**Chapter 39: It's My Turn to Have a Crush on Rebecca**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"The seal appears intact. No signs of disturbance."
Vincent crouched beside the site, examined it from several angles, and straightened with a scratch at the tip of his nose.
They had left the Mansion of Light at first light — Cedric and Vincent, side by side, crossing into the Demon World before most of the household had stirred. The journey to Mt. Manakin hadn't taken long. The inspection had taken longer, conducted with the thoroughness that both of them had learned, over years, was non-negotiable where Lillian's Heart was concerned.
Cedric surveyed the seal one final time. Everything was where it should be.
"You can close it again, Manakin."
The ancient dragon regarded him from across the vast underground chamber with the expression of someone who has been awake since before recorded history and is not impressed by any of it.
"Insolent children," Manakin rumbled, the sound of it moving through the stone walls of the cave like a slow tremor. "Disturbing this old man at dawn."
He shifted his enormous front paws. The earth responded — a deep, resonant *boom*, then a wave of movement through the cave floor that would have sent anyone less accustomed to it stumbling for a handhold. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. The seal chamber closed.
Cedric and Vincent stood through it without moving, watching Manakin's eyes with the easy familiarity of men who had been doing this since childhood.
As the trembling subsided, Vincent tilted his head toward the dragon and grinned.
"Grandfather. You know, if you'd just stop moving those front feet altogether, you'd conserve considerable energy in your final years."
Manakin's eyes rolled toward him with slow, volcanic displeasure. What came out from between his teeth was not words but heat — a billow of red-tinged flame aimed precisely at where Vincent was standing.
Vincent was already somewhere else.
"*Again!*" He reappeared a few feet to the left, pointing at the scorched patch of stone. "You do this every single time—"
"You were arrogant the first day your father brought you here to introduce you," Manakin said, with vast weariness. "You were a child barely past your naming day. You looked me in the eye and told me I had a boring cave. I should have burned you then."
"The cave *is* boring."
"*Vincent,*" Cedric said.
He said it in the particular tone that meant *I will not be responsible for what happens to you if you continue,* and Vincent, who had survived long enough to understand that tone, turned toward the cave entrance with his hands raised.
"The seal is confirmed intact, we've done our duty, I'm leaving before the Norman line ends." He waved over his shoulder without looking back. "Give my regards to Rebecca, Cedric!"
His footsteps faded. The cave settled into quiet.
Manakin's vast eyes moved from the entrance back to Cedric. They held there, slow and assessing, with the patience of something that had watched civilizations rise and conclude without particular urgency.
"Rebecca," he said at last. His voice had dropped — less the grinding authority he used with Vincent, more something thoughtful. "That was the name of your wife."
"Yes."
"She's still not imprinted."
It wasn't a question. Cedric's brow tightened.
Manakin's expression shifted — something between amusement and ancient exasperation. "You've spent years telling me my choice was wrong. Every time you came here, I heard it — my choice was wrong, this woman was not right, you didn't want her."
He paused, watching Cedric's face.
"And now you say nothing."
Cedric was quiet for a moment.
"I'm not sure anymore," he said finally. "I think... I think you may not have been wrong."
The great eyes narrowed with what, on a dragon, passed for interest. Manakin said nothing, waiting.
"I always believed she wanted too much from me," Cedric said. The words came out slowly, reluctantly, the way things do when they've been held inside long enough to calcify. "That she was pursuing something — trying to get close to me for reasons beyond what she said. It felt calculated. And the more she seemed to want me, the more I pulled away." He exhaled slowly. "I was certain of it. I thought I was being perceptive."
"And now?"
"Now I think I may have been wrong about nearly all of it."
A silence.
Then, with the particular difficulty of someone unaccustomed to saying things like this: "Rebecca told me she doesn't want me anymore."
Manakin was quiet for a moment. Then, with a sound like boulders shifting: "Finally."
Cedric's eyes sharpened.
"I don't mean *finally, good riddance,*" Manakin said, in the tone of someone who will explain himself but resents having to. "I mean finally, now we can get somewhere." He settled his enormous weight and regarded Cedric steadily. "So. Does it relieve you? That she's let go?"
Cedric didn't answer immediately.
When he did, the word came out very quietly.
"No."
