Sometimes, when you’re too stunned to believe what you’re hearing, the words just stop coming. That was exactly where Lanen Rockefeller found herself now.

Advice? Sure, she’d been getting advice. For about ten years, give or take. But no matter how she turned it over in her head, this was not the moment to be asking for any.

She hadn’t expected him to be overjoyed at her confession. She would have preferred wailing, or shock, or even him acting like a wronged innocent—“Have you been looking at me that way all this time? I’m disappointed in you, my lady.” At least then she could have made excuses.

Lanen let out a hollow laugh and looked up at him.

His face, sculpted like a master craftsman’s finest work, held within it every absence you could expect from a man who had been surgically stripped of any romantic awareness.

This idiot. He actually meant that nonsense.

‘Right. Give up trying to understand him.’

She couldn’t even make sense of her own heart and head declaring independence and sprinting off in opposite directions—so how could she ever hope to understand someone else? All Lanen could manage now was a serene smile.

Sensing that Lanen was about to ascend to a higher plane of exasperation, Glen cut in with frantic urgency.

“A, ahahaha. W-wait, just hear me out for a—”

Thwap.

“Later.”

Cedarwood promptly slapped his palm over Glen’s mouth and shoved him aside.

Haa. A low sigh echoed through the room. The back of his neck, which never so much as twitched with emotion, had gone blotchy red.

‘Terrible. That’s proof he’s absolutely furious….’

Lanen held her breath like a puppy that had just caused a disaster. In the meantime, Cedarwood ran a hand over his face a couple of times and smoothed his expression back into composure.

“Understood. I’ll release you.”

Cedarwood pulled a ring of keys from his back pocket.

“Y-you will? Really?”

“You issued me a command, my lady. Even going so far as to tell ‘that kind’ of lie. How could I refuse?”

He seemed so rattled that he was now trying to write off her confession as a fabrication.

He then unlocked the shackle fastened around Lanen’s ankle. Release after half a day. Her body was free, but not a single problem had been solved, so there was no sense of liberation.

“You’re free to do as you please now, my lady. You can wander around the Manor, step outside right away, kick me in the shin—ugh.”

“……”

“…You can run away without looking back. But, my lady, do you remember the fox hunt we did before?”

“The fox… hunt?”

Lanen furrowed her brows. The fox hunt she remembered was something from a very long time ago.

More than ten years back, wasn’t it? Early summer, when the days had grown long and the midday sun had started to bite. She and Cedarwood had gone chasing after a fox that was stealing the miners’ lunches.

“Are you talking about what happened on my twelfth birthday?”

“Yes.”

Cedarwood set the ring of keys and the shackle down on the small side table with a clack. Glen’s gaze slid over toward the table.

“It’s exactly the same as back then.”

The fox runs, and we give chase.

“You’re free to do as you like. As I said, you can wander around the Manor, you can go outside… you can run away without looking back. Only, it has to be before sundown.”

When the sun touches the ridgeline of that mountain. Cedarwood pointed toward the deep blue mountain ridge visible through the window.

“When the sun begins to set, I will come after you.”

“…So you’re giving me time and telling me to try and run.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong.”

Lanen thought it over. Dressed up nicely, it was a kind of lovers’ game of tag. The fact that he was being this cooperative meant he already had a good idea of how this bet would end, and that he still felt not even a shred of remorse for what he had done.

“Don’t you think this is far too unfair to me? I don’t know this area at all, and it’s a remote place without a single passing carriage. That means I’d have to escape entirely on foot, and no matter how hard I run in these shoes for half a day, how far could I really get? I’d just end up wandering through the forest and get caught by you in no time.”

“……”

In response to Lanen’s objection, Cedarwood reached into his inner pocket and produced a neatly folded map and a worn letter. He had the air of someone who had prepared these in advance, having anticipated exactly this.

“I’ll show you the way. Take these. It’s a map of the area. Here is the Manor, and this direction is south. To get out of the forest as quickly as possible, face away from the Manor and head southwest. As you said, this is a remote area, so the path won’t be smooth. But you’re the sort of person who can climb trees in heels, my lady, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

Cedarwood removed the dog tag chain he wore around his neck. Lanen’s engagement ring, which had been hanging on the same chain, fell into his palm. He put the ring in his pocket, then used only the chain to bind the letter and the map together tightly, the way you’d tie a ribbon.

“If you keep going straight through the fir forest, you’ll reach the entrance to the woods. And here, there may be no passing carriages, but there are automobiles and my men. Show this letter to any one of them and tell them: ‘Cedarwood Carlisle has ordered you to safely escort the lady to the outskirts of the city.’”

Cedarwood pressed the neatly bundled package into Lanen’s hand.

“They’re the type who’d leap out of bed at a moment’s notice for a direct order, so they’ll handle everything on their own without you having to worry. Once you reach the nearest city that way, you’ll be able to shake me. Then the victory is yours, my lady.”

‘Isn’t he giving away far too much.’

Lanen swallowed her unease.

“…The fact that you’re explaining my escape route in this much detail tells me you’re confident you’ll catch me anyway.”

