**Chapter 48 — The Grand Duchess Has Disappeared**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
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It was still close to dawn.
The Dark Mansion lay wrapped in silence, every corridor still and dim. I slipped out through the front door without a sound and moved quietly into the garden. After a few steps, Mina drew close and whispered beside me.
"Your Highness, the carriage is waiting just ahead."
As I had instructed, it bore no Twins family crest. I had also specifically requested a carriage suited to a middle-class household — plain, unremarkable, the kind no one would look at twice. Nothing about it would suggest that the Grand Duchess of Twins was inside.
"Was all the luggage packed?"
"Every last piece, Your Highness." Mina smiled with easy confidence, shifting the large bundle in her arms.
The other maids stood nearby, each carrying their own. Mina cast a quick eye over them as they loaded everything into the carriage, then returned to my side.
"I believe it's time."
At those words, I turned my head toward the distant silhouette of the Mansion of Light.
"Yes... I suppose it is."
And then, as it had done so many times over the past few days, his voice played through my mind without permission.
*Rebecca, I want your heart back.*
Cedric's face — the expression he wore when he said it — surfaced with perfect clarity.
When I first heard those words, I had been genuinely startled. Not by the feeling behind them, but by the fact of them. That Cedric's heart could move toward someone other than the heroine Lobelia — and that it had moved toward Rebecca, of all people, toward the woman the story had always cast as its villain.
Perhaps the original narrative was beginning to shift. If so, that should have been good news. A changed story might mean a changed fate — and I, who had been thrown into Rebecca's body without warning or consent, had more reason than anyone to hope for that.
But I was not the Rebecca he remembered.
I wasn't the woman who had loved him so completely that she'd worn herself down to nothing reaching for him. That Rebecca — her desperation, her longing, her singular devotion — was gone. I had no such heart to return to him, even if I wanted to.
And so, naturally, I had refused him. There was no other answer I could give.
*Though if I had somehow fallen in love with him — truly, on my own terms — things might have been different.*
But that wasn't something I could allow. Not when he still withheld the truth from me. Not when the wounds left by my husband in my past life were still present, still tender in places I didn't always remember until something pressed against them.
*I don't want to give myself to something that fragile again. So please, Cedric — stop unsettling me.*
I held his silhouette in my gaze for one last moment, then shook my head — deliberately, firmly — and climbed into the carriage.
Everything that had mattered to the old Rebecca had been Cedric. That man, that name, that impossible hope.
But what mattered to me now was simpler, and far more urgent.
I had to survive.
---
A short while later, in the Grand Duke's bedroom.
The door flew open. Light and noise flooded in.
Cedric sat up sharply, his brows already drawn together before he was fully awake.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke! Please, you have to wake up!"
Bianca's voice — and her face, when he found it, was flushed and tight with something close to panic.
Cedric blinked, instinctively reached for his watch.
Four-thirty in the morning.
Whatever had brought Bianca here at this hour, it was not a small thing. She never disturbed her own sleep — or his — for nothing.
He threw back the blanket, rose, and gathered her into his arms in one motion. His voice, rough with sleep, softened.
"Bianca, what's happened? Did you have a bad dream?"
But Bianca, cradled against him, looked moments away from tears.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke!"
He had never seen her like this. Something shifted in him, and he began to pat her back steadily, carefully.
"Bianca, tell me what—"
She wriggled free from his arms and seized his hand instead, pulling with surprising force.
"There's no time! You need to look out the window — right now!"
He let her lead him, though his frown deepened.
"Has someone gotten past the gates? An intruder?" A reasonable question — whoever had the nerve to enter a castle guarded by half-blood demon users would have to be remarkably foolish.
But Bianca shook her head and pointed.
"Look at the carriage in front of the Dark Mansion!"
He glanced out — and went still.
*That's... Rebecca. What on earth is she doing at this hour?*
The longer he looked, the more wrong it felt.
A plain grey dress. A wide-brimmed black hat pulled low enough to conceal her red hair. Everything about her clothing was designed to obscure rather than present — she was dressed not as a Grand Duchess, but as someone who very much did not want to be recognized as one.
And the maids. They were loading luggage — bundle after bundle — into a carriage that bore no Twins crest. A carriage he didn't recognize.
The crease between his brows sharpened into something colder.
Bianca clutched his arm again, her voice rising.
"Where is she going? At this hour, with all of that luggage? She wouldn't just — she can't really be leaving, can she? Can she?"
The question hung in the air.
And in the space of a single breath, the color drained from Cedric's face entirely.
