**Chapter 41: Even If I Risk Everything**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"A chance to stand next to you...?"
I repeated the words carefully, already knowing, even as I said them, that he didn't mean beside me in any professional sense.
Adrian's eyes stayed on mine. Steady. Certain.
"If it were you," he said quietly, "I would never leave you to face anything alone."
"Adrian—"
"I know I can make you happy. Genuinely happy — not the performance of it, not endurance dressed up as contentment." He paused, something moving briefly across his expression. "Happy enough that you'd stop carrying the weight of everything that came before."
He lowered his head for a moment, composing himself. When he looked up again, his voice was very even and very clear.
"Even if it costs me everything I have."
It was exactly the kind of confession Adrian would give — measured, sincere, delivered with the quiet gravity of someone who had sat with his feelings long enough to be entirely sure of them. There was nothing impulsive about it. Nothing that asked me to manage his emotions or minimize my own response to spare his.
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I lowered my gaze, and shook my head slowly.
When I looked up, a small, bitter smile had already found its way to Adrian's lips — the smile of someone who had hoped, while also having prepared for exactly this.
"...I understand."
A pause.
"May I ask why?"
---
I sent him back ahead of me and stayed by the pond alone.
The water was very still. A dragonfly hovered over the surface and moved on.
*Had Adrian felt this way for a long time?*
I'd sensed the shift in him — had been aware, for weeks, of something changing in the way he looked at me — but I hadn't followed the thread all the way to its end. I'd told myself it was affection of a professional kind, or perhaps the particular tenderness that develops between people who have been through difficult things together. I hadn't let myself think it was this.
I turned it over now, trying to understand when it had started. Trying to understand my own answer.
The truth was simpler than I'd expected, and I'd known it even in the moment of refusing him.
*It's not about Adrian. It wouldn't matter who asked.*
Right now, the only person I wanted to take seriously was myself. My plans. My future. The life I was building quietly, brick by careful brick, in preparation for the day I walked out of this castle and became entirely my own person. There was no room in that project for someone else's feelings, however genuine — and no fairness in accepting an offer I couldn't properly meet.
That was the real reason.
I repeated it to myself, firmly, and almost believed it entirely.
Except that while I'd been sitting there listening to Adrian's confession — while I'd been imagining, however briefly, what a future alongside him might look like — Cedric's face had appeared in my mind. Not in any dramatic way. Just quietly, the way a familiar thing surfaces without announcement.
I thought about what expression he'd make, if he saw this scene.
I thought: *he wouldn't care. He's relieved to be done with Rebecca. Whatever civility he's shown me lately is courtesy, nothing more — the same he'd extend to anyone living under his roof.*
I knew that. I believed it.
And yet.
*Don't,* I told myself. *Don't do this.*
I stood up, brushed down my skirt, and turned away from the pond.
Adrian had been kind. He had told me to take whatever time I needed, to think it over without pressure. That was exactly the sort of thing Adrian would say. I was grateful for it, and I would think about it properly, at a later date, when my head was clearer.
For now — forward. Always forward.
I took the narrow path that ran alongside the dark mansion, the one that wound between the backyard and the garden. It was quiet enough for thinking, shaded and still, the kind of path that felt removed from everything else without actually leading anywhere unusual.
I paused at a spot where a bird was singing in the upper branches of a tree I couldn't name, and stood there for a moment just listening.
Then a shadow fell across the hem of my dress.
I looked up.
My face did something involuntary and unflattering.
"Well," said Duke Bold. "It's been a while, Rebecca."
The smile on his face was the particular smile of someone who has rehearsed their entrance. He looked worse than the last time I'd seen him — thinner in the face, less composed around the eyes, with the slightly inflated air of someone who had been drinking since before noon.
"My insides have been burning for weeks," he said pleasantly, "and here you are, taking a lovely morning stroll."
I didn't move.
"What are you doing here."
"Visiting my daughter." He spread his hands as though this were self-evident. "Is that so unusual?"
The smell of alcohol reached me a moment later — not faint, not incidental. He had drunk enough that he hadn't bothered to care.
