“—There are words even Your Highness the Grand Duke must not say!”

The consciousness that had been plunged into absolute darkness was dragged back to the surface by an enraged voice. Like waking from a long sleep, her thoughts were still mired in a haze.

The first thing to enter Judith’s vision when she opened her eyes was a high, imposing ceiling.

The moment she recognized it, she knew by instinct exactly where she was lying.

……The Imperial Palace guest suite, is it.

There was no way she could have failed to recognize it. It was a place she had yearned for so desperately, a place where she had reported for duty day after day.

What she couldn’t fathom, however, was how — under what circumstances — she had come to be lying here.

She had just been reaching back through her most recent memories when —

“You want to hold me responsible? What a shame. I truly haven’t done anything.”

“My wife collapsed immediately after her arm was seized by Your Highness, and you claim no responsibility?”

A voice honed to a razor’s edge drove itself into her eardrums like a blade.

Judith suppressed the throbbing headache beginning to pulse behind her temples and turned her head toward the source of the voices from where she lay.

“You are completely impossible to reason with.”

She blinked her heavy, gritty eyelids open and shut a few times.

What she glimpsed through her still-blurry vision was a man of resplendent golden hair, leaning at an angle against the wall.

“No different from a whining child of three or four at a market stall.”

It was a low voice laced with fatigue and irritation. In the next instant, Judith’s vision sharpened into clarity.

……Grand Duke Rainer?

The man’s neatly combed hair had fallen into some disarray, and the khaki field uniform he wore was far from pristine — marked with dust and bloodstains. The state of him suggested someone who had returned in haste from a long campaign, and yet the Imperial Palace was no place that suited such an appearance. In truth, however, there were few whose station suited it better.

Rainer Waldemar Stefan Roswald.

The firstborn son of the reigning Emperor — yet one who had fallen out of imperial favor for reasons unknown, been granted a ducal title, and effectively been pushed aside from the line of succession.

Before her marriage to Lorenz, when she had served at the Imperial Palace as a Palace Guard officer, Judith had crossed paths with him on a handful of occasions. She knew who he was.

The Valurak front — I heard he’d been deployed there. What is he doing here?

She had a vague memory of reading in the papers not long ago that he had been assigned to the border defense campaign against the Kingdom of Valurak, and that he would not be returning for some time.

The ill-fated prince who had never known the Emperor’s favor — Grand Duke Rainer, Your Highness.

Every time an imperial decree sent him to yet another dangerous front, the papers covered it with enough fanfare that all the nation knew. His news reached Judith’s ears naturally, whether she sought it or not.

It was then.

“I cannot let this pass. Not under any circumstances.”

Once more, a familiar voice rang out.

She lowered her gaze slightly — and there was her husband, Lorenz, glaring at Rainer with an expression she had never seen on him before.

“Your Highness will be held accountable for this, one way or another.”

“…….”

“How dare you — my wife——”

“Ha.”

What cut through his grinding words was a hollow laugh that broke from those sculpted lips.

His straight, heavy brows drew sharply upward, and the eyelids that had been closed over Rainer’s eyes began to lift — slowly, deliberately. Dark crimson irises turned toward Lorenz.

“How dare you?”

The displeasure on his face was undisguised, utterly unfiltered.

“Mind your manner, Duke Belheim. Even my patience has its limits.”

It was the sort of cutting atmosphere that would have sent any ordinary person scrambling to read the room and placate him on the spot — yet Lorenz did not so much as flinch.

Rainer held his gaze, eyes still sharp, watching him stand his ground without yielding. And then —

“Well.”

A short, deflated sound escaped him — a quiet scoff.

Rainer’s expression eased, and he shook his head slowly from side to side.

“I wonder — truly, deeply wonder — whether you would carry on like this if there were others present.”

“…….”

“Ah, that’s right. Shall I call someone in right now? What do you say?”

“……I have my own thoughts on the matter.”

The needling tone continued without pause.

“Your thoughts. You’d be scheming with that Conrad again, no doubt. Where are you planning to send me this time?”

“What are you——!”

Leaving Lorenz flustered in his wake, Rainer affected an expression of exaggerated boredom and lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

It was then that he turned his head idly — and Judith came into his line of sight.

“Well, now.”

“……!”

Rainer’s eyes narrowed. A smile played at the corner of his lips.

“You and your wife both have quite the gift for eavesdropping. They say you grow to resemble the one you love — there may be something to that after all.”

