Everything felt strange against her skin and her face burned with it.

The one small mercy was that she had her back turned to Caesar rather than her face.

Otherwise her flustered state would have been laid completely bare.

Luna made a deliberate effort to clear her throat and continued.

“Ahem. Why are you still here?”

“Too much trouble to move.”

“I woke up and you were here. It startled me.”

“A husband and wife can sleep together, can’t they? So I’m supposed to finish and disappear, is that it? How cold.”

“It’s not exactly that, but you always have before…”

“Are you sulking? Have you been quietly hurt about it all this time?”

“N, no?”

At her overly emphatic denial, a low laugh reached her ears. Why it was pleasant to hear, she could not say. The corners of Luna’s mouth curved up slightly in spite of herself.

But something was off. The hand Caesar had wrapped around her waist began to move, slowly working its way over her soft thighs and along her side.

Right at that moment, with no sense of timing whatsoever, the white fl*id pooled inside her walls came spilling out in a rush.

It was morning, with sunlight streaming in. Luna tried reciting a prayer in her head against the sensation that kept building, but it was no use.

Caesar had already moved his hand up and was touching her n*pple with a subtle, unhurried caress as he whispered against her ear.

“This has gone hard.”

“Ahh… th, that’s…”

“Should I put it in here again?”

His length, already fully hard, poked against her backside.

But the words would not come out. Luna, made so sensitive by him and now acquainted with this new world, was in truth desperately eager. She wanted him to put it in, quickly…

She could hold back no longer and gave a small, furtive nod.

At that, Caesar gripped one side of her and spread her open, pressed the tip against her entrance where white seed still clung in soft beads, and began to push in slowly.

“Mmm… ah…”

“You’re so eager first thing in the morning.”

“How long are you going to… keep… hah…!”

“After a whole night of it, there’s no need to loosen you up. Look at how smoothly you just take it in.”

The long, thick length filled her inner walls completely as it pushed inside once more.

In the early hours that marked the start of a new day, low and indecent sounds began to fill the room.

By the time they had come together several more times in the bed and the bath, Luna was utterly spent all over again.

Caesar had a trip scheduled today to a distant region. As always, he was relentlessly busy.

After tidying herself up quickly, Luna found herself drifting naturally to his side and taking her place there without thinking.

She noticed the hem of his shirt had folded inward and straightened it with practiced hands. Then she turned back the cuffs neatly, giving them a clean, proper line.

It was a habit worn into her body from her years as a maid, surfacing without her meaning it to. The movement was so natural that Luna herself did not even register what she was doing.

“You’re quite good at that.”

Caesar looked down at her without concealing his surprise.

Her hands were firm and sure. They had to be, for the Luna before the body swap had been a rather accomplished maid.

The moment she became aware of what she had done, Luna let a slightly awkward smile cross her face and spoke.

“Ha… perhaps it turns out I have a talent for this sort of thing.”

A quiet satisfaction passed through his eyes. The instant she noticed it, her face felt warm for no particular reason.

“There, all done.”

“Do that for me from time to time.”

“All right.”

Caesar looked down at her for a moment, then added, “I plan to go somewhere fairly far today. I won’t be back for a few days, so don’t wait up and go to bed early.”

“When have I ever waited…”

The two of them exchanging such ordinary words looked, by now, like any ordinary married couple.

Why did something so ordinary feel so pleasantly ticklish and good. Right after the body swap she had thought she would never feel anything like this. Luna felt almost as though she were standing in the middle of a pleasant dream.

“Travel safely.”

“I will.”

Caesar turned away with that short reply, and Luna watched his retreating figure, seeing him off with a heart full of a feeling she could not quite name.

She could not take her eyes off the carriage until it shrank to a speck in the distance.

She had no idea what lay ahead, lost as she was in that warm, fluttering feeling.

* * *

A few days later, it was a day of unusually heavy rain.

Much like the day of the wedding, the day Luna’s body had been swapped.

She had received a letter saying that traces had been found of the maid who had vanished from the Marquis’s manor, which was to say, the real Adelia, and she had boarded a carriage at once. With rain pouring down in fierce sheets, she had ridden at full speed the entire way to her destination.

