**Chapter 38: Do Good While You Have It**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"What if their real goal wasn't the Grand Duchess at all?" Vincent's voice was low and deliberate in the quiet of the study. "What if it was Lillian's Heart?"
The name settled over the room like a change in air pressure.
*Lillian's Heart.*
A gemstone the size of a human fist, red as arterial blood, with nothing remarkable about its appearance — nothing that would suggest what lived inside it. What lived inside it was the accumulated curse and dying grief of the primordial goddess Lillian herself, distilled into something that pulsed with quiet, terrible promise.
*Only those who possess my heart will obtain what they truly desire. But my kindness is as sweet as my price is cruel.*
That was the nature of it. Lillian's Heart offered everything — wealth beyond accounting, power without ceiling — and delivered on the offer completely, right up until the moment it didn't. People had known this for as long as the stories had been told. They had gone mad for it anyway.
In the ancient era, the obsession had nearly ended the world. The most powerful figures of both the human and demon realms had dissolved into war over it — a war so complete and so devastating that when it finally ended, both sides agreed to the same thing: sever contact between the worlds, and seal the Heart away forever. The role of guardian fell to the Twin brothers, born of both bloodlines, belonging fully to neither.
That responsibility had passed down through the generations to where it rested now — with Cedric, and with Vincent.
Cedric turned his glass slowly in his hands, considering.
"I've thought about that possibility," he said. "But if the seal had been disturbed — if something had actually reached it — Manakin would have reacted."
Vincent straightened immediately, nodding with conviction.
"Yes. That's true." Despite the formality of the name, his expression conveyed the same sentiment as Cedric's: that Manakin was old and irascible and would absolutely not have stayed quiet about it. "The old dragon would have made himself extremely known."
The Heart was sealed in a mountain deep in the Demon World, where the ancient dragon Manakin had slept for longer than either family's recorded history. Only Cedric and Vincent knew its precise location.
"Even so," Vincent said, after a moment, "I think we should go and check the seal ourselves. Not because something's wrong — just because we should be certain."
"Agreed. Better careful than not." Cedric set his glass down. "Though the last time you went, as I recall—"
"I *barely* provoked him," Vincent said, with great dignity.
"He set fire to you."
"He set fire to the *air near me,*" Vincent corrected. "I moved in time. The Norman line continues." He paused, then added, with a reflective expression: "It was close, though."
He refilled his glass and leaned back into the sofa cushions.
"By the way." His tone shifted — still casual, but with an edge of something deliberate beneath it. "The imprint. Is it still in place?"
Cedric's expression tightened.
"Manakin asked me about it last time I was there," Vincent continued, unhurried. "He seemed troubled. Can't say I was surprised — it's not every generation that the guardian chosen by an ancient dragon ends up in open conflict with the person he selected."
In the Demon World, the spouses of ruling families were not chosen freely. Manakin selected them — had done so since an ancient era when abuses of power in bonded pairs had brought both realms close to catastrophe. His judgment was considered infallible. His choices had never been wrong.
Until Cedric's marriage, Cedric had privately believed the same.
*Until recently,* some quieter part of him amended.
He didn't say that aloud. He sat with it instead, watching the firelight move in his glass.
Vincent had been watching him throughout this silence. The playfulness was still there in his expression, but underneath it something more genuine moved — the kind of concern that men like Vincent only showed sideways.
"Cedric." His voice was lighter than his eyes. "If you don't want the imprint — if you never intend to — then why not let her go? It's a simple question."
Cedric looked up.
"She deserves better than spending her life with someone who won't have her," Vincent said. He said it simply, without cruelty. "That's all."
The look Cedric gave him was the kind that made most people reconsider whatever they were about to say next. Vincent, who had survived more dangerous things than Cedric's disapproval, simply raised his eyebrows.
"You don't have to look at me like that."
"I'm deciding whether your chin is sufficient or whether I should just remove your head entirely."
"Oh—" Something lit up in Vincent's eyes — delight, specifically, the kind that arrives when a hypothesis is confirmed. He leaned forward. "Interesting."
"What."
"Nothing." He was smiling now, the full, unguarded version. "Nothing at all. Just — if the reason you haven't walked away is because of *Rebecca's* feelings for you, I want you to know I'm prepared to be very helpful in that situation. I find her genuinely appealing. I wouldn't leave her lonely the way you apparently—"
Cedric came over the table.
What followed was not dignified, and it lasted for some time.
---
An hour later, the banquet hall of the Mansion of Light was warm with candlelight and the sound of conversation. The full Twins household had gathered around a table that had been laid with considerable care — an occasion worthy of the family being together, however unusual the circumstances that had produced it.
Bianca had been glowing with quiet happiness at the sight of everyone assembled. Then her eyes landed on Vincent's face, and the glow dimmed into worried confusion.
"It's lovely to see you, Vincent, it really has been too long—" She paused. "What happened to your face?"
Vincent's face had, in the time since I'd last seen him, become significantly more eventful. The bruise on his chin had deepened to a dark purple. One eyelid was swelling. There was a small cut at the corner of his mouth that someone had made a cursory attempt to address with gauze, which he was now removing and setting on the table beside his wine glass.