“I wouldn’t call it confidence so much as experience-based self-assurance. You have quick feet, my lady, and you’re an expert at running away. But I’m a man who has spent his whole life chasing after someone. Catching people is second nature to me by now.”

Chk. Cedarwood pressed a brief kiss to the back of her hand, then let it go.

“But my lady, I have made quite a few concessions in this bet, so please make me one promise.”

At his kiss on her hand, the composure she had been struggling to maintain cracked, and her eyes wavered. Even that fleeting, glancing touch was enough to make her face burn.

Pathetic one-sided love. Not knowing its own master’s heart, running around setting fires everywhere.

Lanen clenched her fist. The paper inside her hand crumpled with a rough, crackling sound.

“What, hoo… what is it.”

“…If you’re caught by me again, promise you’ll never speak of escape again.”

“I have no intention of doing this twice.”

Because she was clearly going to die of heart trouble. Whether from arrhythmia or from clutching the back of her neck, one way or another.

Cedarwood caught the sight of Lanen’s pouty, disgruntled mouth and smiled faintly.

“Then go.”

He gave her a light nudge in Glen’s direction.

Shall we, Lady Lanen. Glen extended one arm to her. Lanen placed her hand on Glen’s arm and glanced back briefly toward where Cedarwood stood.

The room was full of sunlight. He had dragged over the wooden chair from the corner and was leaning back against it with his eyes closed, as though tired.

He had left the inside of her like a place swept clean by a storm, and yet he himself looked not just calm but peaceful, like a lake without so much as a breath of wind.

‘Coward.’

“…Before I go, let me say one thing.”

So Lanen threw the words out like a stone, tossed carelessly, landing on the surface of his unbreakable stillness.

“It wasn’t a lie. Earlier. That.”

Hoping he would crack.

Creak. Thud.

The sound of two sets of footsteps faded down the hallway, and silence followed. Cedarwood kept his eyes closed for a long while even after the sound was gone. When he finally tilted his head back, his throat rose and fell in one slow, sweeping arc beneath his jaw.

He felt as though he were standing on a rocking boat. In the midst of his stillness—the kind that almost never stirred—the single sentence she had dropped out of nowhere sent a deep, wide ripple spreading through the center of his chest.

“Hoo….”

His feet were planted on solid ground, and yet his stomach turned.

***

Outside the Manor, having been all but pushed out of it. Lanen and Glen passed through the Manor’s neatly kept garden and arrived at a forest path that branched off in several directions. Even from inside, not a single human sound had been audible. She’d thought it must be a fairly secluded place, but….

“This is something else. It’s just one lone Manor sitting in the middle of a deep forest.”

Lanen looked back and forth between the map Cedarwood had pressed into her hands and the dense woods as she spoke.

Meanwhile, Glen was scuffing the ground this way and that with his shoe, like a squirrel searching for a hidden acorn.

“Glen.”

“What, squirt.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Is that ‘what should we do now?’ or ’how are you going to take responsibility for this?’”

“Both.”

The confession had been a disaster, and she had succeeded in making him furious. She had managed to escape the Manor one way or another. But she hadn’t fully slipped free of his grasp. Because come dusk, the hunter known as Cedarwood Carlisle would come tearing after them.

‘Of course, the solution is to escape before he catches us, but….’

Why was it, she wondered.

Lanen looked at the map. Her eyes caught the short notes added at various points along the shortcut. Uphill. Lots of rocks, slippery. Thorny bushes, watch out.

‘Really, why is it?’

That she got the feeling Cedarwood didn’t actually want her to be caught.

“Lanen.”

Just then, Glen, who had found something in the dirt, waved her over. There was something like a liquid smeared on the ground.

“It’s an oil stain. I’d been smelling something nearby for a while and wondered, but here it is.”

Glen followed the trail around to the back of the Manor, toward the overgrown brush.

Behind the untended, wildly grown weeds and a nearly collapsed shed, there sat a single automobile. It was spotless, not a speck of dust on it, as though well maintained.

Clunk.

“Locked, as expected.”

“I figured as much, so, ta-da.”

Glen nonchalantly produced a ring of keys from his pocket. It was the very one Cedarwood had used to unlock Lanen’s shackle and left on the table moments ago.

“The keys? When did you steal those?”

“While you two were busy fighting? You thought you were the only one fighting with that guy? I was waging my own fierce battle against his watchful eyes, you know.”

Glen examined the ring of keys from every angle, selected one, and inserted it.

Click. With a bright, clean sound, the car door swung open. Glen climbed in and turned the ignition, and the automobile growled low and heavy, like a bear just woken from hibernation.

“We’ve got the map, and he even wrote down where his men are stationed. All things considered, this is shaping up to be a perfect getaway that no one will see coming, don’t you think?”

“Glen….”

Lanen looked at him with moved, shining eyes. Glen shrugged and was breaking into a leisurely grin, when…

Thunk!

The automobile lurched forward with a dull jolt, then immediately belched out a cloud of acrid smoke and died. It looked exactly like a lifelong smoker of eighty years suddenly dropping from a heart attack.

“Yep, perfect… perfectly broken.”

“…So it is.”

Good grief. Lanen sighed.