The contents of the letter were not ordinary.

Luna’s heart beat irregularly, pounding with unease.

After riding for a full half day, she arrived at a very small village situated just below the Astrael mountain range.

The village headman, who had heard word that she was coming in secret, came out to receive her.

Luna held up a portrait bearing her own face and showed it to the headman.

“Is it true that you saw this woman here?”

A moment later, the headman called in his son.

A young man who looked to be around twenty appeared shortly after.

He looked down at the likeness Luna held out, then nodded without hesitation.

“Yes. That’s her. It was about a month or two ago, I think. It had been raining especially hard and then stopped, so the village was in quite an uproar. The embankment out front had collapsed and we were in the middle of repairs, and then a woman on horseback came riding right through it, so… I gave her a good earful from behind.”

“Are you certain it was this woman?”

“Yes. When I raised my voice she turned and looked back for a moment, gave a brief apology, then turned her horse around and rode up into the mountains. I remember feeling a bit embarrassed afterward for having raised my voice at a young woman like that.”

Before long the headman approached, leading a horse and carrying an ornate box.

The horse was a thoroughbred that the Marquis’s household had raised with great care.

As befitting the considerable sum paid for it, it was the fastest and finest horse in the Marquis’s stable.

The moment the horse saw Adelia, it seemed to recognize its long-absent owner. It snorted and shook its head vigorously, then came toward her and pressed its muzzle against her.

“She is indeed the owner of this horse.”

“Yes. It was raised in our household.”

“Regrettably, the person was nowhere to be found. Only this horse remained. Along with these belongings.”

The headman handed her the ornate box as he spoke.

The moment she confirmed in person what the letter had described, her eyes shook violently.

A horse and belongings left behind on a cliff, their owner gone. It meant Adelia had disappeared.

Luna was too stunned to speak for some time. She barely managed to collect herself and began asking them to recount the circumstances in detail.

“Please tell me… exactly what happened at the time.”

“Well, let’s see… the rain that had been falling for so long had finally stopped, so I went up the mountain to gather some medicinal herbs, and there was this horse, all alone near the cliff. It was clearly no ordinary animal just by the look of it, so I brought it down with me.”

“So there was nothing but this horse and these belongings?”

“That’s right. There are scrape marks on the ground, like something rolled off in the rain, so it seems certain that whoever it was fell off the cliff.”

“How can this be…”

“You said she was a maid you were fond of, yes? If she fell from here, she would have been swept away without a trace. The river below flows directly out to sea, so even finding a body would be considered fortunate.”

At the unbelievable turn of events, the strength left Luna’s legs and she sank straight to the ground. A disappearance in a place like this. The shock left her mind blank and hollow for a moment.

Indeed, the letter from the Marquis’s household had stated only that the entire surrounding area had been searched and yet no body had been found.

“Ah, and… this was found a little ways off.”

The headman carefully pressed something into her hand as she sat on the ground.

She opened her palm. It was the hairpin Adelia had always been fond of wearing. The silver hairpin bore a distinctive engraved pattern that made it easy to recognize.

But one side of it was badly damaged, bent beyond use.

Luna tucked it carefully into her br*ast pocket, thinking it might be all that remained of Adelia.

Back at the Grand Ducal manor, Luna was struggling to hold her chaotic thoughts together and sort through them.

After swapping bodies with Luna, Adelia had abandoned the Marquis’s manor and left of her own accord without a backward glance.

Even in that desperate rush, the only things Adelia had taken with her were a few jewels worth selling, the green brooch said to be a treasured heirloom of the Marquis’s household, and the silver hairpin found some distance away.

But the moment Luna lifted the lid of the box the headman had given her, her gaze stopped.

The brooch was nowhere to be seen.

The empty space where it should have been stood out conspicuously. It was as though someone had reached in and taken it.

On top of that, the ground at the top of the cliff where she was presumed to have fallen bore clear marks, as though something had scraped across it.

Every detail felt unnatural somehow.