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"I know you better than you know yourself, Camilla. So what exactly was the point of all that?"
I muttered this under my breath as I made my way down the central staircase alone, still quietly replaying the evening's events.
I had read the original story enough times to have its contents well memorized. And watching Camilla's face go pale in that hallway had confirmed what I'd suspected for some time — gathering evidence of her affair had been the right move, even if I'd originally intended it purely as a dismissal measure. That evidence would keep her claws retracted for now.
*But she's not the kind of person who simply gives up.* Even restrained, she'd be waiting — biding her time, nursing her grudge, looking for the right opening to strike back.
Most likely that moment would come after her divorce from Count Dmitri. Until then, as long as I held the evidence, she couldn't afford to move against me recklessly. And since I intended to quietly dismantle Henry's investment scheme in the meantime — removing the financial cushion that made a divorce feasible for her at all — that waiting period would stretch considerably longer than it had in the original story.
*By the time she's ready to make her move, I'll have announced my own divorce and left the North entirely.*
The thought settled comfortably in my chest. I reached the second-floor lobby and slowed my pace, feeling the tension of the evening begin to ease.
Beyond the lobby, through the glass doors, the terrace was lit by pale moonlight. Someone was standing out there.
*Who...?*
I moved closer, curious — and then recognized him.
Adrian stood with his back half-turned, a crystal champagne glass in one hand, his eyes closed against the night breeze. The moonlight fell across the high line of his nose and the quiet set of his mouth. Every now and then he exhaled, slow and long, as though releasing something. His honey-blonde hair stirred in the wind.
With the dark sky spread behind him like a canvas, he looked precisely like a painting that someone had spent a great deal of time on.
I had stopped walking without noticing.
"Your Highness?"
His eyes opened. He saw me and smiled — warm and immediate.
"...Adrian."
A slightly shy quality came into his expression. He reached over and drew the glass door open.
"Would you like to come out? The night air is wonderful."
He extended his hand, courteous and easy.
I hesitated for just a moment. Then I took it and stepped through onto the terrace. The cool breeze touched my face at once, and I felt something in me loosen that I hadn't realized was tight.
"Adrian." I turned to look at him, the wind catching both our hair. "How is your father?"
The warmth in his expression softened into something more careful.
"My eldest brother is managing things well. But the next stage will be... difficult, I think."
"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it simply.
I rested a hand on his shoulder. He looked down at it with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"It's all right," he said. "My brother and his household carry the heavier burden — the succession needs to be settled. That takes precedence over everything else."
"If the succession is being decided..." I recalled what Mina had told me recently. "Isn't Adrian being put forward as a strong candidate?"
He glanced at me.
In the demon world, succession was determined by strength of ability rather than birth order. Most of the Monter family's inner circle, from what I'd heard, wanted Adrian — the second son, and by far the more magically gifted — to inherit. The Monter family held real influence in the demon world. If Adrian became its head, that was something worth celebrating.
*Though if it came to that, he'd no longer be here.*
I smiled before the thought could settle into something heavier.
"Is it strange, imagining yourself as head of the family?"
"Honestly, yes." He laughed quietly. "I've never particularly wanted it. The world is large, and there are people far more suited to that kind of role than I am. I've never been especially driven by ambition."
He paused.
"Until..." He stopped. Started again, more quietly. "Until not very long ago."
He was looking at the sky. I watched his profile in silence.
Then I shook myself lightly.
"Anyway — why are you out here alone? It's free social time now. There are rooms full of people inside."
Adrian turned and gave me a look of such deliberate innocence that I almost laughed.
"Why are *you* out here alone? It's free social time."
I conceded the point.
Behind him, a firework bloomed across the dark sky — red and gold, and then gone.
"...Probably because no one in there wants to talk to me for very long," he said, more quietly now.
"That can't be true. I saw at least three different ladies stealing glances at you this evening."
"Which is exactly the problem." He smiled, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "The more interest there is, the more firmly their families will discourage it. A half-blood demon is a fine thing to admire from a distance. A prospective son-in-law is something else entirely."
Another firework. Blue this time, spreading like a flower and then fading.
"Unless, perhaps, one has standing comparable to His Highness the Grand Duke's," he added, with a self-deprecating lift of his shoulder. "That changes the arithmetic somewhat."
The discrimination hadn't disappeared — not truly — in the six years since contact with the demon world had resumed. It had simply learned to dress itself more politely in certain company.