*Rebecca. The contract still has time left. Why would she—*
Her face came back to him immediately — the calm, unwavering look she had worn when she refused him. The quiet finality of it.
*Was that why she refused? Because she was already planning to leave? Or did my suggestion that evening push her toward this?*
His thoughts knotted around each other, frantic and without resolution.
He was already moving.
He ran — out of the bedroom, down the corridor, through the garden — but by the time he burst into the open air, the carriage was gone. Only the empty road remained, the garden utterly still.
He stood there breathing hard, staring at the path the carriage had taken.
*Whatever her reason — I cannot let her go like this.*
His jaw tightened. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
He turned and walked straight into the Dark Mansion, found the guest bell in the lobby, and rang it without pause.
Several moments later, the chamberlain shuffled out from somewhere deeper in the house, still heavy with sleep.
"Good heavens, who rings at this — oh! Your Highness!"
The man startled fully awake, descended the stairs at an undignified speed, and bowed.
"Your Highness, whatever you need, I am entirely at your—"
"Where is Adrian?"
The chamberlain blinked. His expression had been warming with anticipation — the hint of opportunity in an unexpected early morning visit — but the question, and the voice behind it, cut through everything.
Cedric's tone had dropped to something quiet and precise and completely without warmth.
"I asked where he was."
The cold fury in those few words sent a visible shiver down the chamberlain's spine. He glanced up cautiously at the Grand Duke's face and found an expression he had not seen before.
"Your Highness, Deacon Adrian is... not currently in the castle. His father's condition has worsened recently, and I believe he has gone to attend to him, though I don't know the particulars—"
"He's not here."
It wasn't a question.
The chamberlain swallowed and nodded once.
"...No, Your Highness."
Cedric stood motionless. The silence stretched. Something moved through his expression — sharp, controlled, barely so.
"The Grand Duchess has disappeared."
He said it evenly. But his jaw was set tight, and his next words came with the weight of someone who meant every syllable.
"Wake every knight in this castle immediately. Have those with tracking ability prepare at once. I will go ahead and pursue the Grand Duchess myself — the rest are to search the surrounding area."
"Now, Your Highness? At this hour—"
"And if the Grand Duchess is not found—"
His gaze landed on the chamberlain with absolute clarity.
"No one in this castle will be spared my displeasure."
The chamberlain's cheeks went white, then immediately red. He straightened with the urgency of a man who has just understood the full weight of a situation.
"Yes — yes, Your Highness! I'll go to the knight commander at once!"
He was gone before the words finished leaving his mouth.
Cedric watched him go, then pressed a hand over his face and dragged it downward.
*Rebecca left. And Adrian is not here.*
The two facts assembled themselves in his mind with a precision he did not want, and his chest tightened around something he couldn't name — anger, fear, jealousy so fierce it blurred into something shapeless.
Adrian absent from the castle. Rebecca slipping out at dawn, in disguise, with everything she owned.
The image that followed — the two of them, somewhere beyond these walls, together — lodged itself behind his ribs and refused to leave.
The hand at his side clenched slowly, knuckles whitening.
*Rebecca. You are not leaving me. Not yet. Not like this.*
Even if it ever came to that — even if the time arrived when she truly walked away — it would not happen this way. Not in secret. Not before he had been given even the smallest chance to reach her.
He owed her that, at the very least.
---
Bianca arrived in the Dark Mansion a few moments later, nanny in tow, and stopped short at the sight of her brother's face.
*I knew he would be shocked. But not like this.*
Her small hand tightened around her nanny's without thinking. She looked up slowly, guilt pressing quietly at the corners of her chest.
*Nanny... are we sure this is alright?*
The look she sent upward was plaintive and uncertain — but her nanny responded with nothing more than a calm, steady wink, as if to say: *trust me.*
Bianca closed her eyes. She took a breath. She made a very deliberate internal decision to stop feeling guilty.
It was sad that her brother had been frightened. Truly. But the Grand Duchess had, in fact, gone *somewhere* — so technically, nothing she had reported was a lie. And this was all in service of a future in which the two of them would finally be happy. Surely that counted for something.
She was still engaged in this very reasonable internal argument when Cedric swept past her and out the front door, moving with the focused intensity of a man who had forgotten everything except his destination.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke! I want to come with you!"
He was already gone.
Bianca stood in the entrance, watching the door close behind him, and was quiet for a moment.
Then she raised her small fist.
"Just you wait." Her voice was soft, but deeply resolved. "This time, I am absolutely going to fix this."
Her nanny looked down at her with an expression caught somewhere between fondness and mild alarm.
Bianca's chin was set. Her eyes were bright.
She meant every word.
---