His mouth curved up at one corner as he shook his head slowly. Following his gaze, Lorenz turned toward Judith.

Pale violet eyes flew wide open.

“……Erika?”

Judith, who had just been about to push herself upright, went still.

In an instant she was swept by a sharp, visceral resistance — and alongside it, a sensation strangely, inexplicably familiar.

What is this.

Her heart lurched with an unpleasant thud.

“…….”

The inside of her skull throbbed as though a heavy stone were pressing down on it. She could feel the gaze of the man leaning against the wall — no, he seemed to be looking at Lorenz.

Did I mishear.

Judith tried to dismiss the fleeting sense of wrongness. But —

“Eri!”

The wrongness drove itself into her ear a second time, unmistakably.

As though he had never been angry at all, Lorenz came rushing to her with a face on the verge of tears — weak with relief — and pulled her upright and into his arms all at once.

“I was beside myself when you collapsed so suddenly.”

“…….”

She had not misheared.

And yet this was undeniably her husband. The face, the voice —

It is Duke Lorenz Belheim.

But the unguarded familiarity of what she was seeing now was not something the man she knew would do.

“I tried to wake you, again and again, and you wouldn’t stir — I was truly……”

His voice trailed off and wavered. That voice, always so gentle, carried something far deeper in it now.

There was no way to mistake it.

The arms holding her firmly, the hand wrapped around her shoulder — she could feel them trembling, finely, almost imperceptibly.

The breath he drew in to steady himself, the soft, trembling sound of it, reached her ear directly.

Erika.

Her thoughts, strangely sluggish as though she had slept too long, slowly gathered themselves as Judith turned the name over quietly in her mind.

“I was afraid something had happened to you, Eri. And in a situation like this — there’s no way for me to know, is there.”

“…….”

“So I told them we would return to the townhouse for the time being.”

Judith, still held in his arms, thought over the meaning behind his choice of words and slowly pieced together old, half-buried sensations one by one.

“But His Majesty happened to arrive just then, and said he would summon the imperial physician — told us to wait……”

She recalled Lorenz from moments ago, glaring at Rainer as though he meant to k*ll him.

And even now, like this.

The man who had always presented himself so perfectly, so refined — as though perpetually veiled behind a layer of composure — was laying his raw emotions bare without the slightest reserve.

Actions she had never seen. An expression she had never witnessed. And a tone of voice she had never once heard from him.

Everything that felt entirely foreign to her seemed to come to him with perfect, effortless familiarity.

And that…… was never meant for me to begin with.

For Erika, in all likelihood.

It must be for a woman by the name of Erika.

Then why was Lorenz calling her by that name?

“…….”

She felt it instinctively. That horrible, uncanny sensation — as though something had gone fundamentally, irreparably wrong.

An ill omen, creeping upward from the soles of her feet.

“Eri? Are you listening to me?”

At Lorenz’s call, whatever had been rising to the very top of her throat burst and dissolved all at once. Judith, her gaze cast downward, pressed her lower lip slowly between her teeth.

“Ah. Well, that is……”

The throbbing in her head came again.

When no proper answer came, Lorenz drew back and held her away from him.

“What’s wrong? Are you in pain somewhere?”

Violet eyes the color of wild violets were looking into her own.

But the sight of him bending his head to meet her gaze with such tenderness, his brow furrowed with genuine concern — it no longer looked quite whole to her.

Judith smiled awkwardly and drew back a little.

“Lorenz.”

She had not yet sorted through her thoughts, nor had she arrived at any clear grasp of the situation. Until she did, she needed to keep her words measured.

So for now —

“I’m sorry.”

It was better to focus on what she could safely reveal.

“I think I may have lost some of my memory.”

This much was true.

“It looks like the Imperial Palace guest suite, but I have no idea why I’m here — I kept turning that over in my mind.”

“…….”

“So I wasn’t properly listening to what you were saying. Was there something important?”

And this — was a lie.

Judith glanced away briefly, as though embarrassed, then stole a look at Lorenz’s expression.

Just as she had anticipated, his eyes, which had fallen open wide without his realizing it, were trembling almost imperceptibly. His lips parted and closed a few times before pressing firmly shut.

His throat moved in a slow, deliberate swallow, and he opened his mouth with a mechanical stiffness.

“Judi — t……?”

This was —

A reaction that said something had gone wrong beyond what he expected.

And at the same time — either the reaction of someone caught in something they could not afford to be caught in, or —

“How on earth……”

It was the reaction of someone who had seen something that should not exist.