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“Was it really you who did all this…?”

At the sound of Lanen’s voice, trembling as though she couldn’t believe it, Cedarwood lifted his head.

“Did what?”

His indigo eyes shone with a quiet light.

“Was it you who tied me up? Or you who brought me here? Or, if neither, then all of it?”

“Cedar!”

“Yes. That’s right. It was me.”

Cedarwood murmured softly and drew an ointment from his inner pocket.

He dipped his fingertip into the medicine and reached out to smooth it over Lanen’s forearm, reddened where the cloth rope had chafed. Lanen flinched and twisted away, knocking his hand aside.

The shoulder trim of her dress raked across his cheek in an instant. By the time Lanen realized it and caught herself, Cedarwood had already pressed his hand over the thin red line that had appeared on his cheek.

It didn’t hurt. Too small a mark to even be called a wound.

But strangely, the pain burned with unusual clarity, as though he’d been touched by fire, and he couldn’t help but let out a quiet, bitter smile.

‘She’s trembling.’

As though I were something utterly monstrous.

“…Are you afraid of me?”

“Th, that’s…”

Cedarwood gripped the arm of the chair hard. The chair lurched and rattled.

“Thirteen years. The time those Rockefeller vermin kept you locked away and rotting in the Manor under the damned pretense of ‘selling you into marriage.’ You endured all that time just fine. This is no different.”

Lanen, startled, bit down on her lip before her parted mouth could betray her. At that, his indigo eyes drew suddenly close, sweeping over her lips.

“Even if it’s awful and frightening, hold on just a little longer. Because soon, you won’t need to do any of that anymore.”

“Any of that…? Don’t tell me you mean marriage?”

“Yes.”

His thumb brushed across her lower lip. Slowly, unhurriedly, over the faint impression her teeth had left there.

“Because no one marries a dead woman.”

“…What?”

What is that supposed to mean… As Lanen murmured to herself, several things registered in her awareness as if for the first time.

The faint smell of fire and wet earth drifting from beside him. The pitch-black mourning clothes he wore instead of his usual imperial military uniform. And the silver identification chain he always wore around his neck like a collar, her engagement ring tangled in it where his rank tag should have been.

“There is no need for anything like a political marriage. I have just come back from holding your funeral. No one will be looking for you anymore.”

Only then did Lanen understand what he was saying. The color drained from her face until it was white, then flooded back in an instant, blazing red. Whether from shame or fear he couldn’t say for certain, but what he could clearly see was that her eyes, her shoulders, the corners of her mouth were all trembling on the edge of breaking.

Cedarwood smoothed Lanen’s disheveled hair back behind her ear and smiled beautifully.

“That’s why I always warned you. Don’t be kind to a lowborn bastard with no roots.”

His hand grazed the tip of her chin and fell away.

His young lady’s lips moved silently for a long moment, and then her head dropped toward the floor.

“……”

‘Is she crying?’

Cedarwood stared at her shoulders, trembling faintly.

At a time like this, she should be slapping the cheek of the servant who had the audacity to bare his teeth at her, not crying.

‘My poor, gentle young lady.’

“…They say whoever takes you in becomes a calamity.”

Calamity. Cedarwood let out a small, wry laugh, as though even he found the word funny coming from his own mouth.

Cruel words had always followed his young lady. The Rockefeller family’s unwanted burden. A bastard of low blood. The family’s disgrace. A fate trailed by calamity.

Through every insult and contempt, his young lady had held her ground within the family.

Once, when he could no longer stand by and watch and quietly offered her a wildflower and asked if she was all right, she had smiled brightly and said:

“Am I all right? Yes, I’m fine. Rumors and prophecies aren’t things I can do anything about. So rather than worrying, it’s better to focus on what I can actually do right now. And besides… honestly, they’re not wrong.”

Had the girl who smiled and laughed everything off so gently ever known? That every time she wore that lonely smile, he could never simply let it go.

So if you were fated to never be free of wretched things.

“Then I will become the calamity. That way, we can continue to be together.”

My poor, beloved young lady, who resembles a bright and pure summer flower.

Cedarwood Carlisle could do anything for her.

If she was crying from being tormented, he could hide her away so no one would see. If she chose to walk a path of thorns, he could break every last thorn with his bare hands. If someone had hurt her, he could make them feel the same.

It didn’t matter that he had been pointed at as the Manor’s Jinx-warding tool, as a scapegoat. It didn’t matter that, on her orders, he had been dragged to the battlefield in place of the master’s son.

He was fine with her thinking of him as nothing more than damned “family.”

But when he heard that she was to be sold off to some old man who fancied himself a “hero of the revolution”…

“Ah… Rockefeller. Do these vermin not know the meaning of limits?”

Would you have laughed that off too, like it was nothing?

I simply cannot treat it as nothing.

