**Chapter 55 — Keep Shaking My Heart, Rebecca**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
---
At that same hour, Cedric was making his way back down the mountain path with Chief Devon, leaving behind the magic stone mine the Twins family had been developing near the village. They walked in comfortable silence through the trees, a faint smile on each of their faces.
Chief Devon spoke first, his gaze drifting toward the village below.
"Do you truly believe it, Your Highness? That Her Highness the Grand Duchess came here sincerely — to ask forgiveness?"
His expression was complicated — the look of a man turning something over that doesn't quite fit the shape of what he already knows.
Cedric glanced at him with quiet eyes, then nodded.
"Yes. Rebecca means it."
The answer came without hesitation. Chief Devon's weathered face stilled, his eyes opening slowly wider.
He had spent years as head of household at the Mansion of Light, watching the Grand Duke and his wife from a closer distance than almost anyone. He had witnessed everything — Rebecca's consuming devotion, Cedric's cold distance, the long and painful arc of a marriage that seemed built entirely on misunderstanding and resentment.
Seeing Cedric defend her now felt, each time, like something he needed a moment to absorb.
"While you were away from the Mansion of Light..." Devon said carefully, "what exactly happened between the two of you?"
"What happened?" A faint smile touched Cedric's lips. He was quiet for a moment, then turned to Devon with an expression that was more serious than his tone. "She's changed, Devon. Genuinely. With the staff, with Bianca — and with me."
Devon fell silent, brows arching high. It was the most baffling thing he'd heard in recent memory — not because of Rebecca, but because of who was saying it.
"If you can't bring yourself to trust her yet," Cedric said, "then trust me."
"Your Highness..."
"I have no doubt about it. Not anymore."
The certainty in his voice was not the certainty of someone who had been convinced. It was the certainty of someone who had watched and come to his own conclusion and was no longer interested in arguing the point.
Chief Devon's lower lip parted slowly.
---
"Your Highness! Chief Devon!"
A young man came sprinting down the path toward them, waving an arm.
"Come quickly — everyone's gathered in front of the hall!"
Devon blinked. "All the villagers?"
"His Highness the Grand Duke is here, so there's a banquet! Everyone's celebrating!"
The young man delivered this with a grin. But the effect on his audience was the opposite of what he'd intended.
Cedric went very still.
"Rebecca — is she there too? With everyone?"
His voice had taken on a careful, restrained quality. The young man nodded, puzzled by the reaction.
"Yes? She came out a while ago—"
"Is Her Highness alright?" Devon cut in, the professional worry of a former head butler surfacing instantly. "If the villagers have been drinking and someone says something rash—"
He didn't finish.
Cedric had already turned and was moving, fast, down through the trees.
---
The sounds reached him before the scene did — laughter, raised voices, the particular noise of people who had abandoned inhibition in favor of a good time. Cedric's chest tightened with every step.
*If someone has done something to her while I was gone—*
He arrived at the hall to find a long table set up outside it, laden with rough but generous food, cups of honey beer, and people sitting elbow to elbow in various states of cheerful dishevelment. It looked, from the outside, like a perfectly pleasant village celebration.
It also looked, to Cedric's eye, uncomfortably similar to the feasting that followed a successful hunt in demon world custom. He knew these people. He knew what they were capable of when old wounds were reopened.
"Rebecca — where is Rebecca?"
He grabbed the nearest arm. Then the next. People turned to look at him with expressions of mild surprise.
"Who's looking for me?"
A hand went up at the head of the table. A familiar voice, slightly blurred at the edges in the way that suggested its owner had been enjoying the honey beer for some time.
Cedric turned.
Rebecca was sitting at the center of it all, eyes wide and somewhat glassy, looking at him with the earnest confusion of someone who has just recognized a face but isn't entirely certain of the context.
"Oh — it's Cedric."
The relief that moved through him was immediate and thorough. He pressed a hand over his face briefly and walked toward her.
Rebecca, tracking his approach with careful, slightly unfocused eyes, turned to the woman beside her and asked in a whisper that was not remotely quiet: *"That's Cedric, right?"*
The woman in question — Jacqueline, who had until very recently been Rebecca's most vocal critic — confirmed this with a nod and a laugh, her arm around Rebecca's shoulder with the ease of old friends.
*When did that happen?*
Cedric stopped in front of them and looked at the scene, genuinely bewildered.
"Cedric, sit down." Rebecca patted the empty space beside her. "The people here are wonderful — I had no idea. And the honey beer is extraordinary."
She beamed at him.
There were two bright spots of color in her cheeks. Her eyes were sparkling. Her hair had come half undone at some point and no one, including Rebecca, appeared to have noticed.
Cedric looked at her for a long moment, then felt the corner of his mouth curve upward despite himself.
"When did you manage to get this drunk?" He smoothed a loose strand of red hair back from her face. "I was worried about you the whole way here."
Rebecca laughed — a genuine, unguarded laugh, the kind that arrived without calculation.
"Why? Were you afraid the villagers would do something terrible to me?"