I was about to say something to that when Adrian spoke again. His voice had dropped, and there was a quality to it I hadn't heard before — not quite wistful, but something adjacent.
"In all my years, I've never been particularly envious of anyone. Or greedy for anything." He looked at the sky. "When I encountered the small cruelties that come with being what I am in the human world, I watched them with something like detached curiosity. I kept my distance from things. Nothing held me very strongly."
The fireworks painted brief color against the darkness and then dissolved.
"But tonight, of all nights—" His blue-violet eyes caught the light as he looked at me, and something vivid and new moved in their depths. "I found myself envious of His Highness the Grand Duke."
He said nothing else. He didn't need to.
---
In the carriage on the way back, Cedric watched Rebecca.
She had turned toward the window sometime in the first few minutes and stayed there — her temple resting against the glass, her gaze somewhere outside or perhaps nowhere at all. She sighed occasionally, small and quiet, and every time she did, Cedric had to look away before he thought better of it.
Because every time he looked at her mouth, he remembered the feel of it. The warmth of her hands at the back of his neck. The way she had pressed close enough that the distance between them ceased to be a distance at all.
What surprised him — genuinely surprised him — was how completely undisturbing he found the memory. Not unpleasant, not uncomfortable. If anything, the opposite. He kept returning to it without meaning to, and finding that each time he did, something in him wanted more rather than less.
*Two years into our marriage, she tried to kiss me.* He remembered that evening with strange clarity now. He had pulled back, told her firmly no, and then spent half the night unable to sleep for how unsettled the near-contact had left him.
Tonight he also would not sleep. But the reason was entirely different, and that difference had been quietly astonishing to sit with.
"We've arrived, Rebecca."
The carriage had drawn up to the front of the Dark Mansion without his noticing. Rebecca blinked and seemed to resurface from wherever she'd been.
"Ah..." She looked around. "Already."
The grounds were quiet and dark. No other carriage yet — Adrian and Bianca must still be on their way.
Cedric stepped down first and offered his hand as she descended. When she was on steady ground again, he kept her hand a moment longer than was necessary.
"You were quiet the entire journey. That's unlike you."
Rebecca tilted her face up at him. In the moonlight, her expression was thoughtful — and something else that he couldn't name immediately.
He noticed that his eyes had fallen to her lips.
He moistened his own, a reflex he was too slow to catch.
"You wouldn't like it if I told you what I was thinking," she said.
She turned and started walking toward the entrance.
Cedric stood still for a beat, parsing the words — then followed.
"Shall I walk you to the door?"
"Obviously."
She laughed softly at that — at his complete failure to think before speaking — and the sound of it moved through the quiet night air in a way that was difficult to ignore.
"I still can't quite adjust to this," she said, more to herself than to him.
"To what?"
"To you. You used to walk past me in corridors without breaking stride. You certainly never thought to ask whether I'd gotten home safely."
"We lived in the same mansion then."
"And were you sad when I wasn't there?" she asked, lightly mocking. "Deeply concerned for my welfare?"
Cedric said nothing. Rebecca smiled at whatever she saw in his face.
They had reached the front door. Both of them stopped, and for a moment there was only the night around them — the low sound of wind through the garden, the faint glitter of moonlight on the gravel path.
Cedric glanced at her. She was already looking at him — eyes tilted up, the corner of her mouth caught somewhere between amusement and something more serious.
"Cedric." Her voice had changed slightly — quieter, more deliberate. "You've been speaking tonight as though you'd do anything I asked."
He didn't have a ready answer for that.
"So—" She took one small step closer, and then another, until the space between them was the same impossible, breathless distance it had been in the banquet hall. Her red lips curved. "If I asked you to come upstairs with me right now..."
His breath caught.
"...would you say yes to that too?"
He was aware of his own pulse in a way that was frankly inconvenient.
*No. I can't do this. Not now.*
They were already separated — not yet publicly, but in every way that counted. He had no claim on her. No right to complicate what came next. If he let himself want this, and then she left — when she left — he would have no way to hold it together. He knew himself well enough to know that.
He was still working through that logic when her fingers found the buttons of his shirt.
She moved slowly, deliberately — one, and then the pause of a breath, and then the next — until her hand rested flat against his chest, over the place where his heart had abandoned all pretense of composure.
She rose onto her toes and brought her lips close to his ear.
"Cedric."
That voice. The warmth of her breath against his jaw.
Whatever remained of his carefully assembled reasoning evaporated cleanly and without ceremony.
"This is probably," she murmured, "the last invitation I intend to offer."
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