---
I stared down at the horns in bewilderment.
This girl was a half-blood demon.
*What exactly are half-blood demons?*
Because their blood and flesh are part human, they appear no different from ordinary people at a glance. But beneath that surface, their physical capabilities far surpass any human's — two, three times over, sometimes more. Human faces and human minds, paired with a demon's strength and magical power.
After the Emperor of the Western Empire unified the continent with the half-blood demons' aid, their migration into the human world had been steadily increasing. Even so, humans still regarded them with a complicated mixture of fascination, unease, and wariness. Something about their origins in an unknown world made people instinctively cautious.
*For me, it's less unease and more outright fear.*
They were the ones who had set fire to the tower. The ones who had killed Rebecca.
The memory of that ending sent an involuntary shiver through me.
"Your Highness... please... just this once, have mercy..."
The young maid dissolved into tears, forehead still pressed to the floor, hands clutching her own hair. I looked down at her and thought.
*There's no point in cultivating hatred toward half-blood demons. I'm planning to divorce Cedric soon anyway — I don't need to keep performing the role of Rebecca the Mad Dog.*
I arranged my expression into the warmest smile I could manage.
"A little champagne on the dress is nothing. Stop crying and get up."
The effect was immediate — and not the one I'd intended. The maid went rigid, trembling with renewed intensity, as though my kindness were somehow more terrifying than cruelty. She looked like a person who had just seen something fundamentally wrong with the world.
Which, from her perspective, she probably had.
*Right. If the mad dog suddenly starts wagging her tail, of course that's scarier.*
I watched fresh tears spill down her face and sighed inwardly. She was shaking her head slowly, apparently certain she was about to die.
"Are you really going to cut off my horn?"
*Cut off her horn—?*
The words settled over me, cold and clarifying.
It wasn't a hypothetical fear. Rebecca had a documented history of cutting off half-blood demons' horns. That explained the mass exodus of every other maid the moment the glass broke — they'd cleared out without a word, like they'd rehearsed it.
For half-blood demons, their horns were a symbol of racial pride. Severing them wasn't just physical injury. It was humiliation made permanent.
*No wonder I make them nervous.*
And if Rebecca had been doing this routinely — for trivial offenses, just to vent her temper — the resentment wouldn't have been building only since the sacrifice incident. It would have been accumulating for years. The sacrifice had simply been the thing that finally gave it permission to erupt.
Rebecca's reputation among the half-blood demons wasn't just bad. It was catastrophic.
*At this rate, the only person in this entire castle who doesn't want me dead is Camilla. And I need to cut ties with her.*
I exhaled slowly. Before I could do anything else, I needed an ally. Even one would be a start.
*Camilla won't be back for a month. I need someone on my side before then.*
I stood, crossed to the dressing room, and returned with a small jewelry box.
"What's your name?"
The maid blinked. "...Mina, Your Highness."
"Mina. I'm not going to cut off your horns. Now please get up."
She stared at me.
She didn't believe a word of it. Her shoulders were shaking harder than before, as though my gentleness had convinced her I was building to something worse.
*Too friendly. Pull back.*
I thought briefly of my ex-husband's face — specifically the particular expression he used to make when he was doing absolutely nothing while I handled everything — and let the irritation surface.
"Oh, for heaven's sake. *Get up.* Sit on the sofa. Now."
"Yes! Yes, Your Highness!"
Mina scrambled upright and perched on the edge of the sofa across from me, back straight as a board. I settled into my seat, crossed my legs, and folded my arms with what I hoped was an imperious air.
*I hate this. I really, deeply hate performing villainy. But here we are.*
"The champagne glass is forgotten," I said coolly. "What matters now is that you sit there and listen."
"...Yes?"
"I am going to forgive your mistake."
Mina's expression did something complicated. "You're... forgiving me?"
The word seemed to short-circuit something in her brain. She looked like she was trying to run a calculation that kept returning an error.
*She doesn't believe me. Of course she doesn't. Rebecca's forgiveness presumably came with conditions attached to someone's dignity.*
Good thing I'd thought ahead and brought the jewelry box.
"If my word isn't enough," I said, reaching for the box, "then perhaps the price should come first."
I drew out a necklace — a fine gold chain, a ruby the size of a small egg catching the afternoon light — and held it up between us.
Mina's cheeks began to shake. Then her eyes welled up again.
"Please — I'll do anything — just please, please don't—"
I looked at the necklace. I looked at her face.
*She thinks it's a cord to cut her horns with.*
A breath escaped me that was equal parts exhaustion and disbelief.
"Mina." I kept my voice steady. "I just told you I was forgiving you."
I leaned forward and dropped the necklace directly into her lap.
"That is a ruby necklace. Not a cord. A necklace with a very large ruby. Look at it."
A long pause. Mina looked down at the necklace. Then up at me. Then back at the necklace, with the expression of someone encountering a logical impossibility.
"Why are you giving me something so precious?"
"It's an exchange."
"...An exchange?"
"Yes. The price of becoming my person."
I let that land, then continued.
"Do you believe me now?"
Mina turned this over carefully, eyes moving between me and the ruby in her lap.
"So... you're saying you'll forgive me... in exchange for me serving you?"
"Exactly. Follow my instructions, and there will be more where that came from."
Silence. Then, slowly, Mina nodded. "...Yes."
