**Chapter 49 — With Another Man**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
"I believe we've arrived, Your Highness."
It had been roughly two hours since we departed.
Mina drew back the curtain as she spoke. A moment later, the coachman came around and opened the door.
"We've arrived, Your Highness. Please, this way."
I stepped down with his assistance and was met by a bleak stretch of mountainside — grey with early morning, mist clinging to everything. The maids descended after me and immediately began scanning their surroundings with wary eyes.
"Are we really meeting here?"
I asked Mina quietly. She gave a small, composed nod.
"It seemed safer to meet first and enter together. It could be dangerous to go in alone."
The mountain was still dark at this hour, and the fog was heavy, swallowing the trees in patches. The only sounds were the occasional rustle of leaves and the cool, damp press of the breeze against my cheek.
The atmosphere had a distinctly unsettling quality.
I was in the middle of quietly admitting this to myself when Mina slipped her hand into mine.
She had noticed.
"Your Highness, are you alright? You've left the Grand Duke's castle to come to a place like this — I worry about you. It isn't somewhere you're accustomed to."
She meant well. She was thinking of the Rebecca who had been raised in warmth and luxury, sheltered from the edges of the world.
But I wasn't quite that Rebecca.
I was simply adjusting to the particular mood of a misty mountain at dawn. Entirely reasonable, I thought. And I had five capable, combat-ready demon-blood maids beside me. There was nothing to fear.
I squared my shoulders.
"Mina, do you remember when I told you about the whack-a-mole game? When I went up against those magic puppets?"
Mina blinked. "Whack-a-mole? What is that?"
The memory of myself swinging at puppet heads charging at me from all directions made a laugh slip out before I could stop it.
"Something like that."
Mina stared at me.
It was in the middle of this entirely sensible exchange that we heard it.
*Crunch. Crunch.*
Footsteps on fallen leaves — distant at first, then drawing steadily closer.
The maids straightened. Their expressions shifted.
"They're here," Mina murmured, her gaze fixed ahead.
I turned.
A man emerged slowly from between the trees, pushing through the underbrush until he stood in the open. He was broad-shouldered and carried himself with a deliberate steadiness, and when his eyes found me, there was no warmth in them.
He looked me over in silence — unhurried, assessing — then gave a single nod.
"Your Highness. You've come at last." His voice was as cold as the mountain air. "My name is Thompson. I served as a sub-deacon at the Mansion of Light."
He said it flatly, without ceremony.
"Though I don't expect Your Highness to remember me."
There was a bite to those last words. Mina glanced at me sideways and produced an awkward laugh.
"Ha — haha. Thompson, surely there's no need to be quite so—"
"It's alright." I shook my head. "Thompson is someone I wronged. His reaction is fair."
Gray Zone Village sat partway up this mountain — a place where former Twins family employees had gathered after being dismissed or mistreated under the previous Rebecca's tenure. Thompson was one of its residents, and the person who had agreed, through Mina's asking, to guide us there today.
I met his gaze and let the corner of my mouth lift slightly.
"Thank you for coming out to meet us, Thompson."
Something shifted briefly in his expression — his brows rose, just a fraction, as though the words had arrived from somewhere entirely unexpected. As though gratitude from Rebecca's mouth was something he had not prepared himself to receive.
Then his face settled back into something closed and dry.
"I'm not here to help you, Your Highness." He glanced briefly at Mina. "I'm here because an old friend asked me, and I didn't see a way around it."
He returned his gaze to me.
"You're truly set on going to Gray Zone Village?"
"Yes."
Thompson's expression tightened at my answer.
"Most people in that village want nothing to do with you, Your Highness. And some will feel considerably more strongly than I do. I want to be clear about that."
"I expected as much."
"I'll take you as far as the village, as Mina requested. But my obligation ends at the gate." His eyes sharpened. "If the villagers choose to make things difficult for you, I will not intervene. I won't stand against them on your behalf — not for any reason."
I nodded slowly.
"I understand, Thompson. I won't ask anything more of you than this."
Something in his posture settled — not warmth, but a kind of reluctant acknowledgment. He turned and knocked twice on the carriage door.
"Then I'll show you the way."
---
Inside the Twins Grand Duke's carriage, somewhere on the same mountain road.
Cedric's carriage moved at speed, following the trail the knights had traced. Word had come that the most recent signs of the Grand Duchess had been found — they were close.
Bianca sat pressed against her nanny's side, watching her brother from beneath her lashes.
In the space of just a few hours, his face had changed. The lines around his jaw were sharper. The color had drained from beneath his skin. He sat with his gaze fixed hard on the window, unmoving, somewhere unreachable.
