**Chapter 43: Worried About the Woman You Love**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"Your Highness! Duke Bold has been successfully seen off!"
Mina swept into the sitting room with the bright, satisfied energy of someone returning from a thoroughly enjoyable errand. Her face was entirely back to its usual warmth — composed, cheerful, not a trace of what it had been forty minutes ago in that narrow path. The maids filing in behind her wore the same expressions, as though they had simply been on a pleasant walk.
"I told his aide he'd had too much to drink and taken a tumble on the stairs. We sent him home with some ointment."
"Demon bison extract," one of the others added helpfully. "The smell tends to linger for several days."
"His memories have been completely cleared," said another. "He won't remember a thing from the moment he stepped foot on the grounds."
Their faces were luminous with the particular satisfaction of people who have done something they've been wanting to do for a very long time.
"You all did wonderfully," I said. "Thank you."
They laughed — pleased, a little flustered — and then, in a motion I hadn't expected, moved as one to kneel before me, a single knee each, in a gesture that was formal in structure but warm in everything else.
"What are you doing?"
Mina looked up with an expression that was trying very hard to be composed and not quite succeeding.
"After today, Your Highness, there's no question left in any of our minds." She glanced sideways at the others, who nodded. "You belong to the Twins family. Truly."
"We've always wanted to serve you well," another said. "But from now on — we mean it completely."
"Yes! Just tell us anything, Your Highness. Anything at all!"
They looked at me with their eyes lit up, clearly expecting some grand request, something worthy of the moment. I looked back at them.
"There is one thing, actually."
"Yes?" They leaned forward in unison.
I took a breath.
"I want to apologize to the mixed-blood demons I've hurt."
Silence.
The maids exchanged looks — not the conspiratorial ones from earlier, but genuinely confused ones.
"Apologize?" Mina repeated. "To the mixed-blood demons?"
"Yes. There are people who suffered because of me. I've known that for a while, and I've been thinking about how to address it." I looked at them steadily. "It's overdue. It's probably more overdue than I fully understand. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it."
"......"
"I won't leave this castle with those debts still unpaid. Whatever pain I caused — I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen and move on as though my own comfort is all that matters."
I had been looking at my hands, and when I looked up, I stopped.
Three of the maids were crying.
Not dramatically — quietly, in the way of people who are surprised by their own emotions. Eyes bright, cheeks flushed, doing their best to hold it together and not entirely succeeding.
"What — what's wrong—"
"Nothing," Mina said, her voice slightly unsteady. "Nothing's wrong. We just—" She pressed her lips together. "We didn't know Your Highness thought this way. We should have. But we didn't."
"I'm genuinely moved," said another, pulling herself upright. "I mean that. Truly."
I stared at them — these women who had, minutes ago, been dragging a Duke of the Empire through a garden by his collar with expressions of absolute calm — now crying over an apology I hadn't even delivered yet.
The range of it was something I didn't have words for.
"We'll help," Mina said, recovered now, practical again. "Unconditionally." She tapped her chin, thinking. "The people you'd most need to reach... many of them are in the same place." She brightened. "Gray Zone Village."
The other maids lit up immediately.
"The workers Her Highness dismissed — they didn't go back to the Demon World," one explained, seeing my expression. "They stayed and built a settlement together. It's in the mountains near the coast. An hour or two from here."
"And," Mina added, her eyes warming with the particular look of someone sharing good news, "if those people's hearts open to you — the residents of the Mansion of Light might follow. Because most of the people in Gray Zone used to work in the Mansion of Light. The current staff there watched people they'd known for years get turned out. That's been sitting with them."
I turned this over.
The Mansion of Light — the staff who still kept their distance, who were slowly, slowly beginning to reconsider, but hadn't fully crossed over yet. If their former colleagues vouched for me, not because I'd asked them to, but because something had genuinely changed—
*This is it,* I thought. *This is the thing I've been looking for.*
"Then we go to Gray Zone Village," I said.
The maids beamed.
"Anything else?" Mina asked, with the tone of someone who would personally scale a mountain if I asked her to.
"Actually — yes." I hesitated. "This might be harder to answer."
"Anything!"
"What is Lillian's Heart?"
The brightness in their faces changed shape almost immediately. Not quite gone — but rearranged into something that was attempting, not entirely successfully, to look casual.
"That's... that's a bit of a delicate topic, Your Highness..."
"If you wanted to ask about something like that, His Highness the Grand Duke would be the right—" One maid caught herself. "Well. Perhaps not..."
"It's not that we won't tell you, it's that we really... can't tell you..."
