His voice was low and subdued — but threaded through it, impossible to conceal, was tenderness.

Rainer looked steadily at her reddened eyes and the exhaustion plain across her face.

He drew her hand away from where it had lingered on his chest — slowly, but without wavering.

“You are exhausted. You have barely slept these past several days because of the festival, and you have just been through the shock of an accident.”

“…….”

“Your judgment is compromised. This is not the time for this. Go back and rest. We can talk later.”

Rainer murmured it softly, as one might coax a lost child back to solid ground.

It was the best care he could offer her — and at the same time, a desperate act of restraint, pressing down on the wanting that had begun to stir inside him.

Judith looked down at her hand, left adrift in the air between them.

‘……My judgment is compromised.’

He wasn’t wrong.

Her mind was thick with fog, and her reason had long since ceased to function.

What she could not understand, at this point, was the contradictory fear she felt within herself.

‘I’m afraid.’

She wants him.

And yet an instinctive terror gripped her ankles the moment she moved toward him, telling her she must not.

It made no sense.

In the fragment of memory that had surfaced only last night, the two of them had been closer than anyone — and he had been the one who set her feet back on the right path.

If that memory was true, then this fear had no ground to stand on.

And yet — why was it that every time her feelings for him began to deepen, she was seized by the uncanny sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff?

Was it their stations? Judith asked herself.

He was the Grand Duke of the empire. She was nothing more than a captain.

The wall between imperial royalty and minor nobility — ordinarily insurmountable.

It was the most plausible and rational reason she could give herself.

But Judith felt a self-deprecating smile rise to her lips almost immediately.

‘How cowardly.’

She already knew.

Something like their stations was nothing more than a pretext — something to paste over this nameless fear and make it look reasonable. She had been building herself an escape route, crouching behind that tidy justification all along.

Truly laughable.

Reaching out and saying she wanted him — while quietly constructing reasons to run.

But the moment she admitted to that cowardice, her mind went cold and sharp in its wake.

Reason and justification could wait. There was time enough for those later.

In this moment — and beyond it — her instincts were crying out one thing only.

Judith slowly lifted her head and looked at Rainer.

“Go back and rest, you say.”

Her gaze found his wavering eyes and held.

He was drawing a line — performing reason, performing consideration — but Judith’s senses had caught something else entirely.

The pulse transmitted through the wrist he held was running far too fast, and the hand pressing her away was trembling, barely.

‘He is holding himself back.’

He was standing on ice a single layer thin.

She didn’t need to think hard to know how to break through that fragile restraint.

Judith’s eyes narrowed.

Rather than step away, she raised her other hand — the one he hadn’t caught — and closed it slowly, deliberately, around his collar.

“……!”

The instant Rainer’s eyes went wide —

Judith rose onto her toes and pressed her lips to his.

There was no gentle preamble. It was clumsy and impulsive, their teeth nearly meeting in the collision.

Breath mingled. Lips caught.

Rainer’s body went rigid. His hands, with nowhere to go, faltered in the air.

He stood frozen, as though he could not believe what was happening — and then, on instinct, moved to wrap his arms around Judith’s waist and stopped himself.

His trembling fingers reached toward her back and clenched into nothing, opened, clenched again.

“……hah.”

Short, but with unmistakable intent — the kiss ended, and Judith drew back.

In the darkness, only the sound of their unsteady breathing tangled together.

Rainer stared down at her, stunned — then swallowed a sound of pain and stepped back.

“……Judith, you——”

“Do you not want this?”

Judith asked it evenly.

Rainer’s brow twisted.

“That is not the point. You are not yourself right now. When daylight comes and your reason returns, you will surely…… regret this moment.”

“…….”

“I don’t trust myself to bear that.”

The confession was achingly honest.

A man who wanted her so desperately that he carried even the fear that she might one day push him away.

Judith let out a small, deflating laugh.