Cedarwood knelt before her for a long while, waiting for his young lady to lift her head.

But no answer came, no matter how much time passed.

Under normal circumstances, she would have at least put on a stern face, scolding him the way an owner scolds a dog with a firm “No.” But she said nothing. No, not just words. She didn’t even spare him a glance.

She was shutting him out completely.

He had expected this, but facing it directly felt far more devastating than he had imagined.

Meanwhile, Lanen was barely managing to hold down her heart, which was trying to leap out of her throat.

Kidnapping, that guy, calamity and fate, staying together forever, what?

Once she sorted through all the chaotic information scrambling through her head, there was only one conclusion.

‘Ah. I always knew this idiot would pull something like this someday.’

Every plan she had ever made had always been derailed by this man whose thoughts she could never read.

***

Lanen Rockefeller had never been one to hold back, not from the very beginning.

There were exactly two things she treated with fairness, by her own standards: one was social standing, and the other was her own temper.

In short, Lanen Rockefeller was equally unpleasant to everyone, regardless of rank.

On the very first day she set foot in the Rockefeller household, the girl grabbed the mistress of the house by the hair for calling her a “lowborn wench,” and when the servants whispered that she was a wild thing, she began acting like one in earnest.

A bastard? What was she supposed to do about how she was born? It didn’t matter if the people in the Manor pointed fingers. They weren’t important people to her anyway.

“Of course, it’s a little annoying when they humiliate me at banquets or at the academy. They ought to mind their own lives instead of being so obsessed with mine. Isn’t that right, Glen?”

“But little one… you were in the wrong when you poured lemonade on your brother’s trousers at the banquet. There’s a rumor going around now that Nathan Rockefeller wet himself because of it.”

“What a heartwarming piece of news.”

She could simply ignore all of it. Trivial things that couldn’t even amount to a speck of hardship in her life. Rather than sniffling over something like that, it was far better to think about how to spark a revolution of wealth and live well in this age of sweeping capitalism.

And so, this political marriage was no different.

“Was I furious? Are you joking? I was absolutely furious. I thought, so the Rockefeller vermin have finally gotten desperate enough to grind my life into the dirt.”

So what? Was she supposed to weep pitifully, just the way they wanted?

Lanen Rockefeller sneered and smiled with cool arrogance.

“That kind of humiliation is over now. Just watch. The Rockefellers will end up out on the streets before my wedding ever happens.”

So if anyone asked how life was treating her, Lanen Rockefeller could answer with confidence.

“Am I all right? Yes, I’m fine.”

And she meant it sincerely.

But even for someone who had always lived so boldly and shamelessly, there was one exception.

And that was him. The manservant who, because she had treated him as an equal out of her dislike for social hierarchy, took every opportunity to cheekily act as her equal in return. The boy who had lodged himself so firmly in her life that he couldn’t be pulled free. The man whose thoughts she could never read.

Cedarwood Carlisle.

Lanen Rockefeller’s plans were always, invariably, without exception, derailed by her manservant.

Her romantic first kiss, her perfect social debut, her ambition to enter the academy at the top of her class, her life plan to fall in love with a wealthy man of good character, all of it had been thrown into chaos by an unexpected one-sided love. And more recently, her resolve to return his servant’s contract to him had crumbled as well.

She had thought at the time that nothing could be worse than that, but remarkably, there was.

‘Kidnapping.’

Of all the times for this to happen!

Lanen pulled herself free from her old thoughts, biting her lip with a troubled heart.

What kind of time was this, exactly? It was the moment just before a trial. The most historic moment of her entire twenty-three years of life, second only to her birth!

The first step of her plan to bring down the Rockefellers, which she had stubbornly endured that hellish family to prepare.

‘And now, kidnapping? Surely he hasn’t taken me outside the territory. What if he’s crossed the border?’

She had known her manservant was no ordinary madman.

‘I just hope it hasn’t gone that far. Please.’

Lanen instinctively raised her hand to press against her throbbing head. But her hands were still bound, so her body only jerked uselessly.

Because of that, his hand, which had been moving to pull up the hem of her dress where it had slipped, stopped in midair.

Lanen glanced up at him through the curtain of her hair.

She tried to stay composed, but her body was still trembling faintly. Not from confusion, but because her heart was pounding. Not from fear, but from indignation and anger.

In the moment their eyes met, his face, always so impassive, cracked ever so slightly.

He seemed unsettled by the sight of her, face flushed red, huffing and glaring at him with wide, flashing eyes.

‘Right. It’s not something I would ever normally do.’

That’s just how one-sided love goes, isn’t it? You always want to show only your best, most beautiful self to the other person.

But what could she do?

‘I do have feelings for you, but…’

“Have you lost your mind? Cedarwood.”

A wrong is a wrong.

Even one-sided love, d*mn it all, requires a person to have their wits about them.