I watched them flounder with identical expressions of apologetic discomfort and decided not to push. They would help me with anything within their power to help with. This, apparently, was not within it.
*Cedric keeps it secret even from Lobelia, the woman he loves in the original story,* I thought. *He's certainly not going to tell me.*
I let it go.
But the question stayed with me, threading back through everything I'd seen and heard — Duke Bold's desperate obsession, the warning Cedric had delivered from the roof of a moving carriage, Vincent arriving through a painting in the middle of the night — and I felt with increasing certainty that Lillian's Heart was somewhere at the center of all of it.
And that I was adjacent to it in ways I didn't yet understand.
Even as I turned it over in my mind, Cedric's face surfaced again, unbidden.
I pressed the thought flat and went to find something useful to do.
---
That evening, in his private study, Cedric received the day's final report.
His aide stood at a careful distance, the way he always did when delivering information he wasn't sure how it would land.
"This section concerns an incident within the castle grounds today, Your Highness."
Cedric turned pages without looking up.
"Duke Bold arrived at the dark mansion this afternoon. He had been drinking. He confronted Her Highness in the side garden and—" The aide chose his words with the precision of a man who has considered them in advance. "He became physical, Your Highness. He pushed Her Highness against the wall and attempted to apply pressure to her throat."
Cedric's hand stopped moving.
"He made demands — something he claims Her Highness promised him. Given his history and the nature of the demand, it's possible he was referring to—"
"What about Rebecca."
The aide blinked. "Your Highness?"
"Is Rebecca all right."
It wasn't phrased like a question. The aide looked at Cedric's face — at the expression on it — and something in his chest shifted slightly.
"She — yes, Your Highness, she's unharmed. The maids intervened quickly. Duke Bold was subdued, his memories were cleared, and he was escorted off the grounds."
"He put his hands on her throat."
"Yes."
The silence that followed was the particular kind that has a temperature to it.
"Duke Bold." Cedric said the name very quietly. "Whatever he claims she promised him — if it's what I think it is, then she's been living under his pressure for years. Used as a means to an end, since before she ever came to this castle."
"Your Highness, you don't think Her Highness was genuinely—"
"No."
One word, and nothing after it. The aide thought of how Cedric had spoken about this very possibility six months ago — the cold certainty, the willingness to assume the worst, the way suspicion had settled into him like something permanent. He had expected to report this and have that certainty confirmed.
Instead Cedric looked like a man who has heard that someone he cares about was hurt, and is deciding what to do about it.
The aide chose his next words very carefully.
"The maids of the dark mansion — they acted outside their defined duties today. Technically, there may be questions in aristocratic circles, if anything comes to light—"
Cedric stood up.
"I'm going to reward them tonight."
"I — yes, Your Highness, I can arrange—"
"The only thing I regret," Cedric said, gathering his coat from the back of the chair, "is that they didn't bury him in the Demon World forest without leaving a trace. I'd have given them considerably more for that."
The aide stood very still.
He stared at his employer — at this person he had served for years, whose reactions he had thought he understood — and felt the reliable architecture of that understanding quietly come apart.
A new and alarming thought arrived: *Is this Vincent?*
Vincent had done it before. The resemblance was remarkable when he tried, and he found Cedric's household endlessly entertaining to confuse.
The aide stepped carefully forward and placed Cedric's hand against the Grand Duke's seal.
Cedric looked down at his hand, then up at his aide, with an expression of slow, patient bafflement.
"What are you doing."
The seal moved perfectly, responding only to Cedric's power, as it always had. The aide stared at it.
"I— nothing, Your Highness. My apologies."
Cedric studied him for a moment with the look of someone who has genuinely lost track of what his employees are for.
"Prepare the reward for the maids immediately. I'm going to the dark mansion."
"Now, Your Highness?"
"Now."
He was already at the door when he paused, one hand on the frame, as though the next words were something he hadn't quite decided to say until they were already said.
"I don't think I'll sleep easily until I see her myself."
Then he was gone, his footsteps already fading down the corridor.
The aide remained where he was for a long moment, looking at the empty doorway.
*He's worried,* he thought. *He's genuinely, simply worried about her.*
He turned the thought over carefully, examining it from multiple angles, looking for the version of events in which this was still the Cedric he knew — the one who had been cold and distant and relentlessly suspicious about everything related to the Grand Duchess.
He couldn't find it.
He picked up his pen. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Then he went to prepare the reward, walking quickly to catch up with a Grand Duke who was, for reasons the aide was only now beginning to understand, in a considerable hurry.