Just as Asilri was listening with desperate attention, the child’s voice gradually faded.

Please, tell me.

Who you are.

Asilri cried out with a longing that had nowhere to land.

But her desperate wish counted for nothing, and even the faint afterimage slowly disappeared.

After that, there was only deep darkness.

As Asilri frowned and strained to chase the fading sensation, a clear voice shook her awake.

“Asilri!”

She opened her eyes slowly, and the sensation that had been drifting further and further away finally began to return.

“Are you with me?”

Through her blurry vision, she could see red eyes flashing sharply.

But Asilri only blinked, showing no other reaction.

By now, seeing that keen gaze and not being startled felt stranger than the alternative.

Wrapped in a strange feeling, she did not notice the relief mixed in among the rest.

“Are you all right, Asilri?”

“…….”

“Please, answer me.”

While Asilri still struggled to shake off the fog of sleep, Khalid grabbed her with an urgent voice.

Only then did she come back to herself and look at him.

It was a face she had once never been able to look at properly, yet lately she had seen that poker face of his crack more and more.

Why was a man who had never spared her a thought acting so frantic?

As Asilri’s eyes grew clearer, he too gradually settled.

“……Why are you here?”

A cold, indifferent voice that would have stung anyone else, yet what settled on Khalid’s face was relief.

Khalid clung to her small hand with a desperate tenderness.

“You were groaning and writhing in pain.”

“……I was?”

“Yes. Did you have a nightmare?”

As Asilri’s expression softened, Khalid’s heavy hand moved gently across her forehead.

The slow, soothing touch and the quietly asked question were both unexpectedly tender.

Asilri fell silent, lost in thought, and Khalid took the moment to savor having her fully within reach.

“……I’m sorry.”

The out-of-nowhere apology caught her off guard.

Asilri could not take Khalid’s words at face value and felt a faint wariness rise in her.

But the meaning he had hidden behind them was not hard to grasp.

Whoosh.

“Kha, Khalid!”

The moment tension crossed Asilri’s face, Khalid pulled her toward him with ease.

The arms that wrapped around her felt almost frantic in how tightly they refused to let go.

Asilri sat in his arms with a startled expression.

What on earth had made this man so desperate?

“You really are…….”

“……!”

Asilri flinched without meaning to.

He was trembling.

A man who had seemed afraid of nothing in this world, holding a woman barely large enough to fill his arms.

The desperate, clinging touch, like a small child holding on to its mother, stayed with her.

Perhaps that was why.

A touch she would have coldly pushed away under any other circumstance, and yet right now she could do nothing at all.

“Ha, well. At least you woke up safely.”

In the meantime, Khalid composed himself and drew her slightly out of his arms to meet her eyes.

“I was worried. That you might never wake up.”

“…….”

“That you would leave me behind.”

……Why would you, over me?

The words that rose all the way to her throat never made it out.

Only then did Asilri realize that Khalid’s desperate touch no longer felt unfamiliar.

It resembled a certain moment from the past.

Right. She had clearly lost consciousness after being swept up in Khalid’s violent dark energy.

The time Asilri had spent trapped in that dream, Khalid had apparently lived through every moment of it as well.

Instead of pushing Khalid away, Asilri lifted her head and looked up at him.

“……Is it not running wild anymore?”

She did not know why she asked.

But watching him shake like this, she had wanted to ask.

Even now, with their bodies this close, she could no longer feel that precarious energy from that night.

“……Thanks to you.”

He was someone who had stayed silent while knowing everything, so he must have done a great deal of thinking this time.

Asilri had tried, somewhat idly, to peer into Khalid’s thoughts, but found herself feeling worse for it instead.

“……I want to get up.”

“All right, Asilri.”

Khalid did as she asked and released her from his arms, helping her lean back against the headboard.

Moving her still-heavy body drew a labored breath from Asilri.

But Khalid, unusually, only watched.

“Why did you do it?”

A cool, flat voice reached her.

Khalid asked again, as though genuinely curious about what was going on inside her.

“I’m asking why you did something so reckless.”

“……I’m not sure.”

Why had she?

What could she, with nothing to her name, possibly do?

Had she held some reckless certainty that she could bring him back under control.

Or was it……

Asilri could not answer Khalid’s question, and found she could not easily answer the one she had posed to herself either.

“……Well. What does it matter.”

But Khalid could not endure even that brief silence and broke it himself.

Khalid held her small hand tightly and savored its warmth.

“What matters now is that you are safe. And…….”

Khalid gently stroked her flushed hand.

“That you took my hand.”

“……I haven’t taken your hand yet.”

Asilri pressed him without giving him even a moment’s opening.

“Yes, that’s right. I know.”

Even so, Khalid accepted it with surprising ease.

For some reason, that felt distant to Asilri.

Why was that?

Khalid was clearly looking at her, and yet in another way, he was not.

This sensation of him chasing something somewhere far away felt, for some reason, familiar.

“……Khalid.”

But before she could place what it was, Khalid buried his face in her small hand.

The feeling of his warm breath against her skin was dizzying.

“Whatever it is you want, I will follow your lead. So.”

Khalid lifted his head slowly and looked directly at Asilri.

His eyes were wavering, which was rare.

“Please don’t do anything dangerous.”

At this point, both Khalid and Asilri had to be out of their minds.

Khalid, for clinging to an Asilri who had nothing.

And Asilri, for thinking that the sight of him clinging suited him rather well.

Asilri, unusually, did not press him and only watched.

It was a small change that had come to them.

* * *

Perhaps it was because she had spent the time she lay unconscious confronting memories she had wanted to forget.

After that day, Asilri sank into her own thoughts for a while and suffered.

She had struggled so hard to break free from the moments when she had been nothing but weak.

She had vowed to take revenge on those who had destroyed her life.

And yet she had accomplished nothing. The realization left her feeling pathetic and hollow.

But Khalid kept drifting near her, unsettling her heart.

What had that energy been, the one she had felt from Khalid that day.

And…… what had it been that stopped his rampage.

What was it that put him in such a precarious state?

Khalid had said nothing, but Asilri remembered the sensation that had surfaced faintly within her.

It only made her more uneasy.

She could feel a dangerous atmosphere wrapping itself around her, and yet she herself knew nothing.

What exactly was she not being told, and what did he want from her?

What was he, really……

“Asilri.”

Before she could finish the thought, a low, sunken voice called her name.

Asilri looked up without thinking, and found Khalid looking down at her.

The darkness had settled thick behind him, which meant night had already fallen by the time he came to find her.

Asilri let out a quiet sigh without meaning to.

“……Go away nicely today.”

It was, unusually, a sincere thing to say.

She meant that she did not want to argue with Khalid today, though in another way it had also slipped out without thought.

But Khalid did not answer her and moved toward her slowly.

He stopped at a comfortable distance and simply looked at her.

The troubled, tangled feeling weighed most heavily on Asilri herself.

The two of them held their silence for a while, each for their own reasons.

Then Khalid parted his lips and spoke.

“Yes, it is rather stifling in here.”

Stifling.

This was his estate. His bedroom.

Asilri furrowed her brow slightly, letting the question show.

Khalid met her reaction with something like pleased recognition, as though he had expected exactly that.

Asilri understood his meaning a moment later.

“Would you like to go out with me?”