**Chapter 37: Are You Jealous?**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
Vincent held my gaze with complete seriousness, waiting for an answer.
I looked at him for a moment — this enormous, scarred, half-dressed man who had just walked out of a painting — and laughed. Whatever tension had been building dissolved all at once.
*He really is asking me that with a straight face.*
"You've probably seen me at a family gathering," I said. "Or passing through somewhere. It happens."
"When have the Normans and the Twins ever held joint family gatherings?"
"Then you haven't seen me, and this conversation is over."
I said it firmly, with the intention of closing the matter entirely. Vincent had other plans.
"No." He frowned, something genuinely puzzled working its way across his face. "I'm certain I've seen you. Not just a passing glance — properly. You really don't remember?"
A long sigh escaped me before I could stop it.
"Why do you keep insisting? This is the first time we've met, and I'd appreciate it if you'd address me accordingly — I'm not beneath you in rank."
Cedric nodded beside me with an expression of complete agreement.
"Vincent. Mind your manners. You're in the human world."
Vincent shrugged, utterly unbothered, and drifted toward the marble side table.
"Fine. Then call me by name too, Rebecca. No titles, no formality."
"......"
"Human etiquette bores me to death. I've never seen the point of it."
As he spoke, he flicked an idle finger at a small decorative piece on the table. It tipped over the edge. He watched it fall with mild interest and then began slowly grinding it underfoot, apparently just to have something to do.
If Cedric was a patient wolf — controlled, deliberate, still — then Vincent was something untamed entirely. A creature that had never learned to be anything other than exactly what it was.
I snorted.
"All right, then. Vincent it is."
He looked up sharply.
"...What?"
"You want to drop the formality. So do I, apparently. Let's."
One of his eyebrows climbed toward his silver hairline. For a moment, genuine surprise replaced the boredom on his face — as though he'd made an offer fully expecting it to be declined and wasn't sure what to do now that it hadn't been.
Then he laughed, low and pleased, and dropped into the nearest chair, throwing one long leg over the armrest.
"They told me she was interesting. They weren't wrong."
He was still chuckling to himself when he added, almost as an aside: "I like her more every minute."
Beside me, Cedric's brow furrowed.
Vincent either didn't notice or didn't care. He stood abruptly — everything he did seemed to operate at either complete stillness or sudden motion, nothing in between — and crossed the room toward me with the directness of someone who had never once considered that approaching people might require permission.
"What are you—"
"Hold still."
Before I could finish the question, he had taken my wrist, guided my hand to the top of his head, and was moving it in a slow, deliberate stroking motion.
I stood very still.
Something nagged at the back of my mind — the texture of his hair, the particular bronze of his skin, the gold of his eyes — familiar in a way I couldn't immediately place.
*I've seen this before. Not him exactly, but something like him...*
"Could it be..." My lips parted slowly. "Were you the cat?"
The corner of his mouth curved.
"There she is."
He stepped back and pulled aside the front of his loosely fastened nightgown, gesturing at his lower abdomen. There, among the older scars, were marks that hadn't yet finished healing.
"The wounds are still there," he said, with tremendous mournfulness. "From when you manhandled me without so much as asking."
"I — you were a *cat*. I thought you were an injured stray—"
"I was *beautiful*," Vincent said, pressing one hand to his chest. "Exquisite, even. And you just went ahead and touched me wherever you pleased."
He arranged his expression into something intended to be pitiful. On a face like his — all hard angles and old scars and that simmering golden gaze — the effect was deeply unsettling.
I yanked my hand back.
"That's not—I didn't know—"
"Touch it here and there," Cedric said, very quietly, from somewhere to my left. I looked at him. His expression was neutral in the specific way that meant it was working hard to stay that way. "You're that kind of woman?"
"Vincent's *here and there,*" Adrian murmured from my right, with a carefully blank face.
"*The cat,*" I said loudly. "*He was a cat. I thought he was an injured animal. I was being kind.*"
A beat of silence.
Then Cedric nodded slowly, and Adrian followed suit, both of them with the expressions of men who are choosing, generously, to be convinced.
Vincent collapsed into his chair laughing, entirely delighted with the chaos he'd created.
"Vincent." Cedric's voice was flat. "Enough. Why are you here?"
Vincent waved a hand, still collecting himself.
"Yes, yes, all right." He wiped his eyes. "Patience, cousin."
He straightened, and the laughter faded. What replaced it was something quieter and considerably more serious.
"I felt unusual energy in the forest near the castle. Something was set up there — something deliberate. I assumed you'd already noticed, which meant you'd want to discuss it." He tilted his head. "We do have things to protect together, after all."
A pause settled over the room.
"Speaking of which." Something flickered in Vincent's golden eyes — not quite the madness that lived there ordinarily, but close to it. "Lillian's Heart, Cedric—"
"Not here."
Cedric's voice was quiet but absolute. His expression had gone somewhere unreachable.
"We'll discuss it privately."
Vincent studied him for a moment with those unsettling eyes. Then he glanced at me, then back at Cedric, and something knowing and faintly provocative moved across his face.