"Your brother," he said simply.
"His Highness wouldn't—"
"He absolutely would, and he did." Vincent aimed a pointed look down the table toward Cedric, who was cutting his steak with quiet concentration and the expression of someone who has put an unpleasant task behind him and feels entirely at peace. "Turns out he's more territorial than advertised."
I kept my face carefully still.
Vincent stabbed his fork toward Cedric's plate and helped himself to the untouched salad.
Cedric looked up.
"What are you doing?"
"You weren't eating it."
"I was going to."
"You weren't."
"I eat slowly."
"You were ignoring it."
"I was *pacing* myself."
"For what? The next hundred years?"
Cedric exhaled through his nose — the long, controlled exhale of a man who has been outmaneuvered in a conversation he didn't intend to have — and turned back to his steak.
Bianca sat between them with the expression of someone trapped between two weather systems, quietly preparing to offer her own salad as a peace offering if it came to that.
*They've turned a dinner table argument about salad into something that feels genuinely fraught,* I thought. *This is extraordinary.*
Vincent, apparently satisfied with his acquisition, refilled his wine and leaned back with the ease of someone who had spent the last hour getting beaten and was nonetheless having a fine evening.
"Here's something to think about," he said, to no one in particular and everyone in general, his golden eyes moving idly around the table. "Everything around us has a shelf life. The things we take for granted, the things we ignore, the things we assume will simply wait—" He swirled his glass. "—they don't wait. And there is always someone watching, ready to value what you've decided not to."
He took a sip.
"So while you still have what you have," he added, with a glance in Cedric's direction so brief it might almost have been accidental, "do something worthwhile with it."
Cedric did not look up from his plate.
But he also, I noticed, said nothing.
---
Back in the dark mansion, Adrian had dismissed the remaining staff and sent them to rest. The mansion was quiet. He moved through it alone, attending to small tasks — the things that accumulated in a household when its occupants were elsewhere.
He found himself at the window in the front sitting room without fully intending to be there.
The Mansion of Light was brilliant across the grounds, its windows warm and alive. Sounds drifted over occasionally — laughter, the murmur of voices. The welcome dinner was clearly going well.
*I hope she's all right.*
The thought arrived softly, and then Adrian noticed what was underneath it — the loneliness that had followed it, quiet and familiar and increasingly difficult to rationalize away.
It hadn't always felt like this. There had been a time when seeing Rebecca with Cedric brought him straightforward relief. She had been so unhappy for so long — exhausted and diminished and carefully, painfully composed about it. Watching her find steadier ground had felt like what it was supposed to feel like: the satisfaction of someone you care for being genuinely cared for.
He couldn't fix the exact moment that had changed.
The banquet at Count Dmitry's house, perhaps. The moment he'd seen them kissing and had stood very still and waited for the relief to arrive, and found instead that something else had.
Or earlier today — Cedric lifting her from the carriage with that proprietary ease, carrying her inside as though closing a door between them.
Adrian pressed two fingers against the window frame and looked at the light across the grounds.
He knew what was true. He'd known it for a while, and had been finding ways not to look directly at it.
He was in love with Rebecca.
Not with the Grand Duchess — not with the role, not from obligation or habit or professional care. With *her.* The woman who had swung a wooden block at enchanted monsters while shouting at them. Who had made her first serious step toward financial independence and was furious about the possibility of dying before it paid off. Who laughed at unexpected moments and had more composure under pressure than people gave her credit for, and who had looked at the burning forest afterward with the wide, unguarded eyes of someone encountering beauty they hadn't expected.
He wanted to see that expression again. Directed at something he'd shown her. He wanted —
Adrian stepped back from the window.
*Stop.*
She was married. She had been in love with Cedric for years — that much had always been evident. Whatever distance had opened between them recently, whatever private pain Rebecca had been managing, it wasn't his place to read into it. It certainly wasn't his place to hope.
And yet.
A gust came through the gap in the window he'd forgotten to close, scattering the papers Rebecca had left on the table — newspaper clippings, spread across the surface, some blown to the floor.
He knelt to gather them.
And then stopped.
He turned the clippings over in his hands slowly. They were property listings. Mansion advertisements, cut from multiple issues, spanning the last several weeks. Some had red circles drawn around them. A few had small stars. One had notes in the margins in Rebecca's handwriting — dates, figures, comments about location.
She was looking for somewhere to live.
Not a secondary residence. The urgency in the annotations, the range of the search, the way she'd been building her personal funds with such quiet, determined focus — it all assembled itself into a single picture.
*She's planning to leave.*
Adrian sat back slowly on his heels, the papers in his hands.
He stayed there for a long moment, looking at them.
Then, carefully, he set them back on the table in the order he'd found them. Smoothed the edges. Closed the window properly.
And stood with the small, fragile thing that had surfaced in him — not quite hope, not yet, but something adjacent to it — and tried to decide what a good man would do with it.
He already knew, of course. A good man would put it aside. A good man would continue as he had been, and wish her well, and find a way to be glad for whatever she chose.
He also knew, with equal honesty, that he wasn't entirely sure he was capable of that anymore.