**Chapter 42: The One Who Dies Today Is You**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"You shameless girl!"
Duke Bold's hands closed around my shoulders and shook — hard, the grip of someone who had stopped caring about appearances.
I shoved back with everything I had. It wasn't enough. He was heavier than he looked, and fueled by something beyond ordinary anger.
"Five years!" he snarled. "Five years I waited, and now you're filling your own pockets and pretending our arrangement never existed?"
"Let go of me—"
"Was this your plan from the beginning?" His face was very close now, flushed and ugly with rage. "Use me to get the title, get settled, then cut me loose once you didn't need me anymore?"
"I said *let go*—"
I twisted hard and managed to free one arm, but he caught me again — faster than I expected — and this time his hand found my throat, pressing me back against the wall.
The stone was cold through my dress. The pressure on my neck built steadily.
I hit at his wrist. Tried to get a knee up. Neither worked. His grip tightened with each attempt, as though resistance made him more certain rather than less.
He watched me struggle with the detached patience of someone who has already decided how this ends.
"Did you really think," he said softly, almost amused, "that you could use me and simply walk away?"
My vision was beginning to gray at the edges.
"You're nothing without what I gave you." He leaned closer, his breath hot and sour with drink. "If you're so determined to be useless to me — I'll find a replacement. One of my other daughters. Someone who actually follows instructions." The pressure increased. "But first. Bring me Lillian's Heart. That's all I'm asking. Just bring it to me, and all of this stops."
I couldn't answer. I could barely breathe.
He loosened his grip — barely, just enough to let air back in — and brought his face close to my ear.
"Otherwise," he murmured, "I don't see any reason to let you leave here at all."
The words were very calm. That was the worst part.
"Unless—"
Duke Bold's head snapped backward with a sharp, involuntary cry.
The pressure on my throat vanished.
I doubled forward, hands on my knees, pulling in breath after ragged breath. The world tilted back toward steady. I blinked the gray from my vision.
"Who," said a voice — pleasant, almost cheerful, with something underneath it that was neither — "did you just say you were going to kill? Here? In the dark mansion?"
I straightened slowly.
Mina stood a few feet away, one hand still extended from whatever she'd done to send Duke Bold staggering. Behind her, filling the narrow path with quiet, purposeful menace, were five or six of the other maids.
They were not wearing their uniforms.
The fitted black they'd changed into was practical in the specific way that suggested they had worn it before, in contexts that had nothing to do with housekeeping. Their faces were equally different — not the warm, composed expressions I was used to seeing in the corridors. These were still, and cold, and looked at Duke Bold the way patient things look at something small that has made a great deal of unnecessary noise.
Duke Bold took one look at them and went pale.
"Don't — don't come any closer!"
They came closer.
Mina tilted her head at him, the expression on her face almost gentle.
"How unfortunate," she said softly. "It isn't Her Highness who's going to die today." She leaned in, close enough that he had to hear it clearly. "I believe it might be the Duke."
A maid materialized behind Duke Bold and bent his arm back in a single efficient motion.
"*Ahh—!*"
"Did you know," she said conversationally, over his cry, "exactly who you were manhandling just now? In whose home you were doing it?"
"*Let go — I'll have you all—*"
Mina grabbed him by the collar and deposited him to one side with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to moving things considerably heavier. Then she came to me, and between one step and the next her expression completed its transformation — back to warmth, back to familiar, the Mina I knew every morning.
"Your Highness. Are you hurt?"
I looked at her face — that perfectly composed, genuinely concerned face — and felt a wave of something between admiration and absurdity wash through me.
"I'm all right," I managed.
She held my gaze for a moment, checking, then nodded.
"If Your Highness would prefer we simply escort him off the grounds, we will." Her voice was perfectly agreeable. "We'd regret it, but we would."
A small pause.
"On the other hand, if Your Highness would prefer a more thorough resolution—" She brightened. "There's a very pleasant spot in the Demon World forest. Sunny. Quiet. No one would ever need to know."
I raised my thumb.
Duke Bold made a sound I'd never heard a person make before.
"*You're all insane!* Do you have any idea who I am?! You cannot — a Duke of the Empire — you *cannot*—"
"Your Highness." Another maid stepped forward. "If it would put the Duke's mind at ease, I can remove the relevant memories before we conclude. He won't recall any discomfort."
I looked at Duke Bold — at his shaking jaw, at the performance of authority that had nothing left to perform at — and something in me that had been braced for a long time quietly released.
"Do whatever you like with him," I said. "He's yours. Just make sure he's out of my sight."
The maids smiled — not the polite, domestic smiles I saw every day, but something older and more honest — and moved toward Duke Bold with a focused enthusiasm that suggested they had been waiting, on some level, for exactly this kind of afternoon.
Duke Bold's dignity lasted approximately three more seconds.
"*No — wait — please, I'm asking you—*"
Mina's hand closed over his mouth. The group moved efficiently toward the backyard. The sounds of his muffled protest grew distant, then faded entirely, then were gone.
I stood alone in the quiet path and breathed carefully for a moment.
*Pathetic,* I thought, without particular heat. *You came all this way, into this castle, and this is what you got.*
I straightened my collar, checked that my hair was more or less intact, and walked back toward the mansion.
---
Several hours later, inside the Bold family carriage on the road south.
Duke Bold surfaced from unconsciousness with a gasp, eyes flying open, heart hammering against his ribs.
He looked around.
Carriage interior. His aide, sitting across from him with the expression of someone who has had a long and trying day. The window showing countryside moving past at a steady clip.
"Duke." The aide leaned forward. "Are you all right?"
Duke Bold's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. He was — in the carriage. Going south. The city was already behind them.
"How did I—" He stopped. Tried again. "When did I get back in the carriage?"
"You fell on the stairs, Duke. The maids said you'd had too much to drink and lost your footing. They carried you out and helped you to the carriage." The aide paused. "We've been traveling for about two hours."
"I fell on the—" He stopped.
He tried to remember.
He could recall getting out of the carriage. Walking toward the dark mansion. The path. And then — nothing. A complete and seamless nothing, as though the tape had simply been cut and rejoined at a later point.
He had never lost memory to drink. Not cleanly, not like this.
He was still frowning at the gap when the pain arrived.
It came from everywhere at once — a full inventory of aches that ranged from deeply unpleasant to genuinely alarming. His arms. His ribs. His legs. A spectacular bruise under one eye that throbbed at its own rhythm. The corner of his lip split and crusted over.
The comprehensive, anatomically thorough quality of the damage suggested that whatever had happened on those stairs had been a very bad fall indeed.
The aide produced a small ceramic container from his coat pocket and worked off the lid.
The smell hit Duke Bold like a physical force.
"*What is that.*"
"Ointment. The maids sent it along — they said it was made with Demon World ingredients and would help with bruising."
"I don't want anything from those—" He moved sharply to push it away, reopened the cut on his lip, and produced a sound that was not remotely dignified. His hand pressed to his mouth. His eyes watered.
The aide waited.
Duke Bold sat very still for a moment, evaluating his situation with the pragmatism of a man in significant pain.
Then, with great dignity, he held out his hand for the ointment.
The aide applied it without comment.
The smell was genuinely awful. The bruises were comprehensive. The memory was gone. The journey south stretched ahead for hours.
Duke Bold sat with all of this, staring at the window, and said nothing more for a very long time.