Bianca's heart grew heavier with every mile.
She had made up her mind. She didn't regret the decision — not exactly. But looking at her brother's face now, she found it increasingly difficult to feel entirely at peace with it either.
She parted her lips carefully.
"Her Highness will be alright. We'll find her soon, I'm sure of it..."
Cedric did not respond. He didn't even seem to hear her.
He was somewhere else entirely.
---
Inside his own silence, memories were moving through him like water — not all of them, but one in particular, returning over and over no matter how many times he tried to step past it.
The day Rebecca announced their divorce.
The things he had said to her.
The look on her face when he said them.
*Your obsession is suffocating. I am sick to death of the woman you've become.*
He had meant it to wound her. He had wanted it to — had resented her for the way she clung to him, the way her love felt less like love and more like a chain. And so he had been precise about it. Deliberate. He had chosen words that would cut deep and thrown them without hesitation.
*I wish you would just disappear somewhere I don't have to think about you.*
And they had landed exactly as intended.
She had gone quiet. Her head had dropped. For a long moment she hadn't moved at all.
Then, in a voice that was almost too composed:
*If I had been born to a different family — if my name hadn't been Kachiisu — you would have believed me. You would have seen me differently. Would things really have come to this?*
He had been irritated by the question. He always was, when she tried to shift the ground beneath an argument. Her southern accent had grated on him that day in a way it usually didn't. He had looked at her red-rimmed eyes and braced himself for the crying, the recrimination, the spiral he knew was coming.
But that day had been different.
She had looked at him — directly, steadily — and something behind her eyes had gone very still.
*No matter how many times I try. No matter how much I change. As long as I am who I am, our ending will always be the same.*
Her voice was quiet, almost resigned. And then beneath it, threaded through it like old habit:
*But you will love me someday. You were chosen for me — I know it. And when that day comes—*
She had raised her eyes to his, wet with tears she hadn't let fall.
*You will regret this moment terribly.*
He had heard it as a curse. As the latest iteration of the obsession he had spent years trying to escape.
Now, sitting in a moving carriage on the side of a mountain at dawn, searching for her — now, he heard it differently.
She had been right. That was the unbearable part. She had been exactly right, and he had made sure she would never know it.
The memories continued. The escalation. The final breaking point. The slap the day she asked for the divorce, her hand against his cheek — the shock of it, how unlike her it had seemed, and how, in retrospect, it had not been unlike her at all. It had been the only language left to her after all the others had failed.
Cedric exhaled.
*She was right about all of it.*
If he had held his tongue that day. If he had looked at her — just once, truly looked — without resentment coloring everything he saw. If he hadn't, in his bitterness, given her every reason to leave and none to stay.
Would she have disappeared without a word?
Would there have ever been a divorce at all?
The contract he had signed gave him no rights here. He had surrendered them himself, with his own choices, long before any document made it official. He had no claim over her. He knew that.
And still he could not let her go.
Because if she disappeared from his life like this — if he allowed it — he was not sure he would ever be able to look at himself clearly again.
*I have to find her.*
The carriage began to slow.
He looked up. Outside, the knight commander had drawn alongside and was opening the carriage door with a crisp bow.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke."
Cedric was already leaning forward.
"The Grand Duchess — which direction? And the man's energy — did you detect anyone with her?"
It was the same question he had asked an hour ago, at the last location where her presence had been felt. Then, the answer had been no — she was alone, or at least, no male presence had been sensed nearby.
That answer had been the only thing keeping him remotely level.
The knight commander hesitated.
"Her Highness's trail leads further up the mountain, Your Highness. The energy signature is notably elevated — unusual, but consistent." He paused. "However..."
A beat.
"This time, we detected a man's presence as well. A mixed-blood demon. The other knights with tracking ability confirmed it. It appears they met somewhere nearby and continued upward together."
The knight commander kept talking.
Cedric stopped hearing him.
The world narrowed to a single point.
*Rebecca. And a man. Together.*
The image arrived without mercy — the two of them meeting somewhere in the grey mountain mist, close, speaking low. Scenes he had no evidence for assembled themselves with agonizing clarity anyway.
His face had gone completely white.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke..." Bianca's voice, small and frightened.
He couldn't hear her.
He was already moving — out of the carriage, onto the black horse the knight commander had been riding, taking the reins in one motion.
"We ride from here."
He didn't wait for a response.
"Keep up."
The horse surged forward. The mountain road narrowed ahead. Behind him, the thunder of other hooves scrambling to follow.
His eyes were fixed on the path above.
The fiercer his expression became, the harder the wind whipped through the black horse's mane — both of them tearing forward, relentless, up into the fog.
---