Cedarwood left Glen where he was and pulled the lunch tray over.

“Did you sleep well?”

“…Did I sleep well?”

She echoed his question back at him, subdued.

Did I sleep well? He was asking it the way you would if she hadn’t spent a single moment weighing which was more bearable, being kidnapped and imprisoned or her wretched one-sided love, before drifting off to a sound sleep.

“Ask something worth asking. Put your hand over your heart and see if there’s any conscience left in there.”

Though honestly, he was right. She had slept without dreaming.

“I was having a lovely dream about starting a peaceful day at the Manor, no shackles, no imprisonment, and then a rude visit involving Glen woke me up in the most terrible way. So I slept rather… no, not at all. But thank you for asking.”

The pillow creases were still vivid on her cheeks as she forced out a flat reply. Cedarwood, who had been pressing a hand to his heart, turned his head away and pretended not to notice.

“…Things are going to get busy for a while, my lady. A lot has come up that needs to be dealt with.”

“What sort of things?”

“The sort of things men who carry guns do. Nothing you’d find interesting.”

Interest she hadn’t had a moment ago sprang up at those words.

‘…He’s not going around shooting people, is he? The war is over, after all.’

Lanen looked at him with suspicion. Cedarwood gave a small smile that seemed meant to reassure her. It was beautiful enough to warm her heart, but it offered no reassurance whatsoever.

“I’d like to stay by your side until late, but I’m afraid evenings are very difficult to free up. Even so, I’ll do my best to make sure I can stop by at this hour at least. I promise. If I don’t come back, you’re welcome to burn this whole place down.”

Cedarwood crouched down in front of Glen, who had been rolling around on the floor, and drew his knife. He cut through the knots of the rope with it.

“You’ll be alone at night and it might feel frightening and lonely, so I’ll leave this one here with you.”

“…‘This one’?”

Glen muttered in what appeared to be shock at Cedarwood treating him as some sort of nightmare-warding totem.

“Wait, Cedar. That’s not what matters right now. Let’s talk.”

“…‘That’s not what matters’? Are today the two of you celebrating some newly designated holiday? International Friendship Destruction Day or something…?”

“Oh, right. Here, my lady.”

Cedarwood set a piece of paper down beside the tea.

“This is…”

“I couldn’t send it that day, but I’ve brought the letter’s intended recipient instead, so that should be fine.”

It was a letter written in careful, pressed handwriting, addressed “Dear Glen.” The letter Lanen had written to Glen before the kidnapping.

Lanen’s face went pale.

“Did you by any chance read this…?”

If he had, it would be nothing short of a catastrophe. Most of the contents were complaints about Cedarwood Carlisle. The rest amounted to threats of bodily harm about wanting to grab the oblivious man by the collar.

“No.”

Fortunately, Cedarwood shook his head with an expression that said he had no idea why she was asking.

“I have no interest in peeking at other people’s love letters. No desire to see them either.”

“Love… what?”

“I understand. There must be a lot you want to say to each other. I’ll give you plenty of time to talk, so don’t worry. But my lady, eat first.”

Cedarwood set the soup down in front of Lanen. Between the clear, pale cream color distinctive of a cream soup, colors that had no business existing in the world peeked through.

“You only had the scone yesterday.”

That was because of his maddening cooking.

“And you didn’t even finish that properly.”

That was because of the sleeping draught in the wine.

“I made it myself. Please eat.”

The corners of Lanen’s mouth drooped downward like a cursed flower wilting on its stem.

Glen tensed up sharply at the sight of Lanen’s fallen expression. That was unmistakably the face of someone holding back a torrent of words rising all the way up their throat. The expression she made right before her patience switch flipped.

Meanwhile, Cedarwood, setting her spoon down in front of her, saw her press her lips together and quietly cast his gaze downward. It was clearly the look of someone witnessing something dreadful. He could tell without being told. She found his hypocrisy revolting.

Both of their predictions were half right and half wrong.

Lanen Rockefeller was steeling herself for death as she looked at the lunch table laid out like a condemned prisoner’s last meal.

This soup? It could have generated cholera patients just by being looked at.

But then she heard that the person she had feelings for had made it himself, and her addled brain began to distort what she was seeing. Making the soup look appealing, of all things.

‘Maybe one bite wouldn’t hurt?’

The moment that thought crossed her mind, Lanen felt a sudden chill run down her spine.

If things went on like this and the atrocities of Cedarwood Carlisle, which even her own lovesick perspective had ruled “completely unhinged,” started to look charming to her…

Steam was still rising from the soup.

Lanen stared at it and swallowed.

‘Right. That’s the point of no return. There’d be no coming back from that.’

She would sooner take Cupid’s arrow lodged in her chest and drive it through her head for an honorable death.

And so Lanen steeled herself for death and took one spoonful of the soup.

***

Lanen felt as though she had seen a vision of the biological father whose face she had never known. When she came to her senses she was in the bathroom, bringing up everything she had eaten.

Cedarwood handed her a few pieces of military jerky, meant purely for protein intake, and a few plums he had picked from the forest. She declined, saying she would accept the thought alone. She had just learned in the most nauseating way possible that love was great, but there were things even the power of love could not overcome.

