Kenneth watched as Ariana stood there, lips parted in stunned disbelief. Even her lips had lost their color, trembling faintly now.

“After Bibi died…?”

“…”

“Kenneth, don’t tell me… That can’t be what this is, can it?”

Her wide blue eyes quivered with unease, the unspoken question hanging in the air.

‘Do you remember your past life?’

When Kenneth remained silent, Ariana reflexively brought her hand to her mouth, then slowly lowered it, repeating the motion in a daze.

“H-How? That can’t be. Why would you…?”

“…Because I regained those memories.”

Kenneth finally took a shaky breath. Seeing Ariana reel, he forced himself to steady his mind.

Yet each time he blinked, haunting images clung to his vision: Ariana’s final, blood-soaked moments, and the pit in the windbreak grove where her replacements were buried.

Unable to bear it, he grabbed her shoulders.

“Kenneth—”

“Why didn’t you kill me that night?”

“W-What…?”

“You should have done that right then. You had that silver pistol. You could have killed me.”

He remembered how she had deemed their child a mere “mistake.”

“You should’ve shot me and run. If you managed it in this life, you could’ve done it in the last.”

“…”

“If you remember it all, how can you still—”

Kenneth tried to smile, but he couldn’t tell what expression had appeared on his face.

How had she endured him? In her first life, she hadn’t known what the future held. But in the second, she’d seen exactly how cruel he could be. Yet she’d endured it all for one child.

In that instant, he realised that, to Ariana, he was nothing but pain. And yet he had dared to promise her a life without scars. He should never have hurt her; a life already marred by wounds could never simply be undone.

“What Bibi wants most is for Mommy not to hurt.”

Against the pure wish of a three-year-old praying only for her mother’s health as a birthday gift, his own feelings felt pitifully small.

***

‘Am I dreaming all of this in a fever?’

Stunned, Ariana stared at Kenneth, unable to believe her eyes. For a moment, the boundaries between her past and present lives blurred so completely that she lost all sense of where—or even when—she was.

‘But I’m still alive, and in this life, Bibi is alive too. This Kenneth has never seen me die.’

And yet, in all the years — across two lifetimes — she had never seen him so shaken.

She looked at the man before her as if she were seeing him — and the world — for the very first time.

His face was deathly pale, as if he might stop breathing at any moment. His sea-green eyes, dulled by all they had witnessed, looked like tarnished copper — like a once-majestic statue abandoned to the wind and salt on a cliff by the sea.

Even when he was hit by sniper fire at the opera house, he hadn’t faltered like this. On that occasion, pain had contorted his body, but he had gritted his teeth and persevered until the very end.

Until now, the Kenneth she had known had been flawless, with no openings whatsoever — not even the thinnest crack to slip through.

His presence had always been so imposing that Ariana often felt as though she were suffocating beneath the sheer weight of his shadow.

Even now, as he stood before her speaking of penance and sacrifice, she still felt somehow inferior to him.

But now…?

“I—I didn’t kill you.”

She stammered, answering the question he had hurled at her. Her head screamed that she should demand how he possessed memories of their past, yet the words that escaped her mouth were about something far less important.

“It wasn’t fear of being caught. I was just… so tired.”

“…”

“And back then, I—”

Ariana remembered what she’d said to him right before she died:

“I loved you.”

She also recalled what she hadn’t dared to confess:

“I still love you.”

Hating someone until their last breath seemed far more tragic than loving them. Even if others scoffed and called it foolish, this kind of ending seemed slightly more beautiful than a life filled with bitterness and cynicism.

So she chose to end her own life.

“It was easier to take my own life than to destroy yours.”

Kenneth’s shoulders slumped as he let out a long, ragged breath.

“Even if I’d found another way to escape back then, k*lling you was never an option for me.”

But the more truthfully she spoke, the more devastation gathered in Kenneth’s eyes — something she’d never imagined seeing.

She had always seen him as unstoppable—the kind of man even bullets couldn’t bring down. That unyielding strength had frightened her, and at times, she had even resented it.

He can have everything without giving up anything. Treating him with cold indifference once more.

But could he really waver like this?

Could he really be shaken by the thought of her or Bibi dying?

Ariana took a step back, shaking her head as if caught in a tremor.

Kenneth reached for her, but she slapped his hand away.

“Why are you interfering now? Why ask me that question?”

“Ariana—”

“Kenneth, you remarried and lived perfectly well afterwards.”

‘Don’t forget he had a good life. He saw me die and didn’t crumble. Saints don’t lie, do they?’

“You even had more children and forgot about our daughter. You didn’t shed a single tear when she died.”

She had sworn never to voice this wound to the Kenneth of this life — blaming someone who remembered nothing would be pointless. Yet the scar she’d meant to keep hidden stretched tight and burst the moment her voice quavered.

“You made me attend our baby’s baptism alone! You have no idea how much I cried that day. You didn’t care enough to help choose her name!”

‘Please… stay the villain. I don’t want to find out you had anything to lose—that you were ever weak or human.’

Hot tears of fury welled in her eyes. Gasping, she pounded her fists against his shoulders.

“You abandoned us! You left the two of us in that mansion and never came back! Bibi died because you weren’t there to protect her!”

“…”

“Because you ignored us, everyone else did too! If you had shown even the slightest bit of kindness, Bibi might never have fallen ill in the first place!”

Ariana hit Kenneth’s shoulders with more force, her voice rising with anger. She forced herself to release all the fury she had bottled up during those lonely days at the ducal manor when she was pregnant and raising their child alone.

But the more Kenneth stood there silently accepting her blows, the harder the tears came.

“You always made it feel like you’d leave us behind the moment something more important came along. Like we could be replaced at any time!”

“…”

“Then why are you pretending to hurt now? It makes no sense!”

She clung to the name ‘Bibi’ like a shield, unwilling to reveal the deeper wound beneath. She needed to see Kenneth only as a bad father, not as a husband, and certainly not as an individual.

But once the tears began to fall, her most fragile truth slipped out:

“After you threw me away like that, how—”

The words were so raw and humiliating that she wanted to run. The calm mask she had worn, protected by the memory of their daughter, was beginning to crack — and she hated it.

She wasn’t ashamed to admit that she still loved him. What devastated her was her helplessness in wanting to be loved in return.

Her firsts — her first love, her first night, her first child — had all belonged to this man. She couldn’t even imagine anyone else.

The fact that she still craved love from the person she should hate and fear the most made her feel pathetic. It was foolish enough to make her want to flee.

She tried to push him away and hit him again, but when he pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her waist, she fell into his embrace without resistance.