“For someone called the empire’s greatest strategist, you become quite the fool when you are in front of me.”

Judith made no move to shake off the hand on her shoulder. Instead she raised her own hand and cupped his cheek.

The skin beneath her palm was burning hot.

She could tell. This man had reached his limit.

“……Your Highness.”

One step more, and he would break.

“Do I look like someone who would regret this?”

“……Yudi.”

“I do not regret things. If it were something I thought I would regret, I would never have started it in the first place.”

At Judith’s bold declaration, Rainer’s eyes went still.

That was when she heard something in him snap.

Rainer held back no longer.

He wrapped his arm hard around her waist and pulled her against him.

What followed was nothing like the clumsy collision of before — it was deep, and slow, and consuming.

“Mmph……”

A muffled sound broke past Judith’s lips.

Rainer kissed her as though he meant to devour her, and at the same time pressed her carefully back toward the bedroom door.

The cold surface met her back — but the warmth radiating from Rainer in front of her left no room to feel it.

When their lips finally parted after a long, tangled stretch of time, a thin silver thread broke between them.

Rainer pressed his forehead to hers and drew breath in ragged pulls.

His hand slipped inside her uniform jacket and drifted across the thin fabric of her shirt beneath.

“……Yudi.”

Even as he exhaled a ragged breath, he held onto the last thread of his reason and asked.

“Do you understand what it is you are doing right now.”

“…….”

“If we do not stop here, there is no going back.”

A warning. A last chance.

But Judith laughed softly and wound her arms around his neck.

Going back was fine. She wanted to see for herself where the end of this restless, nameless fear lay.

“I know.”

“…….”

“Because I, too, have wanted you…… all this while.”

Judith’s hand traced lightly along the back of his neck.

She looked up at him, her eyes holding a strange warmth, and whispered.

“I am used to restraint. So if you wish it, I can restrain myself.”

“…….”

“Do you wish it, Your Highness…… for me to hold back?”

An unmistakable provocation.

At those words, Rainer’s lips curved into something slow and dangerous.

The last trace of hesitation in his eyes vanished cleanly.

“……Ha. As if.”

Rainer lifted her into his arms and growled low against her ear.

“Don’t hold back. I have no need of that mercy.”

When she opened her eyes, it was a familiar ceiling.

Her body was heavy as waterlogged cotton, but her mind was strangely clear.

Judith blinked, dazed.

‘Last night I definitely…… went into the empty room in the Princess’s Palace.’

She looked around. It was her own quarters.

What was more, she had been changed into soft sleep clothes, and the sweat and dust that had clung to her were cleanly gone.

……Had it been a dream.

To think she had wanted him so badly that she’d reached for him in her sleep.

With that thought, she moved to push herself upright — and the bright light spilling through the gap in the window stopped her cold.

“……!”

The December sun rises late. And yet the world outside was already bright.

Judith checked the clock on reflex and launched herself out of bed without even managing a scream. It was not merely past six — morning duties had been underway for quite some time.

She scrambled into her uniform, dragged a comb roughly through her hair, tied it back, and bolted out of her quarters.

The cold air hit her lungs like a blade, filling her chest to the very top.

By the time she reached the outer guardpost of the Princess’s Palace, she was nearly gasping.

“Hah — hah……”

Her subordinates, who would ordinarily have snapped to attention and saluted, were watching her today with an oddly unhurried air.

“Captain Grein? But we were told you were injured — what brings you all the way out here?”

Injured — what on earth were they talking about.

“Who said that. Where is Her Highness the Princess? Has the guard handoff — ugh — already been completed?”

Judith asked between ragged breaths, but her subordinates responded with an easy shrug.

They tilted their chins toward the inner chambers of the Princess’s Palace.

“His Highness the Grand Duke arrived at the crack of dawn. He said you were in need of complete rest and that he would personally see to Her Highness the Princess.”

“…….”

“They should be having breakfast together inside right now.”