Before leaving the Manor. Cedarwood watched Lanen dry-heave for a long while. His lips parted several times, but in the end nothing came out and they pressed shut again.

“Rest.”

With that, Cedarwood left the Manor.

Glen looked out the window. The carriage he was riding in was slowly disappearing between the trees of the forest path.

“He seems very busy too. Well, at this hour he’s probably the second busiest person in the empire, right after the afternoon edition paperboy.”

His light words scattered into the air without reaching Lanen. Glen scratched his head at the sight of her gloomy expression.

‘Then again, I’m thrown off too. There’s no way she’d be in her right mind in a situation like this.’

Wondering what words might serve as a single ray of moral victory in this bleak atmosphere, Glen walked slowly toward Lanen.

“Little one, did you see that man’s face just now? He was glaring at me on his way out, warning me not to try anything funny.”

“…Cedarwood was?”

“That’s right. What a terrifying look in his eyes. He seemed like someone who had just come back from burying a person.”

“Right. He came back from burying me.”

Ah, of course. Glen belatedly recalled Lanen’s funeral. It had been only a few hours ago that he had been wailing in front of the coffin.

Glen let out a pained groan. So there was no easing into it with pleasantries after all. Straight to the point it was.

“Are you all right?”

“Everyone has to have a funeral once in their life. I just had mine early.”

“…I genuinely cannot tell sometimes whether your mental state is fine or not.”

“I’m still fine. Anyway, Glen, what happened to you?”

“That’s exactly what I want to ask.”

Glen sighed and crossed his arms.

A Manor deep in a forest with almost no sign of people. A room sealed shut on all sides. And the shackle fastened around her ankle.

When Glen’s gaze reached the metal weight on her ankle, he chose to close his eyes instead. It felt like catching a glimpse of the inner void of someone whose actions his common sense could not accept.

“Are you… imprisoned?”

“Yes, as you can see.”

Lanen gave a light shrug. Glen let out a quiet, hollow laugh.

“I really am fine. It’s livable, apart from not being able to leave.”

“If it weren’t livable, that man would have been dead at my hands long ago, little one…”

Glen raked a hand through his hair in irritation and dropped into the chair across from her.

“I was kidnapped on my way home from your funeral.”

And so Glen slowly retraced the sequence of events that had brought him here.

He had been exchanging letters with her to help with Lanen’s trial.

What arrived for him at the time he had expected her letter, instead of the usual laments about the world and the sorrows of one-sided love, was a death notice bearing news of her passing.

He couldn’t remember what state of mind he had been in at the time. The unexpected tragedy had simply left his mind a blank.

He had driven like a madman to the Rockefeller Manor, and when he barely managed to collect himself, he was standing in front of her mound of dirt.

A funeral that had ended in barely half a day, as though in some great hurry. The people left behind whispered about her death, and even they vanished without a trace the moment the funeral ended, like ants on a rainy day.

Glen Raines had stared at the gravestone bearing her name for a long while. She was really dead? That young lady, truly? And then, all of a sudden, he thought of the boy the little young lady had always kept by her side like a shadow. Cedarwood Carlisle. The man she had talked about loving until she was sick of saying it.

“Where is he?”

D*mn it, that man would be beside himself right now. Glen headed urgently toward the Manor to find him.

And as he was anxiously searching the places he might be.

“Glen Raines?”

Men in black uniforms appeared in a swarm.

“After that I don’t remember anything, so I must have been knocked out. When I came to…”

“Your hands and body were bound, and your eyes were covered. Right?”

“That’s right.”

Lanen and Glen looked at each other. A peculiar sense of solidarity was forming between two people who had both been kidnapped. Touched by the warmth of it, Glen rubbed his nose.

“Dreadful, haha.”

He said it casually, but honestly, there was no clever way out of this.

It was close to the worst situation possible. They were playing Jenga with a stick of dynamite called Cedarwood Carlisle. One wrong move and bang, the whole tower of effort that was their lives would be blown to pieces. A crisis of the most desperate kind.

Lanen clasped her hands together.

“I knew Cedar had a dark side.”

“Dark…? No. It’s an abyss, little one. That man has always been nothing short of an abyss wearing a human face.”

“After the war ended he looked more and more worn down, so I knew he’d do something eventually… but not like this…”

“Honestly, I think the war is just an excuse. It only gave his abyss a socially acceptable explanation.”

“…I actually used to think there was something beautifully dissolute about him, you know?”

“Pardon?”

“But I’ve come to feel that dissoluteness, like any kind of nuisance, is only beautiful when you’re not the one living through it.”

This is truly maddening.

Glen quietly closed his eyes and sank into thought. He was desperately missing the last cigarette he had left behind in the carriage.

He let out a small sigh and looked at Lanen. She looked even more at a loss than he was. At least she didn’t appear to be hurt or in pain anywhere, which was a relief.

“Why that man kidnapped you…”

Glen let his words trail off. Why he kidnapped her? That was the most obvious thing of all. The only time the depths of Cedarwood Carlisle, that impossibly difficult and complicated man, became perfectly transparent was when it involved her.

‘Right, so Lanen being locked up here must be because of the political marriage…’

“I think he wants revenge on me.”

A baffled retort burst from Glen’s lips, interrupting his serious deliberation.

“…Revenge? He wants revenge on you?”