She looked up at him with bright, slightly unfocused eyes, and something in the warmth of her expression made his chest do something inconvenient.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke!" Jacqueline leaned forward, deeply offended on behalf of the table. "What do you take us for?"
"Honestly! If anyone's doing harm in this relationship, it's Her Highness to *us*!" another woman said, which produced a fresh wave of laughter.
"I was worried," Cedric admitted, looking at Rebecca with an expression he didn't bother to moderate. "I'm glad I was wrong."
The village women exchanged glances at this — at this Cedric, who was nothing like the one they remembered from years of stories and distant observation.
"Shh."
Rebecca pressed her fingers against his mouth with the decisive authority of someone who has important things to say.
"Cedric, stop saying things that kill the mood. I was in the middle of something."
His lips curved against her palm.
"What were you talking about?"
Jacqueline's eyes narrowed with the gleam of someone about to deliver information.
"Her Highness was telling us about a husband who had an affair with her best friend."
Cedric went still.
Every woman at the table fixed him with an expression of collective judgment.
"...Me?" He pointed at himself.
"Yes! Her Highness said so herself — she walked in and found her husband with her closest friend!"
Cedric blinked. He genuinely, briefly, ran through his memory to verify that he had not, in fact, done this. He was fairly certain he hadn't. He turned to Rebecca.
She was face-down on the table with the specific bonelessness of someone who has had slightly more honey beer than was wise. She raised her head at the attention and found his face.
"Oh — Cedric's here." A pause, apparently to process this. Then, with great seriousness: "You know... unlike *some* people. He's handsome. Very good body. Rich." She considered. "And he only has eyes for one person."
The table fell into slightly confused silence.
Jacqueline stared at her. "Your Highness — you just told us he had an affair."
Rebecca looked up with the expression of someone who finds this observation baffling.
"Cedric?" She laughed softly. "No, no. That's completely impossible. This one is..." She seemed to search for the word and settle on it with quiet certainty. "Single-minded."
The table exchanged glances.
Cedric, who had been prepared to navigate a complicated misunderstanding, found that the conversation had resolved itself in a direction he hadn't anticipated. Something warm moved through him.
*Handsome. Good body. Rich. Single-minded.*
It was, he realized, the first time Rebecca had said anything like that about him in longer than he could clearly remember. He pressed his lips together against a smile that was threatening to become something more obvious.
"I think," he said, standing and gently steadying Rebecca as he did, "that Her Highness has had enough for this evening."
Rebecca, leaning against him with the compliance of someone whose body has reached its own conclusions about the rest of the night, did not argue.
"We'll head back," he told the table.
There was good-natured noise in response — farewells, laughter, Jacqueline saying something about the Grand Duchess being welcome back anytime with the air of someone who would deny having said it in the morning.
Cedric guided Rebecca away from the table, one hand at her back, his expression settled into something quiet and content.
---
I became aware of warmth first. Pleasant, steady warmth — and the faint sensation of movement.
I blinked. The first thing I saw was the back of someone's neck, and the particular way the trees were moving told me I was being carried.
On someone's back.
I processed this slowly, with the careful deliberation of a person whose thoughts are moving through honey.
*Cedric is carrying me.*
*I should probably ask him to put me down.*
*The cabin is quite far.*
*His back is very warm.*
I dropped my head onto his shoulder and went back to sleep.
---
The next time I opened my eyes, I was in bed.
I lay there for a moment taking stock of the ceiling, the blanket, and the fact that I felt considerably more present than I had an hour ago. The fog was lifting, slowly.
"Mina," I called, my pronunciation leaving something to be desired. "Come wipe my face."
A pause.
Then warm moisture, gentle and careful, touched my cheek.
I opened my eyes properly.
Cedric was sitting beside me, a damp cloth in his hand, watching me with an expression of quiet amusement.
I lay still and looked up at him while he moved the towel slowly across my face.
"...Why are you so handsome?"
The towel paused.
Cedric blinked — the long lashes dropping and rising, and behind them those very blue eyes, looking at me with an expression I wasn't entirely prepared for.
"Pardon?"
"It's unnecessary," I said, with great sincerity. "The degree of handsomeness. It's excessive. It unsettles people."
I frowned at him to make my point.
Cedric let out a breath that was trying very hard not to be a laugh.
"I'm glad my face is doing something useful."
"Don't be smug about it."
He looked at me — really looked, in that way he had started doing lately that I hadn't quite found the words for — and something in his expression settled into something softer and more serious at the same time.
"Anything that moves your heart," he said quietly. "That's all I want."
He set the towel aside.
His face was closer than it had been a moment ago. His fingertips found the ribbon at my collar — the one that had loosened somewhere during the evening — and began, slowly and with great deliberateness, to retie it.
I forgot, briefly, how breathing worked.
His eyes lifted to mine. The slight tremor in his fingers was the only thing that suggested this moment was costing him anything at all.
Then, in a voice low enough that it seemed to belong only to the space between us:
"Keep shaking my heart, Rebecca."
---