrangement of limbs that suggested he'd started the night sitting upright and gradually surrendered to gravity. His head was tilted at an angle that would guarantee a stiff neck by morning. His silver hair fell across his closed eyes in disheveled waves.
The door's movement—and the sudden loss of its support—sent him lurching forward.
"Oh—!"
The speed with which he recovered was ***terrifying***.
One instant he was half-falling into her compartment; the next he was on his feet, towering over her, every trace of drowsiness burned away by reflexes that operated faster than conscious thought. The transition from sleep to full alertness happened in the space of a blink—fluid, seamless, *predatory*.
Then his golden eyes focused on her face, and the predator vanished. In its place stood something that looked remarkably like an overgrown puppy caught chewing a slipper.
"Juliet…"
Roy's attempt to appear as though he had arrived at her door moments ago—through sheer coincidence, naturally, and certainly not because he had been sleeping against it like a loyal hound all night—was so transparently unconvincing that Juliet had to suppress a smile.
His recovery was smooth, she'd grant him that. The way he straightened his spine, squared his shoulders, and assumed an expression of casual surprise was performed with the practiced grace of a courtly dance.
*Should I applaud?*
His warm golden eyes widened as they settled on her, surprise and something softer flickering in their depths—as though the sight of her, rumpled and bleary-eyed in a doorway, was somehow genuinely astonishing to him.
Juliet let out a small, breathless laugh, caught off guard by her own reaction. Hearing her name in his voice—*Juliet*, spoken with that particular warmth, as though the word itself were something precious—made her feel oddly exposed.
*I'm glad he asked me to call him Roy. If I had to say* Romeo *out loud, I think I'd die of embarrassment.*
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
The unspoken question hung between them: *You didn't spend the entire night outside my door, did you?*
"Well, I…"
Roy ran a hand through his hair, making a halfhearted attempt to tame the silver chaos. The gesture bought him time but accomplished nothing else.
Juliet took the opportunity to look him over properly.
He was, mercifully, fully dressed today—a dark shirt beneath a fitted coat, boots laced to the knee. The cloak his subordinate had given him the previous day was nowhere in sight, replaced by clothes that actually fit his large frame. He looked less like a half-feral creature and more like a gentleman.
A very *tall* gentleman.
Looking up at his face required Juliet to tilt her head back at an angle that sent a twinge of protest through her already-sore neck. She tried to take a half-step backward, seeking a more comfortable vantage point—
"…!"
Roy's hand closed around hers.
The movement was quick—not rough, but decisive. His fingers wrapped around her wrist with a gentle firmness that stopped her retreat as effectively as a wall.
Juliet blinked, startled.
"Here."
Before she could react, she felt him press something small and cool into her palm.
She looked down.
A hairpin.
*Her* hairpin—the last one, the one that had slipped free when she fell yesterday. She had recovered the others from the carriage floor, crawling on her hands and knees between overturned seats and unconscious bandits, but this final pin had eluded her no matter where she searched.
"Where did you find it?" she asked softly. Then, as the implication settled: "You waited here all this time… to give this to me?"
Roy nodded.
His face ***lit up***.
There was no other word for it. The expression that spread across his handsome features was so openly, artlessly delighted—so entirely disproportionate to the act of returning a hairpin—that it transformed him. The sharp angles of his jaw and cheekbones softened. His golden eyes shone with a warmth that was almost tactile. Every line of his massive body radiated the unmistakable energy of a creature seeking approval.
*He looks like he's waiting to be told he's done a good job.*
And unbidden, a memory surfaced from somewhere deep and tender.
*Roro.*
The gray puppy she'd had when she was five years old—a small, wriggling ball of fur and adoration who had followed her through the Montague mansion's echoing corridors as though she were the center of the universe. Roro had possessed exactly this expression: that quivering, full-bodied joy that overtook him whenever Juliet came into view, his stubby tail wagging so furiously that his entire hindquarters swayed with the effort.
Looking now at Roy—enormous, silver-haired, built like a siege weapon—with those sparkling golden eyes and that barely contained excitement, Juliet could see Roro's ghost superimposed over him like a double exposure.