She still looked wary. Reasonably so — one necklace didn't erase years of history. I added the necessary insurance.
"You now owe me two things: the necklace, and your horns. If you betray me, I take both back. Are we clear?"
"Yes! Yes, Your Highness!"
Her posture was still tense, but the blue tinge had faded from her face. Progress.
*Good. Now for actual information.*
I drew a sapphire necklace from the box and turned it slowly in the light so it caught Mina's eye.
"Answer my questions honestly, and this one is yours. Understood?"
Something shifted in Mina's expression — a faint, involuntary glimmer of interest, now that mortal terror wasn't monopolizing all her attention.
"Yes! I'll answer honestly, Your Highness!"
"How many half-blood demons work in Twins Castle?"
"At least a thousand, even being conservative. If you count the townhouses in the capital... closer to two thousand."
"That many?"
"Most of the half-blood demons who've come to the human world end up in service to the Twins family."
I sat with that for a moment.
*So every person who set fire to the tower was a Twins employee. Every single one of them was someone Rebecca had power over. Someone she'd used that power against.*
The picture was becoming clearer, and clearer was worse. Rebecca hadn't just been cruel in some abstract sense — she'd had access to thousands of people she could bully without consequence, and she had apparently used that access comprehensively. Cutting horns. Demanding servitude. Treating the symbol of their identity as something she could take away on a whim.
*No wonder they were ready to burn a building down.*
I leaned slightly forward and lowered my voice.
"Among the staff — are there any who've said outright that they intend to kill me once I'm no longer Grand Duchess? Once I've left the protection of this title?"
Mina went still.
"I'm not asking for names," I added. "Just an approximate number. Roughly."
"Your Highness, that's..."
"A hundred? Two hundred?" I held up the sapphire so the light ran through it. "Take your time."
Mina's gaze dropped. Her voice, when it came, was very small.
"...There are so many I couldn't give you an accurate count. I think everyone who works here has said it at least once."
"Everyone. All thousand-plus of them."
*I knew it. I knew it would be like this, and it's still somehow worse to hear.*
"I assume," I said carefully, "that since the divorce discussions began — what, a few days ago now — some of them have moved from talking to planning?"
Mina said nothing.
*Silence is confirmation.*
I pressed my temple where a headache was building and tossed her the sapphire anyway.
"Thank you, Your Highness!"
"...Have you made a plan yourself?"
"What?"
"The waiting list seems long. I imagine you'd want to get ahead of it."
Mina threw up both hands in an expression of startled, helpless semi-guilt. "I got approached! But I didn't commit to anything! Hehe — my specialty is poison, actually, I'm quite good at making compounds that can't be detected by human methods, so they asked if I could — ah. No. No, that's not — I really didn't want to—"
"Really."
"Yes, really!"
"Mina. If you lie to me, the necklaces come back."
A long pause. Mina counted something on her fingers with the look of a person doing reluctant arithmetic.
"...A little bit?"
---
That evening, in the bathing chamber of the Grand Ducal suite.
Ivory marble from floor to vaulted ceiling. A chandelier scattering warm light across steam rising from an enormous tub. A row of servants bent at precise angles, waiting.
The door opened.
Every head turned, and every expression in the room shifted — quietly, instinctively — into something between reverence and admiration.
Cedric Twins.
The Twins Grand Duchy was the only family recognized as a royal house in both the human world and the demon world simultaneously. And Cedric was its master — the man who had elevated a minor kingdom into the Great Western Empire within six years, and who had, in the same span, made the existence of half-blood demons visible and legally recognized in a human world that had spent centuries pretending they didn't exist.
Those were the reasons the staff respected him.
But they also simply couldn't stop looking at him.
Even now, in nothing but a navy silk robe, there was something almost unreasonable about the way he occupied a room. Square shoulders, lean muscle, the robe doing almost nothing to suggest modesty. Black hair. Arched brows that gave his face an expression caught between arrogance and ease. A jawline that belonged on a statue and features that somehow worked in concert to suggest something more than merely handsome — something magnetic and slightly unfair.
The room held its collective breath.
"You can go."
His voice, low and unhurried, broke the spell. The servants filed out with the barely perceptible reluctance of people leaving something they'd rather keep watching.
Cedric stood alone. He unknotted the robe, let it fall, and stepped into the water.
He sank back slowly. Let the warmth work through the tension in his shoulders. Today had included a check on the protective barrier around Lillian's Heart — always draining work — and fatigue had settled into him like sediment.
He rested his head against the edge of the tub, wet hair pushed back, eyes closed.
And then a name surfaced, the way it had been surfacing for days.
"Rebecca."
He said it quietly, to no one. His eyes opened — blue, cool, and faintly perplexed.
He had been expecting her that morning. The morning after the divorce discussion. He knew exactly how it would have gone: she would arrive early, eyes already red, and she would cry, and beg, and rage, and threaten, and work through the entire catalogue of her desperation. She would claim she was going to die. She would beg him not to say there was another woman. And eventually — inevitably — it would end the same way it always ended, with her asking him to hold her. Just once. Just tonight. Because the only thing she had ever truly wanted from him was that one fragile imprint of closeness.
*Yes. That's who Rebecca was.*
His brows drew together slightly. Without quite meaning to, he'd thought of her in the past tense.
*But then...*
Why hadn't he seen her since that day?