And yet Lucian had known about him. She had known that he disliked sharp flavors and preferred rich food. In that moment he could not help feeling his heart leap with joy, and he despised himself for it, but he could not stop his heart from doing as it pleased.

The guilt of feeling joy in the midst of grief, and the happiness of knowing he occupied some corner of her mind, tangled together and brought tears to his eyes. Rather than concealing what was inside him, it had forced its way out entirely. He had covered his eyes with his palm, thinking a grown man crying must look ugly, but Lucian had noticed. He could tell because when he returned to the imperial palace and looked in the mirror, his eyes were badly swollen.

Lucian had not laughed at him. She had waited quietly beside him as he crumbled, treating it as though it were nothing. He had known long before that she was not the kind of person who would, but she had not pulled away from the hand of someone too weak to hold himself together, and she had stayed by his side.

‘Do I exist somewhere inside you too?’

Pathetic. What great poet had once said it? That love is the most sublime and pure of all emotions. If that was true, then that poet had clearly never loved anyone.

Love makes a person this small and wretched. It makes you feel contempt for yourself, know you will not be answered, and still be unable to push a single person out of your heart, walking willingly into an endless abyss.

“What would you like to do about dinner?”

Count Fonta’s question from where he stood waiting nearby pulled Heliones back to the present.

“There’s a great deal of work to get through, so I’ll eat something simple here.”

There was no time to spare. He needed to get through the backlog of documents as quickly as possible so he could get to bed early. That way he would have a little more time to go over what Lucian had said and done today, and try to piece together what she might be feeling.

Heliones ate a quick dinner of a light sandwich, finished his work, and was about to head straight to his bedroom when he stopped in his tracks.

‘I think it would have been wonderful to have a sibling who understood my heart. One who laughed with me when I was happy and cried with me when I was sad.’

In truth, Heliones had not deserved to hear those words from Lucian. He had let his grief show in front of her, but in front of Helena he had held himself back as much as he could. He was by no means the kind of sibling Lucian might have envied, but having heard those words from her, he could not simply go to bed.

‘I really am a terrible brother.’

“Tell Helena to come by and see me for a moment.”

The maid who received the Emperor’s order hurried off down the corridor to deliver the message to Helena.

Heliones quickly pulled every blanket he could find from the wardrobe and carried them out to the sitting room. He was a little rusty and fumbled for a moment, but the old skill came back to him, and using the chairs and cushions he threw together a respectable fort in no time.

The fort he had often built to comfort Helena when she came to him in tears after being scolded by their mother had served as the two siblings’ hideaway right up until the day Helena left to be married.

They were both adults now, and it might not feel as cozy as it once had, but no other way of comforting Helena came to Heliones’s mind.

Helena arrived shortly after. Heliones waited for his sister beneath the fort, his heart unsteady. Helena stopped in her tracks when she saw it, and broke into a bright smile while tears ran down her face at the same time.

“Come in.”

Helena ducked down and crawled inside. Whether because they had both grown, or for some other reason, the inside of the fort felt just as snug as he remembered, if not more so.

Just like that night long ago when she had leaned against Heliones’s shoulder to get through the night during one of their mother’s episodes, Helena leaned comfortably against her brother and let out all the sorrow that had been building up inside her in a flood of tears.

That secret was one no one could ever be allowed to know. Isabela, the woman who had gone from concubine to Empress and now to Empress Dowager, had been forced to step back from public life even after her homeland was rebuilt and her status restored, solely to keep that secret.

Who would believe her if she said she hadn’t meant for it to happen?

Who would believe her if she said she hadn’t known the mad king would react so violently, that she hadn’t known he would burn his own wife alive?

Born a duke’s daughter, she had lived her entire life without knowing want. Before she met the man who had blinded her the moment she laid eyes on him, it had never once crossed her mind that she would spend her life branded with a shameful name.

A great family still stood behind Isabela, so no one openly insulted her to her face, but she had ears, and she knew what people whispered about her behind her back.

But that was not what she truly could not bear.