*A very large, very handsome puppy.*
She bit the inside of her cheek. *Hard.*
*Do not laugh. Do* ***not*** *laugh.*
A faint prickle of awareness drew her attention back into the compartment.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The butterflies had gone completely still.
They perched along the windowsill in a silent row, wings folded, their blue glow dimmed to barely a flicker. Not a single one moved. Not a single fragmented word drifted through the air.
*As expected.*
The demon had always fallen quiet in the presence of a Sword Master—subdued the way a candle flame shrinks in a strong wind. The Duke's mana had suppressed him through sheer overwhelming force. A High Priest's holy aura achieved the same effect through spiritual pressure.
A Sword Master operated differently. Their bodies existed outside the framework of magic entirely—rejecting mana at the most fundamental level. For a creature made *of* mana, being near one was like standing at the edge of a void.
Roy's presence had silenced the demon more effectively than any command Juliet could have issued.
*Useful,* she noted. Then, immediately: *Don't get used to it. He's a stranger. He'll be gone soon.*
She turned back to Roy, and her gaze dropped to his hands.
"Does it hurt?"
"Hm?"
Roy followed her gaze downward.
A laceration crossed the back of his right hand—a clean, shallow cut, probably sustained during the previous day's chaos. The skin around it was reddened and slightly swollen, the wound still raw and open.
He looked at it with the mild disinterest of a man noticing a smudge on his sleeve.
Then he raised the injured hand and began to—
"***Don't do that!***"
Juliet seized his wrist before the movement could complete itself.
Roy froze, blinking down at her in bewilderment.
"You were about to wipe it on your coat," Juliet said accusingly.
"…Was I?"
"You *were*." Her grip tightened. "Do you have any idea—an open wound, unwashed fabric, the amount of—" She stopped herself, taking in his expression. Wide golden eyes. Faintly tilted head. The guileless confusion of someone who had genuinely never considered that an open wound might present a problem.
"You could get an infection," she said, simplifying ruthlessly.
"…An infection?"
*It's like talking to a wall. A very handsome, very tall wall.*
Explaining bacterial theory to a man who apparently treated lacerations with the same concern he might give a wrinkled collar seemed pointless. So Juliet abandoned the attempt and defaulted to direct action.
"Come in," she said, stepping aside and gesturing into her compartment.
"Yes."
"Sit there."
"Yes."
"Give me your hand."
"All right."
Roy obeyed each instruction without hesitation, without question, without so much as a flicker of resistance. He sat where she pointed, extended his hand when she asked, and held perfectly still as she retrieved the small medical kit from her traveling case.
*He's like a well-trained dog at the veterinarian's office,* Juliet thought, uncorking the bottle of disinfectant. *Obedient. Trusting. Completely unbothered.*
She dabbed the solution onto a clean cloth and pressed it to the wound.
The disinfectant stung—she knew it did, because she'd used it on herself often enough to know the sharp, biting burn it produced on raw skin. Roy's hand didn't even twitch. His expression remained placid, his golden eyes fixed on her face rather than on the wound she was tending.
He wasn't watching the treatment. He was watching *her*.
"It must hurt," she murmured, more to fill the silence than from genuine concern. A man who could shatter iron bars with his bare hands was unlikely to be troubled by a splash of antiseptic.
Roy said nothing. He simply continued to watch her—the way her fingers moved, the small crease of concentration between her brows, the careful precision with which she wound the bandage around his hand.
"There. That's all."
Juliet tied off the bandage and sat back, examining her work. The wrapping was functional rather than elegant—a little loose at the edges, slightly uneven in its layering—but it would hold.
"Don't touch it," she added, noticing Roy's immediate inclination to investigate the bandage with his other hand. "The knot isn't tight enough to survive fidgeting."
He stopped at once.
"Yes."
His hand withdrew. His golden eyes returned to her face. And the smile that spread across his features—slow, warm, incandescent—held such uncomplicated gratitude that Juliet felt something tighten unexpectedly behind her ribs.
She looked away.
*Don't,* she told herself firmly. *Don't mistake kindness for connection. Don't mistake proximity for permanence. You know better.*
But the warmth lingered—faint, persistent, impossible to fully extinguish—like the last ember of a fire she had thought long dead.