"Still keeping secrets from your wife?"
"......"
"I knew things between you two were strained, but I hadn't realized it was quite this bad." He clicked his tongue softly. "What a marriage."
A vein appeared at Cedric's temple. He had been maintaining an admirable composure throughout, but it was clearly approaching its limits.
Vincent, as though sensing opportunity, turned his gold eyes directly on me.
"Rebecca." His voice was almost sweet. "Genuinely — why not divorce him and find someone better? Someone with a personality, for instance."
"Oh?"
"Yes." He propped his chin in one hand, considering. "What about me?"
He let the silence sit for exactly one beat, then smiled — slow and sideways and sharp at the corners.
"I find you quite appealing, honestly. You seem just as ungovernable as I am. We'd be well-matched."
The muscle in Cedric's jaw had progressed from a twitch to something architecturally significant.
"So just throw away that dull, secretive—"
The sound of Cedric's knuckles connecting with Vincent's chin was crisp and unhurried, the kind of movement that suggested it had been building for some time and was, ultimately, a relief.
Vincent's head snapped back.
---
Later, before Vincent's welcome dinner at the Mansion of Light, I slipped back to my rooms to change.
Mina was already waiting with a dress laid out. I gave her a brief account of what had happened in the lobby, and she listened with an expression that moved through surprise, recognition, and something that might have been sympathy — though directed at whom, I wasn't entirely sure.
"So Vincent is here," she said, when I finished.
"He is. Do you know him?"
"I know *of* him." She hesitated, smoothing the fabric of the dress with perhaps more attention than it required. "He's half-blood, like many here, but he has no love for the human world. Less than no love, really — closer to contempt." She paused. "And that's perhaps the most polished way I can describe him."
"What's the less polished way?"
Mina set down the dress and leaned toward me conspiratorially.
"In the Demon World they call him the Idiot Devil Duke."
I stared at her. "...They call a Grand Duke that?"
"Affectionately," she said, with a smile that suggested the affection was debatable. "He's very — free-spirited. Very outspoken. Very..."
"You're searching for words."
"I'm selecting them carefully." She reached for the ruby earrings. "Let's leave it at free-spirited."
I thought of the madness that occasionally surfaced in Vincent's golden eyes — bright and sudden, like something live passing through still water — and decided she was right not to elaborate.
"He said he owns the dark mansion," I said. "Am I going to need to find other lodgings?"
"No, no." Mina shook her head immediately. "The Norman family holds the deed, but the management has always been left entirely to the Twins household. His Highness wouldn't be permitted to use it if Vincent hadn't already given his blessing." She fixed the earring and met my eyes in the mirror. "You're not going anywhere."
I let out a quiet breath.
"He also said something about needing to protect something with Cedric. Do you know what that is?"
Mina's hands stilled on my hair for just a fraction of a second.
"Haha, well..." She resumed her work, smiling at the mirror with her mouth only. "That's a little outside my knowledge, Your Highness."
She was lying, or something close to it. I filed it away and said nothing.
---
In the private study of the Twins mansion, Cedric set two glasses of aperitif on the table between the sofas and lowered himself into the chair across from his cousin.
Vincent was nursing his jaw with two fingers, prodding at the bruise experimentally.
"You could have just said you didn't want to talk about it," he said.
"I communicated clearly."
"You communicated *physically.*" Vincent picked up the offered glass and tilted it toward Cedric in a mock toast. "A bottle in one hand and a bruise in the other. Very you."
"You earned the bruise."
"I was being friendly."
"You were being insufferable."
Vincent grinned and took a sip. For a moment he simply sat there, legs crossed, studying the middle distance with those restless golden eyes.
"It's been a while since you hit me like that," he said, more thoughtfully. "Not since we were children." He rolled his jaw. "I heard your marriage was in a difficult place. I didn't think you'd still be sensitive about it."
The corner of Cedric's mouth twitched.
"Do you want another one?"
"I want to know if you're jealous." Vincent watched him with bright, unrepentant eyes. "Simple question."
Cedric said nothing, which was, in its own way, an answer.
Vincent laughed again, softer this time, and let it go.
"Fine." He set his glass down and laced his fingers together, and the lightness fell away from his face with the ease of someone dropping a mask they'd been wearing only loosely. What replaced it was the other Vincent — the one whose eyes went flat and still and ancient. "Let's talk about what actually matters."
Cedric looked at him steadily.
"Today's incident," Vincent said. "The barrier in the forest, the constructs — someone set that up deliberately, in your jurisdiction, with enough power to do it cleanly." He held Cedric's gaze. "You know as well as I do that this could have been about more than just the Grand Duchess."
"......"
"If their real target wasn't Rebecca at all." Vincent's voice dropped. "If someone was trying to get to *Lillian's Heart—*"
"What do you know about it?" Cedric's voice was very quiet.
"Enough to be worried." Vincent leaned forward, all the playfulness gone. His golden eyes were entirely serious now, and the scar at his mouth made his expression harder to read than it might otherwise have been. "Cedric. What if that was their actual goal?"