Thud. The way he dropped into the chair in his study, it looked like he was testing just how sturdy it was. Things had not gone well again, it seemed.

Count Fonta, the emperor’s devoted chamberlain, watched Heliones’s mood carefully and asked with caution.

“Did you manage to speak with her?”

“Yeah.”

He closed his eyes and let out a deep groan. The conversation had clearly gone nowhere.

“Are you not going to tell me what happened? You said you needed my advice.”

Count Fonta was a married man of six years and the father of two children. He had always taken pride in being a good father and a good husband.

“She said she ran into the daughter of Duke Balthar.”

“Ah. By now, most of the capital’s nobility will know that Lady Lucian is in the city.”

“She was invited to a tea party. I told her to do as she pleased, and she said she would try not to be a burden.”

“From Lady Lucian’s perspective, that’s a perfectly natural thing to say. Even when she was duchess, she was always watching your reactions.”

At Count Fonta’s words, Heliones slowly opened his eyes and fixed him with a stare.

“She was watching my reactions?”

“Yes. She was always so invisible at the ducal estate, wasn’t she? Even at social events, no matter what anyone said to her, she never once gave a proper response.”

“What? What did people say to her?”

“What do you think they said? To a princess from an enemy nation whose homeland they had destroyed.”

Heliones shook his head with a deflated exhale, as though asking why he hadn’t known, but it was stranger that he hadn’t. Everyone held their tongues in front of the last surviving imperial, and Lucian was not the type to go telling tales about what had been done to her.

“Why didn’t she tell me? If I had known, I would have made whoever it was apologize, without exception.”

“Yes, well, you may have thought that, but would Lady Lucian have known it?”

“Why? Known what?”

Heaven had blessed this young ruler with natural intelligence, military instinct, and an overwhelming presence. If there was one thing missing, it was any sense of romance.

“Because you never said so.”

“What?”

“What dish shall we serve on your birthday? Do as you like. What flowers shall we use for the banquet? Do as you like. Was it not almost always that kind of conversation?”

“What’s wrong with telling her to do as she likes? I only wanted her to have things the way she wanted them!”

“That is precisely the problem. To the person hearing it, it comes across as indifferent and thoughtless.”

At Count Fonta’s words, Heliones raised his voice in protest.

“Thoughtless! I was busy, but I always had breakfast with her! I called merchants to the house every season!”

Right. True to form for a soldier through and through, there it was again. His unspoken consideration was the kind that worked on old friends who knew him well. Why he still could not see that it meant nothing to a wife who had come from an enemy nation was beyond understanding.

Count Fonta shook his head slowly, as though he had grown tired of hearing the same excuses every time.

“Did you ever show your face when she was choosing jewels or fabrics? What about during fittings?”

“What would be the point of going? She had fine taste. She would choose well on her own.”

For the sake of a lord who still could not grasp what the problem was, Count Fonta finally said what he had long thought but never quite managed to put into words.

“You never spent the wedding night with her, did you? If you had, I would not have signed the divorce papers in your place.”

The duchess had kept herself small and watchful, and while her origins played a part in that, this was the real reason. She had never spent the wedding night with Heliones, which meant she had never truly become his wife.

“Honestly, I always assumed you were keeping the duchess at a distance because you intended to divorce her at any point. To avoid growing attached from sharing a bed when it would come to nothing.”

As he listened to Count Fonta, the color drained steadily from Heliones’s face, going pale as though cold water had been poured over him.

“Did she think that too?”

“Most likely, yes.”

Heliones’s reasons for not spending the wedding night with Lucian were layered and tangled.

The first was his mother.

His mother was known to be infertile, but she had threatened to take her own life the moment Lucian, who was well within childbearing age, conceived a child of Frianc imperial blood, however unlikely.

Heliones had grown so accustomed to his mother’s threats and manipulations that he was not particularly shaken by them, but he worried about Lucian instead.

Even if Lucian had not conceived during her three years of marriage to her first husband, that was no guarantee she was completely infertile. There were plenty of cases where people who had no children went on to have them after remarrying.

He was away from home often, and if Lucian were to become pregnant, his mother was more than capable of harming Lucian in his absence rather than harming herself.

His mother already ground her teeth over Lucian being the daughter of an enemy and watched her every move. Provoking her would bring Lucian nothing but harm, and so Heliones had deliberately tried not to treat Lucian in any way that might stir his mother’s suspicions.

But this was only the surface reason. The deeper reason Heliones could not bring himself close to Lucian was psychological.

His decision not to spend the wedding night with Lucian was not the shallow calculation Count Fonta had assumed, that they would part ways eventually so there was no point in forming an attachment.

It had not taken Heliones long at all to find himself in awe of Lucian, daughter of his enemy.

The Rodencian royal family, with their red hair and red eyes that called to mind their fire-wielding power, were also known for their fierce temperaments.

Lucian’s father was a belligerent and passionate man who had always led from the front in his wars of conquest, reveling in the banquet of blood and death.

Even before the marriage, Heliones had known something of Lucian. She was a princess of the victorious nation, but the only royal born without the power of a divine beast, which had left her in a poor position at home.

Rodencia’s king had arranged his eldest daughter’s first marriage and her second with the deliberate intent of humiliating the other party.

Heliones had expected that a spirited princess of a conquering nation would feel contempt for a bridegroom who was the sole survivor of a defeated empire. Or else that she was consumed with despair at being sold off to one loser after another.

But the wife he met in person was nothing like what he had imagined.

Her gentle smile and composed bearing were the flawless, perfect manner of a princess, but he felt nothing from her. No emotion at all.

Her vivid red eyes held no passion. They had gone cold and reflected nothing.

She was present in the room, yet seemed not to exist in it, like a phantom that might drift up into the air and vanish at any moment.

Without thinking, Heliones reached out and caught her by the wrist.

They had been holding each other’s gaze the whole time, but in that moment, Lucian’s eyes truly saw Heliones for the first time.

He had never seen eyes like that before. Those hollow eyes that held neither expectation nor hatred for him.

He knew in that instant that he would remember this strange, unfamiliar gaze forever, in one way or another.

Lucian behaved exactly as she had appeared at first, like someone who was barely there. The princess who had lived under every manner of contemptuous label seemed to have learned to read the room and efface herself long before she learned dignity or bearing.

As time passed, Heliones came to understand Lucian’s true circumstances through the servants who had come with her from Rodencia.

Not merely dismissed as some figure from a prophecy, but subjected to relentless *buse her entire life.

When he overheard the servants snickering that she must have had some pride left in her, the way she tried to hide the scars on her back, he had wanted to tear their mouths open on the spot.

When he learned that the stifling lace covering her neck and back and the long gloves were there to conceal the marks of that *buse, his blood ran hot with fury.

People who deserved to die. Demons who were not content to invade other nations for sport and wage war, but turned their cruelty on their own blood.

Heliones burned with anger just from hearing it, and he wondered how Lucian could remain so unmoved.

Had years of torment burned away even her capacity for hatred and rage?

Heliones raged on her behalf, found his justification for destroying Rodencia in it, and let vengeance and purpose set him alight.

Yet every time he looked at Lucian, he suffered under a crushing weight of guilt.

A father who had never once looked at him with warmth. A distant figure he could not even approach until the late empress passed away.