**Chapter 35: My Heart Toward Rebecca**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
I followed the blue light upward and found a familiar silhouette crouched at the ragged edge of the torn roof.
"...Cedric?!"
He dropped into the carriage in a single fluid movement, landing between me and the open doorway as though he'd simply stepped off a staircase. When he turned and saw my expression, something softened at the corners of his mouth.
"You look better than I expected, Rebecca."
He said it almost conversationally, even as a beam of blue light extended from his outstretched hand and cut through the nearest creature without breaking stride. The thing collapsed, and as it hit the floor, its form dissolved — not flesh, not bone, but straw and compacted spell-work unraveling at the seams.
"Straw dolls," Cedric said, almost to himself, glancing down at the scattered debris. "Someone's been busy. These are animated constructs — probably controlled from a distance."
*That explains why the numbers kept multiplying.* I stared at the heap of straw on the floor, my mind catching up slowly.
Cedric raised his voice toward the forest outside.
"Adrian! Can you raise a protective barrier through the trees and take the reins?"
"Of course, Your Highness!"
Adrian's answer came back immediately. He turned and sprinted for the coachman's box — and the dolls surged after him at once. But this time, threads of blue light struck them down from behind one by one before they could close the distance, precise as thrown knives.
A moment later, Adrian's voice carried back from the front of the carriage.
"We're ready!"
Cedric planted himself in the broken doorway and drove the nearest cluster of dolls back with a sweeping arc of light. Then he pressed both palms flat against the frame and pushed his power into the wood and air where the door had been — a barrier that shimmered faintly blue before settling invisible.
The first doll that rushed the gap struck it and crumpled. Then the next. Their spell-work failed on contact, each one collapsing back into its base materials.
"That should hold." Cedric straightened and called forward. "Adrian — full speed! Leave them behind!"
"Yes, Your Highness!"
The carriage lurched into a hard gallop. Wind tore through the broken roof and the gaping doorway, cold and sharp with the smell of forest pine. Outside, the constructs gave chase for a stretch — and then, one by one, they fell behind, unable to match the speed.
Through the ruined door I could see it beginning — a soft purple light spreading between the trees in every direction, like sunrise bleeding through fog. Adrian's barrier, unfurling through the forest at last.
I gripped the window frame and watched it expand.
*We're safe.* The thought arrived slowly, as though my body wasn't ready to believe it yet. *We're actually going to be—*
Something warm and solid settled around my waist.
I looked down. Then up.
Cedric had moved to stand beside me, one arm wrapped around me with a quietness that suggested he'd done it without fully deciding to. He looked down when I looked up.
"You don't have to hold the window quite so tightly," he said. "You're not going to fall."
His voice was low. The calm in it was immediate and absurd and — despite everything — it worked. The tension I hadn't realized I was carrying in my shoulders began to loosen.
I gripped his waist instead of the window frame, mostly out of stubbornness, and lifted my chin.
"Then keep that promise."
"Which promise?"
"That I won't die today. I'd like that in writing."
Cedric looked at me for a moment — at my jaw, which I was clenching to stop it from shaking — and the corner of his mouth curved.
"You have nerve. I'll give you that. No one in the Twins family would be ashamed to claim you."
"Let's agree never to tell them about today and spare us both the embarrassment."
He laughed — a real one, brief and warm — and I took the opportunity to pinch his waist sharply. His arm tightened around me in retaliation.
"That hurt, Rebecca. Surprising as it may be, I do feel pain."
"Good. Consider it incentive."
A comfortable silence settled over us for a moment, the forest blurring past outside. Then Cedric spoke again, his tone lighter but genuinely curious.
"Earlier — you said you didn't want to die, *at least* today. What's special about today?"
I glanced up at him. "If I tell you, are you going to let the monsters have me?"
"I haven't yet."
I exhaled slowly and looked back out the window.
"I went to the futures exchange this morning."
"I'd heard that much."
"I made a deal. A significant one." I paused. "And I won a competition I've been looking forward to winning for a very long time. Against Countess Dmitry, as it happens."
That wasn't a name he'd been expecting. His eyebrows lifted a fraction.
"Camilla came?"
"She did. And I beat her rather thoroughly." I allowed myself a small, private smile. "I've had my eye on a particular investment for a while now. Today I finally secured it. All I have left to do is wait for it to make me extraordinarily wealthy — which it will — and if I happened to die before that occurs, it would be..." I considered. "Genuinely inconvenient."
Cedric stared at me for a long moment.
Then he bowed his head, and his shoulders shook.
"Stop *laughing*," I said, heat rising in my face. "I am being completely serious. Today was important."
"I know, I know—" He was still trying not to smile. "You're very serious. I can see that."
"Can you? Because you look like you're—"
I reached for his waist again and he caught my hand, still laughing quietly, and pressed it against the window frame instead.