When she became the Emperor’s favored consort, she had accepted one condition. The simple condition of not drawing the Empress’s attention had seemed easy enough at the time, when she was in love, but the reality was something else entirely.

Whenever she happened, truly by chance, to cross paths with the imperial couple, she had to flee the scene like a guilty party or hide herself so as not to be seen. The Empress, who had clearly arranged these encounters without warning on purpose, would act with complete indifference whenever Isabela was in the same space, treating her as though she did not exist, and the Emperor, busy keeping the Empress appeased, would not spare his lover so much as a glance.

After the imperial couple finished such an unannounced visit and left, the others who had been present would naturally avoid acknowledging Isabela’s existence for a time as well.

Whether they did it out of consideration for her embarrassment or because they themselves found the situation uncomfortable, being treated as though she did not exist despite being plainly present had carved a deep wound in Isabela.

However tangled her feelings had been, the late Emperor had been the love of Isabela’s life. And now the daughter of the man who had burned him to death had become her son’s wife. Even so, Isabela had tried at first not to hate her daughter-in-law.

The child had grown up in misery and loneliness because of her own past mistake, so she had tried not to love her but at least not to hate her.

But every time she saw that red hair and those red eyes, the face of the mad king who had laughed as he burned her husband alive rose up before her. Up to that point, she had managed.

The greater problem was that the image of a woman she had never seen die kept rising before her, a scene of burning she had not witnessed.

Lucian’s very existence was a voice screaming at Isabela. That all of this was her fault. That in the end, her petty jealousy had cost her both her homeland and her husband.

At first she tried to ignore it. She had tried to treat Lucian the way the late Empress had treated her, as though she did not exist. But she soon came to understand that treating a person who was plainly there as though they were air was not so easy a thing to do. She came to realize that the late Empress had not truly been indifferent either, but had spent her whole life working hard to appear so, though that realization changed little. Isabela and Lucian had been confined together in the same residence, which made ignoring her all the more difficult.

Isabela, who had never had much patience even with her own children, soon reached her limit. The mere sight of that red-haired woman hovering near her son made her stomach turn. The thought that the symbol of a secret shame and the object of her hatred might bear her son’s child was enough to make her feel she would rather die than witness it.

She mimed hanging herself and made a shallow cut on her wrist. Her son, as he always had, relented in the end and did not share a bed with the daughter-in-law she despised.

The hellish time passed, and at last Rodencia fell. Isabela went straight to Lucian with divorce papers in hand. Along with a considerable sum in settlement money, in case her daughter-in-law refused to leave.

Whether Lucian judged there was nothing to be gained by staying, she signed the papers without resistance and left the estate.

That ominous, unpleasant woman should have disappeared from her son’s life forever.

Ungrateful wretch of a son. Heliones, utterly consumed by that woman, had somehow uncovered the secret Isabela had kept hidden her entire life and used it to threaten her. He had dared to defy his own mother and declared he was cutting all ties with her.

From the moment she became Empress, Isabela had been focused on rebuilding the sense of self that had been ground down to nothing. If the secret she had kept were to come to light, disgrace would be unavoidable. Even if the other party was the queen of an enemy nation.

So she had endured the excruciating pain of cutting away her own flesh, stepped back from public life, and made herself scarce. Waiting for the moment she could correct her insolent son’s behavior.

And at last, after more than half a year of patience, the moment had arrived. She had never wished for the granddaughter she had seen only twice to die, but the timing of it was remarkably convenient.

Heliones had been gradually distancing himself from Helena, and so he had not known when Helena lost her child or when she divorced, and he was surely suffering now under the weight of that guilt.

At a time like this, even a son mad over a woman would find it difficult to recklessly expose his mother’s shame.

On top of that, the woman’s brother was gathering followers and contributing to the worsening of public opinion. This was the last chance. If not now, there would never be another opportunity to tear that woman away from her son.

Even if this affair were to expose her own shame in the end, Isabela steeled herself to remove that woman from her son’s side, and ordered her maids to pack her things.

“I must go to the imperial palace.”