Chapter 66

“The wound…… why didn’t you try to heal it right away? It hurt.”

It seemed the wound had remained as a weight on her. Not having expected it to weigh on her so heavily, Ashton was a little at a loss. He covered the small hand that had grasped the hem of his shirt, and whispered.

“To show His Majesty the King.”

“Why?”

“Because his younger brother did this to me, so I wanted him to take responsibility.”

“Did he say he would?”

“Well, I got results that were fairly satisfying.”

“How will he take responsibility? The King is generous to Reyes in most things, so long as he doesn’t have to personally take a loss.”

The man’s body had already leaned heavily over Sabina. Because Ashton’s senses were growing duller by the day, he had to take her lips again and again, tasting and drawing them in countless times, just to judge what they truly felt like.

“Mmm….”

Repeated kisses set fire to her cold body. The ember that slid down her throat gathered, hollow and deep, in her lower belly. It was a sensation she had never felt before. It wasn’t frightening. She was simply curious.

Breathless, her chest rose and fell. With moisture in her eyes, she reached out.

“Ash….”

It felt as though her breath might give out at any moment. Her mind could only focus on sensation. She could no longer fixate on the worries that had made her thoughts so tangled.

Ashton still couldn’t bring himself to touch her skin, hesitating. Sabina’s lips, swollen red, took the man’s hand and placed it lightly atop her chest, which rose and fell in a frantic rhythm. His solid palm pressed, gently, through her clothes, against the soft, yielding warmth beneath.

Even though they kept kissing, Ashton’s lips were dry. He narrowed his eyes and toyed with the ribbon that held Sabina’s clothes closed. After a moment, the ribbon came undone.

Looking quietly into Ashton’s face, Sabina revealed herself without embarrassment. Unlike her stiff image, the curves made by her br*asts, waist, and hips were all soft and pliant.

As though he meant to kiss her skin, Ashton lowered his head. Sabina wrapped her arms around his head and whispered.

“It’s okay… even if you don’t have to be gentle….”

His lips began at her throat and drifted gradually lower. Even without leaving a mark, it was possible to brand someone. Thin breaths turned into a trembling voice.

The kisses that felt as if they might run all the way to her toes stopped at the place where fever-heat had been swirling for a while now. Sabina’s toes curled. Clutching the sheet, she whispered as she felt for the sensation of falling into an unfamiliar place. Keep doing that…. Like this is good….

But “good” only lasted for a moment. Soon, Sabina grew curious about something else, and so the man’s clothing slipped down from his body as well.

Sabina didn’t want to think about anything anymore.

So she sought him out and clung to him, actively. She was clumsy, but bold. He was more rational than she was, but he was not passive. She sank and surfaced dozens of times. It felt as though what she gripped might crumble, and as though everything might burn away into nothing.

Sabina understood why foolish people so often mistook pleasure for love. She wanted to repeat that brief time forever. Everything she had worried about felt like nonsense.

Sabina thought she understood why people indulged in the immorality of carnival so eagerly. A sensation as if only just before, right now, and one second from now existed. She had originally despised and recoiled from such things, but now, she needed them.

She kept pleading for “more.” Ashton didn’t seem to have much intention of stopping, either. Just as Sabina had said it was fine even without gentleness, the two of them clung, pressed, and drove one another on.

“Ah, it hurts….”

“It hurts? You only say it now?”

Her skin here and there had flushed a deep red. Ashton’s forearms and the back of his neck were scattered with crescent-moon nail marks in messy embroidery. He only smiled, as if it didn’t hurt much.

“Shall we do more?”

He asked as he tucked his lips beneath Sabina’s jaw. In truth, it was less a question than a coaxing insistence. But Sabina had no strength left now.

“Not anymore…. Later….”

Trembling with the faint afterglow lingering across her skin, she calmed her breathing. Fine black hair, damp with sweat, clung to her forehead and neck in thick strands. For someone who didn’t sweat much even in summer, this sensation was unfamiliar.