"Even I can smell it on myself." He laughed lightly. "I had a little something for the nerves. I was nervous, you understand. Coming to meet such a remarkable daughter — a rising investment genius, apparently. The papers have been very flattering."
"Leave."
"Now, now."
He took a step forward. Something in his eyes had gone sharp in the way that alcohol sometimes sharpened things — not clearer, but more concentrated, stripped of whatever social patience usually kept it contained.
"You've been ignoring my letters."
"Yes."
"You tore them up."
"Yes."
He looked at me for a moment.
Then he laughed — soft, unpleasant. "You always clung to my sleeve when you wanted something. Laughed at my jokes even when they weren't funny. Called me Father with that earnest little face." He tilted his head. "And now you mock my origins. Interesting."
"I learned from the best," I said. "You told me, many times, that anyone who stops being useful gets thrown away. I assumed that worked in both directions."
Something flickered across his face. The pleasantness thinned.
"...What?"
"I'm not useful to you anymore. So I'm throwing you away. Isn't that how it works?"
The pleasantness vanished entirely.
He stood very still for a moment, breathing through his nose, the redness creeping up from his collar. Then, slowly, he began to move toward me.
"You made me a promise," he said. "Before you ever set foot in this castle. Before I spent years arranging your position, your marriage, your access to everything you have now." His voice had dropped — quieter, which made it worse. "You agreed to give me something in return."
"I agreed to nothing."
"You—"
"I was a girl who had no choice and no information and nowhere to go," I said. "Whatever you called an agreement between us was never one."
He stopped walking.
His eyes were very empty now. Not cold exactly — emptier than cold. The look of someone for whom other people have never quite been fully real.
"Then I'll remind you," he said softly, "of what the alternative looks like."
---
Upstairs, in the corridor of the dark mansion, a small group of maids had been quietly ignoring their duties in the comfortable way of staff who know the head maid is occupied elsewhere.
The conversation had been running for a while — easy, familiar, the low-stakes banter of people who had known each other long enough to be honest.
"The people from the Mansion of Light," one of them said, with the particular tone reserved for a subject that has been complained about many times and shows no sign of being resolved. "Honestly. If we were in the Demon World, rank insignia off—"
"We'd flatten them," said another, with the tranquil certainty of someone stating a fact of physics.
"We'd devastate them."
General nodding.
"The human world is fine," someone allowed. "But sometimes. *Sometimes.*"
"Don't you think they've been a little different lately, though?" Mina said, from her position near the window. "The Light Mansion people. Dennis said something the other day — said he thought Her Highness had genuinely changed."
"Dennis said *that?*"
"He actually said that."
"He's insufferable but he's not stupid," someone concluded. "Princess Bianca keeps seeking Her Highness out, too. You can't keep dismissing someone the Princess openly likes."
Mina smiled a little to herself, still looking out the window, half-listening — and then stopped smiling.
She leaned forward.
Below, on the narrow path alongside the mansion, two figures stood close together in the way that immediately read as wrong. One of them was Rebecca. The other was a man Mina recognized — had been quietly watching with increasing suspicion over the past weeks.
Duke Bold's hand was on Rebecca's shoulder.
Mina's expression went very still.
Then it changed into something else entirely.
"*That absolute—*"
The maids behind her went quiet instantly. Mina never swore. Mina was the patient one, the measured one, the one who talked the others down.
They looked at her face and then looked out the window.
What they saw produced a collective, very quiet settling — the kind that happens when a decision is reached simultaneously, without discussion.
"That's within the castle grounds," someone observed, very calmly.
"Within the Grand Duke's jurisdiction," said another.
"Touching a member of the household."
"Within the castle grounds."
"We did hear that," the first one confirmed.
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
Mina straightened. Her fingers snapped once, crisp and decisive.
"Change into your field clothes."
The maids moved.
The light in Mina's eyes, as she looked back out the window, was the kind that polished uniforms and careful manners had been keeping carefully contained for a very long time.
"We're going to go and have a word with him," she said pleasantly.