**Chapter 40: A Chance to Stand Next to You**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
Rebecca had always been obedient.
That was what Duke Bold had counted on — the foundational assumption beneath every calculation he'd made over the past five years. She had always come when summoned. Had always absorbed his displeasure quietly and adjusted her behavior accordingly. Had always, in the end, done what she was told.
Which was why her silence now felt not merely inconvenient but personally offensive.
She had refused every request for a meeting. She had torn up his letters without reading them. And she had done all of it without explanation, without apology, without the tearful contrition he'd been quietly certain would arrive once she'd had time to reflect on her position.
He had miscalculated. He could see that now.
His hands moved restlessly across his face as he paced. He'd known she was changing — the reports from the castle had made that much clear — but he had assumed the change was cosmetic. A woman putting on a better performance for her husband's household. He had not seriously entertained the possibility that the change went deeper than that.
And now she had liquidated her personal assets. Jewelry, artwork, pieces that had been wedding gifts — gone, converted quietly into capital. The moment he'd learned that, something cold had moved through him.
*She's planning to leave.*
Duke Bold stopped pacing.
The entire scheme — years of careful positioning, of sacrifice, of endurance — had been built on a single premise: that Rebecca would obtain Cedric's imprint and, through it, the means to locate Lillian's Heart. That was the arrangement. That had always been the arrangement. The Heart promised absolute power to whoever possessed it, and with that power, the fallen Kingdom of Katsis would rise again. Duke Bold would no longer be a disgraced noble clinging to an empty title in a country that had swallowed him whole. He would be the second most powerful man in the empire. He would be *owed.*
Five years. Five years, and she had obtained nothing. No imprint. No information. And now — now, when he needed her compliant more than ever — she had apparently decided to develop a personality.
"Useless," he said quietly, to the empty room. "Utterly useless."
He poured another drink and didn't bother with a glass.
If Rebecca would not cooperate — if she was genuinely planning to divorce and walk away from the castle — then she was no longer an asset. She was an obstacle. And obstacles, in Duke Bold's experience, were best replaced.
He smiled slowly, the expression doing nothing pleasant to his face.
There were other ways. There were always other ways.
---
Several weeks had passed since the futures exchange.
In that time, the imperial family had begun releasing special carriages into the market in careful, deliberate quantities. The response had been immediate and enthusiastic. Early buyers, initially cautious, had quickly converted to devoted advocates — the convenience was too significant to resist, and word traveled fast. Articles appeared daily. The value climbed steadily, without ceiling in sight.
"Your Highness, this morning's paper."
Mina appeared as I finished washing my face, holding the newspaper out with both hands and a poorly concealed smile.
I took it, turned to the economics section out of habit, and then stopped.
My name was in the headline on the front page.
*Rebecca Twins.*
I stared at it.
Mina made a sound of suppressed delight beside me.
"I nearly dropped the whole stack when I saw it this morning. Your Highness, you really are extraordinary!"
The headline read: *Grand Duchess Rebecca Twins Predicted the Value of Special Carriages — Is She the Empire's Newest Investment Genius?*
I read the first paragraph and set the paper down.
"This is wildly exaggerated."
"It's only exaggerated by a little."
"They've written it as though I'm already a billionaire."
"You will be, though." Mina tilted her head with cheerful practicality. "Relatively soon, by the looks of it. When are you planning to release the first units?"
I picked up the pen I'd been using to annotate the margins and tapped it against my chin.
"A handful — twenty or so — in the next few days. At the highest price the market will bear."
"Only twenty?" Mina looked genuinely pained. "Wouldn't it make more sense to move them quickly while the value is still climbing?"
"The value hasn't finished climbing yet. If I release them gradually, the scarcity keeps demand sharp. People want most desperately what they can't easily obtain." I turned the page. "According to what I've gathered, large-scale production won't begin for at least six months, possibly a year. Until then, I hold."
Mina absorbed this and nodded slowly, with the expression of someone revising their opinion upward.
I turned another page — and found my thoughts drifting, despite myself, to Duke Bold.
He had stopped appearing uninvited after I'd made my position clear, which was something. But his attempts to arrange meetings had grown more persistent since then, not less, and I had been ignoring all of them with systematic thoroughness. He had written. I hadn't replied. He had written again. I'd thrown it away.
*He will have read this article by now.*
He had spent years leveraging my dependence on his approval — my title, my standing, my sense that without his goodwill I had nothing. He had used that as a leash. Now the leash had been cut, and he couldn't approach me directly, and his options were narrowing in ways he would not enjoy discovering.
*I'm almost sorry for him,* I thought. Then I thought about it a moment longer. *Almost.*
I set the paper down and stood.
"Where are you going?" Mina asked.
"Morning walk. The weather's too good to waste."
"Shall I come?"
"Not today."
---
I came down to the lobby and, as I often did, found myself pausing in front of the large painting on the wall.
The Demon World forest. Dark, dense, impossibly still — except that I knew now it wasn't still at all. There was a whole world on the other side of it, alive and moving, with someone I'd met walking through it.