Her whole body was damp and slick, and also a little sticky, yet it wasn’t unpleasant in the slightest. Ashton stopped rubbing his lips along Sabina’s collarbone and shoulder and lifted his upper body, wearing a troubled expression.

“You… need to wash.”

“Yeah.”

Ashton looked like he couldn’t quite grasp how he should explain anything to Mitchell or Julia. Sabina, instead, was calm. N*ked, buried in the bedding, she looked at Ashton.

“I’m really sleepy.”

A pleasant drowsiness washed over her. Ashton looked down at her in silence, then picked up the clothes that had been tossed messily onto the floor. In front of her, he covered himself, piece by piece.

“Are you leaving?”

“Not right away, but I’m worried someone might knock.”

He sat by her side, gentle, and put her to sleep. She fell asleep quickly, like a baby.

The heat was still coursing inside him. Ashton closed his eyes and tried to control himself. But as at the shore in Berna, once he crossed a threshold, nothing could be managed by his will.

For Sabina, kissing or mingling bodies could not become more than sensory pleasure. She had forgotten how to treat it as an exchange of emotion. That was why she could embrace, kiss, and cling without thinking much of it. Because it was nothing.

But he would live, craving that sensation, until the day he died.

‘Good thing my life is short.’

Whenever he felt he might get too carried away, he cooled himself with cynical thoughts. His mind grew cold, as if ice water had been poured over it.

Only after Sabina fell into deep sleep did he leave the room.

* * *

By the time she woke, it was already night.

She was still wearing nothing, but her body had been cleaned. The servants must have taken care of it.

Just as Ashton had said, her days and nights had flipped. She sat blankly on the bed, then quickly pulled herself together. The wall clock said eleven, and it was a time when the servants would all have gone to sleep.

She wanted to sleep more until morning, but it didn’t go the way she wanted. Usually she had too much sleep—that was the problem. In the end, Sabina carefully stretched her legs out from under the blanket.

And she had something to do.

Sabina slipped on the negligee hanging to one side and draped a shawl over herself, then carefully opened the bedroom door. As expected, it was as silent as a grave. She walked slowly down the corridor without even lighting a lamp, making sure her footsteps didn’t sound.

It didn’t matter where she wandered. The maids, including Mitchell, would all be sleeping on the third floor. Relying on her night vision, she entered the study.

If she slightly pulled out the thick biography no one read from the very bottom shelf of the fourth bookcase, there was a small key sitting on top of it. It was the key to Sabina’s desk drawer. She took it, opened the drawer, and removed two slips of paper. Then she locked the drawer again, returned the key to its place, and left the study.

Unlike Ashton, she had openly prepared a laboratory where it could be seen. Perhaps it went without saying, but her laboratory was far cleaner and more orderly than Ashton’s. Sabina hung her shawl to one side and spread the slips of paper on the workbench.

One of the two had a black stain, and the other had no trace at all, as though it might never have been wet. Sabina opened a cabinet and poured out a small amount of solution that had been kept in a large bottle. This solution would dissolve only the paper and sink it, while allowing a small amount of medicine to float up to the surface.

The work took time and was tedious. Sabina propped her chin in her hand and only swung her legs until the separation completed.

‘I should’ve brought a book.’

It took about thirty minutes for the paper to fully dissolve. Sabina carefully decanted only the surface liquid onto a shallow dish, and prepared several test papers.

The basics of solution testing began with distinguishing whether magical elements had been mixed into it.

Sabina dabbed a tiny amount of solution onto a needle tip and moistened only a very small area of a test paper. The violet test paper turned transparent. Sabina was left speechless.

‘It’s a magical solution.’

This medicine used solvent.

‘How…?’

She slightly furrowed her brow.

Of course, Ashton was someone who could obtain high-purity solvent at any time. But why would he have to drink a magical medicine? Magical medicine was for people suffering magic-related illnesses, or those with severe diseases.

And “severe disease,” here, meant a level where normal movement became difficult.