He'd expected relief. He'd been so certain, for so long, that distance from Rebecca was what he wanted — that her indifference, when it finally came, would feel like a door opening. Instead it had felt like something closing. Each time he saw her now — her laughter, her composure, the way she'd looked at the burning forest with those wide, unguarded eyes — he understood with increasing clarity what he'd had his back turned to all this time.
She was nothing like the woman he thought he'd married. She was more than that — more complicated, more capable, more genuinely *good* — and he had spent four years deciding not to look closely enough to see it.
The guilt of that had its own particular weight.
"You've finally let her in," Manakin said. He wasn't gloating. He sounded, if anything, almost tired — the weariness of having seen this same shape of human error too many times to count. "The tragedy being that now she's the one stepping back."
"I have no right to stop her," Cedric said. "I gave up whatever right I had."
"Did you." Manakin's great head tilted. "Tell me, Cedric — in all the years I've been choosing companions for the guardians of this seal, do you think I've made errors?"
Cedric said nothing.
"The only error in your match," Manakin said, "was yours. The blindness was yours. The distance was yours." A pause. "But blindness can end. Distance can be crossed. What you threw away carelessly — that is gone, yes. But what is in front of you now is different. *She* is different, and so, it seems, are you."
He lowered his head until one enormous eye was nearly level with Cedric's.
"I showed you the shape of your fate. I can't walk the path for you. But the path is still there, if you choose to take it."
The quiet that followed was the kind that changes things.
Cedric stood in it for a while. Then something in his expression shifted — not dramatically, not the way it did in stories, but the way real things change: gradually, and then all at once.
The corner of his mouth moved.
"They say you've lived long enough to accumulate the wisdom of heaven and earth," he said. "For once, it shows."
Manakin made a sound that was not entirely unlike a laugh. Enormous, and slow, and deeply reluctant.
They spoke for a little while longer. Then Cedric bid him farewell and walked out into the light.
Behind him, in the dark of the cave, Manakin watched him go with eyes that had seen the beginning of many things.
"Now," the old dragon said softly, to no one, "it is your turn to fall for her."
---
Early that afternoon, with Cedric away in the Demon World and the dark mansion quieter than usual, Bianca invited me to the Mansion of Light for tea.
We had been sitting together for a pleasant while — the kind of unhurried afternoon that I hadn't realized I'd been missing until it arrived. Bianca had a talent for conversation that felt genuinely easy, and I found myself laughing more than once at things she said with complete sincerity that were also, without her intending it, rather funny.
A servant approached while we were midway through a second pot of tea. She hesitated at the edge of the table, holding an envelope, her expression caught somewhere between apology and anxiety.
"Your Highness, I'm very sorry to interrupt — a letter arrived for you. The messenger said it was urgent and asked that you send a reply immediately."
She looked as though she expected this announcement to go poorly.
I smiled at her.
"Thank you for bringing it straight to me."
She blinked. A small, startled blink, as though the words hadn't quite matched her expectation of them.
"I— yes, of course, Your Highness. Thank you..."
She handed me the letter and stepped back.
I turned it over to check the sender.
*Of course.*
The discomfort arrived immediately, familiar and unwelcome. I looked at the letter for a moment, then folded it without opening it, tore it cleanly in half, and set the pieces on the table beside my teacup.
I looked back at the servant.
"Please tell the messenger that my schedule doesn't allow for it. And that this will likely continue to be the case."
She nodded quickly and retreated.
Bianca watched this with polite restraint and said nothing. She refilled my cup instead.
I picked it up, and we carried on with our afternoon.
---
That evening, in the southern estate of Duke Bold, the messenger bird arrived late.
Duke Bold was still at his desk when it came — he'd been waiting, in the irritable, restless way of someone who expects a particular answer and has already decided what to do when it arrives. He unwrapped the note from the bird's leg and read it standing.
The silence lasted exactly as long as it took him to understand what he was reading.
"*This—!*"
The flat of his hand came down on the desk hard enough to send papers sliding.
He stood over it, jaw tight, the note crumpled in his fist.
"Rebecca." Her name came out low and vicious. "You think you can simply ignore a promise you made before you ever set foot in that castle—"
He dropped the note onto the desk and looked at it for a long moment, his breathing controlled with visible effort.
"You're mistaken," he said quietly, "if you think I'll simply let this go."