"Just hold on a moment. I'll be right back."
Before I could respond, he was gone — up through the torn section of roof in one smooth motion, landing on top of the moving carriage as though it were perfectly still ground.
"*Cedric!*" I craned my neck upward. "You said you'd keep me alive! Where are you going?!"
His face appeared in the gap above me, framed by torn fabric and open sky, and he was smiling.
"To make sure your important day ends properly."
He straightened, and I heard the sound of something heavy landing on the roof above me — and then Cedric's voice, stripped of all warmth and aimed at something else entirely.
"I know someone is watching through these."
A brief, strangled sound.
"So listen closely." His tone had gone very quiet. Very still. "The moment you threaten my wife again — I will find you. And I will deal with you personally."
A pulse of blue light. Then the crackle of something igniting.
I looked out the broken doorway and watched a straw doll, burning brilliantly blue, arc through the air and land among the horde still trailing us. The flames spread instantly — not like ordinary fire, but like a living thing, consuming construct after construct in great, luminous waves. In seconds, the pursuing mass was simply gone.
The forest fell quiet.
---
In a basement room somewhere in the northern quarter of the city, an old woman sat before a crystal ball draped in purple silk.
The room smelled of dust and formalin. Dried specimens hung in the cupboards. Old books leaned against each other on the shelves, their titles strange and faded.
The old woman watched the crystal ball's light dim and settle, then folded her hands in her lap.
"I'm afraid the attempt was unsuccessful, my lady."
A woman standing with her back against the far wall exhaled slowly.
"I thought she would be simple enough to remove."
"What went wrong?" Her voice was sharp, though her posture remained deceptively relaxed.
"His Highness the Grand Duke intervened." The old woman was unruffled. "Directly."
"...His Highness?"
The woman crossed the room in several quick strides.
"Show me."
The old woman laid her hands on the crystal ball. The image surfaced — the burning forest, the carriage, and Cedric's face, still and terrible, delivering his warning to whatever puppet he held in his grip.
*The moment you threaten my wife again, I will find you and deal with you personally.*
The woman watching went very still.
After a long moment, she spoke.
"Again."
The image replayed.
"Again."
Cedric's voice repeated through the crystal — *the moment you threaten my wife* — and the woman watched his face each time with an expression that was difficult to read.
"Stop."
Silence.
She stood looking at the still image for a long moment, her finger tracing an idle pattern on the edge of the table.
"He came for her himself," she said softly. "He didn't send the knights. He went personally."
She tilted her head, studying Cedric's expression in the frozen image — the cold fury in it, the absolute certainty.
"Why?" she murmured, more to herself than to the old woman. "Why would he do that?"
---
Night had settled fully over the forest by the time the last construct fell.
What remained was unexpectedly beautiful — the huge blue flames Cedric had set still burning in places between the trees, and Adrian's purple barrier woven through the branches like aurora light, the two colors intertwining across the dark forest in something that looked less like the aftermath of an attack and more like a painting.
Adrian had slowed the carriage to a gentle pace, and Cedric had dropped back inside. He found Rebecca leaning toward the open doorway, both hands braced on the frame, watching the light move through the trees with wide, unguarded eyes.
She hadn't noticed him return. She was too absorbed.
"Is it that remarkable?" he asked, moving to stand beside her.
"Enormously." She didn't look away from the window. "Come and see — the view is better from here."
She reached without looking and pulled his arm until he was standing close enough to see what she was seeing. The light shifted between the trees — blue and violet, warm and cold at once, flickering like something alive.
"Well?" She tilted her face toward him, and the colors played across her features. "It's better from here, isn't it?"
Cedric looked at her.
The glow moved over her face in slow waves, catching the brightness in her eyes. Her shoulder was barely touching his arm. Something light and familiar drifted from her — a scent he had stopped consciously noticing a long time ago, though apparently some part of him had never stopped registering it.
"...Yes," he said, after a moment. "It really is."
She smiled and turned back to the window, content.
Cedric found himself following the curve of that smile without meaning to.
He thought about it, standing there beside her in the broken carriage moving through a forest that looked like it had been lit for a festival — about what had happened hours ago, when the certainty that she was in danger had arrived not as a thought but as something physical, something that had moved his legs before his mind had caught up.
He wouldn't have done this before. He knew that much. He would have dispatched knights. Managed the situation from a distance. Kept himself properly removed.
But tonight he had run.
There were many possible explanations. Proximity. Habit. Some remnant of the old sense of responsibility.
He turned them over one by one, and set them aside one by one.
At the end of it, what remained was quieter and less convenient than any of the explanations.
*Perhaps,* Cedric thought, watching her watch the light, *my heart has been turning toward her for some time now.*
*Perhaps it already has.*