*Is Vincent all right?*
I found myself thinking of him with a warmth that surprised me slightly. He was bewildering and unpredictable and apparently capable of walking out of paintings, but there was something guileless about him underneath all of it — a directness that I appreciated, even when it was aimed at me like a blunt instrument.
My hand moved toward the painting's surface without my fully intending it.
"Are you thinking of visiting the Demon World again?"
I spun around.
Adrian was standing at the far end of the lobby, watching me with a quiet expression. When our eyes met, he walked over and smiled in his familiar, easy way.
"Good morning, Your Highness."
"Adrian." I lowered my hand. "What do you mean, *again*?"
The smile faded.
He looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't immediately read — searching, and then settling into something that looked like reluctant understanding.
"I always thought," he said slowly, "that you remembered and were simply pretending otherwise. That you couldn't forgive me for what happened and had chosen not to acknowledge it." A pause. "But looking at you now — you genuinely have no memory of it."
He said it quietly, without accusation. More as though confirming something he'd been avoiding confirming.
"Adrian, what are you talking about?"
He lifted his eyes to mine.
"Would you walk with me, Your Highness?"
---
He led me through the mansion and out to the backyard, where a narrow path wound down to the pond behind the Mansion of Light. The morning sun was still low, breaking in long pale ribbons across the water's surface.
He stopped in front of a flat stone near the water's edge.
"Here," he said. "Sit here a moment."
I sat. He remained standing, looking at the pond.
"His Highness the Grand Duke was sitting in this exact spot," he said, "the day I first encountered you."
I blinked. "I thought we first met in the dark mansion."
"No." He shook his head. "It was here. Before any of that." He paused. "You were crying."
*Rebecca was crying.* I turned the image over, trying to attach it to something real.
"It was your wedding day," Adrian said. "His Highness had been called away to the Demon World on urgent business within hours of the ceremony. He left before evening." His voice was carefully even. "You were alone. You seemed — broken, I think, is the right word."
He went quiet for a moment, his jaw working slightly.
"I found out later what you did next. You followed him. Somehow you found your way to Mt. Manakin — the demon mountain where he'd gone — and you went after him." He exhaled. "I don't know everything that happened there. What I do know is that His Highness brought you back himself, and you were unconscious when he carried you in." He closed his eyes briefly. "And from that night onward, he was different toward you. Cold. Suspicious. As though whatever he'd found you doing there had confirmed something he'd feared."
I sat with this.
All these months, I had been working with an incomplete picture — I'd known the shape of the unhappiness, but not its origin. Not the specific night that had fractured everything before the marriage had barely begun.
*She followed him.* On her wedding night, alone and heartbroken, Rebecca had followed her husband into the Demon World because she couldn't bear not to.
And something had gone wrong there. Something that had colored every day of the four years that followed.
Adrian turned toward me. Then, slowly, he lowered himself to one knee.
"Adrian—"
"That day," he said, "it was my doing. I helped you find the way. You were crying and I couldn't — I couldn't simply watch and do nothing." His blue-violet eyes were direct and full of something that had clearly been sitting in him for a long time. "I thought I was helping. I thought if you could just reach him, things would be better." He shook his head. "I was wrong. Whatever happened at that mountain — I set it in motion. I cost you both something you might never have lost otherwise."
"Adrian." I leaned forward. "You couldn't have known what would happen."
"It doesn't change what did happen."
"No," I said. "But it changes what you're responsible for."
He looked at me steadily, unconvinced but listening.
"And besides," I said, more gently, "the decision to divorce is mine. I made it with a clear head, knowing what I was doing. Whatever happened that night — it doesn't own me. The past doesn't get to make my choices for me."
A long pause.
"I know," he said finally. "I know you've decided. I heard enough to understand that." He stood slowly, brushing off his knee. He seemed to be gathering himself for something. "How?"
"The property listings," he said simply.
I looked at him for a moment. Then I exhaled.
"I'd like you to keep it between us, for now."
"Of course. Whatever you want."
"And please stop carrying this like it's your fault." I reached up and touched his shoulder briefly. "I'm leaving because I choose to. I'm going to start over somewhere new, with money I earned myself, and I'm going to be perfectly fine." I smiled at him. "So take care of yourself until then. That's all I'm asking."
Something shifted in his expression — the darkness not gone, but loosened slightly, like a knot that had been worked at for a long time beginning to give.
"Your Highness." He said my title and then stopped. He pressed his lips together. Tried again. "I know that what I'm about to say is — that I have no right to say it. I know that."
He looked at me directly, with his blue-violet eyes very clear and very serious, and spoke before he could stop himself.
"The day you leave this castle — when that day comes — would you consider giving me a chance? To stand beside you."
The pond was very quiet around us. A bird called somewhere in the trees and went silent.
"Not as your butler," he said quietly. "As someone who would very much like the opportunity to be more than that to you. If you'd allow it."