The latter was not something Vivian could do anything about, but the former was a plan she could ruin perfectly well on her own.

Vivian would unmask the monster today.

She would strip away the mask and face whatever lay beneath it head-on. It didn’t matter if the cursed mark was as horrifying as the stories passed down through the ages claimed. Vivian already steeled herself.

Even if it made her sick, even if she instinctively looked away, she had no intention of letting the smile she wore now falter. After all, for a woman who ruled Petrasia’s social circles with the label of imperial bastard pinned to her back, this was no different from what she did every day.

They said looking at the cursed mark would bring a curse down on you? When it came to curses running through the blood, she herself, born an imperial bastard, was already cursed from the start.

It was the only act of defiance Vivian could manage against the imperial family. Rather than being ashamed of her marriage to a monster, she would marry him with a radiant smile, boldly baring the monster’s curse to all the world.

In the process, however many people caught sight of the monster’s face would be exposed to the curse, but Vivian was far from the kind of selfless person who put others before herself.

If she were being honest, she half hoped the cursed mark’s power was as terrifyingly potent as the rumors claimed, so that not only those who saw it but the entire empire would be struck by a dreadful curse. She wanted the imperial family to regret their judgment to the bone, to understand what a foolish thing it was to foist a monster onto a bastard girl named Vivian.

“……”

Vivian tightened her grip on the door handle. Instead of making the mistake of biting her lightly colored lips, she squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, swallowing the last of her nerves.

The woman who would bring the monster out into the world. That was the role Vivian assigned herself today. She leaned her weight forward and the door swung open.

The room inside was dark. All the curtains were drawn. A thin sliver of light barely seeped through the gaps and drew a single faint line across the stone floor, and every other space was sunk in darkness.

There was a fireplace, but the fire was out. In the cold, vast space, the smell of leather and iron hung thicker than it did in the corridor.

Something stood in the middle of that darkness.

The partial outline of a person showed against the curtains drawn across the window. Broad shoulders were the first thing to catch her eye. Far broader than she vaguely imagined. The height, too, was plainly greater than any man she met in the capital, beyond any comparison.

The dark silhouette, tall enough that even lifting her gaze couldn’t immediately find its end, did not move. Vivian clearly made a sound opening the door, clearly made her presence known, and yet the figure did not turn.

Vivian strode toward the window without hesitation. The reason she skipped even the customary nod of greeting was simple. She had only one moment.

Once time passed, once conversation began, once her intentions were seen through, refusal was the only thing that would come back to her. Vivian was not the kind of person to sacrifice her own interests for the sake of a war hero she was meeting for the first time today.

I’m sorry about this. I have nothing against you personally.

Vivian walked straight to her destination without caring that the hem of her dress dragged across the stone floor. Within a few steps she passed alongside the man who stood rigid as a stone statue. Renard.

In the instant she brushed close, she felt heat. Despite the fireless cold of the northern land, this man’s body was startlingly warm. She heard him draw a sharp breath, but she didn’t stop. She grabbed the curtain and pulled it open in one motion.

Light poured in. The sunlight of the North was different from Petrasia’s. A white, cool light that plunged straight down from a high altitude filled the room in an instant.

Dust particles swirled slowly inside the shafts of light. Her eyes, adjusted to the dark, went white for a moment before recovering. Vivian turned her head.

Renard Callen stood there. Only now could she see the human shape that existed until a moment ago as nothing more than a silhouette.

Big. Her first thought was much the same as before. Vivian’s gaze traveled upward from below.

He wore black shoes that looked like military boots, planted firmly on the floor. Above the dark, sharply creased trousers, the thickness of his thighs was impossible to hide. Moving past the black leather belt at his waist and up to his torso, it was hard to look away from his broad, powerful frame.

The jacket pulled taut across his chest, and the old scar running from his sleeve along his wrist, both caught her eye at once. Renard seemed to realize she was looking at his scar and quickly tugged his sleeve down to straighten himself, but she already saw everything there was to see. It must have come from the battlefield. Not a difficult guess.

And where his face should have been, there was a mask.

Seen in the sunlight, the mask was more worn than she expected. Not so much worn as saturated with years of handling, the oils of long use soaked into it. It appeared to be made of hardwood, its surface cleanly painted, though the paint lifted at the edges in a way that went unaddressed. The rims of the eye holes were worn smooth and round.

And within them, a single pair of pitch-black eyes laid bare all of Renard’s confusion, unobscured by the mask. Irises so dark the boundary between pupil and iris was nearly indistinguishable.

“You are……”

Vivian did not wait for Renard to finish.

For a lady of society, it required no great length of time to take in a person’s appearance from head to toe. In the brief moment she turned toward Renard, she swept her gaze all the way to the eyes behind his mask and reached out her hand.

The jewels set into her dress clinked softly against one another as she moved. Vivian was not short by any measure, but next to Renard Callen’s height, calling herself a dwarf would not have been an exaggeration.

It didn’t matter. As long as she could hook just the tips of her fingers under the bottom edge, that was enough. She felt the rough grain of the hardwood, worn smooth from years of touch, and lifted the mask away.

Renard Callen reacted a beat too late. Someone entering his space without permission, someone opening the curtains of his room to let in light, a beautiful noblewoman looking directly at him, that woman’s hand reaching for his mask: all of it was something he never experienced in his life, and the unfamiliarity delayed his judgment.

He raised his hand in a rush as cool air settled over the bridge of his nose where the mask lifted away. But it was too late. Vivian’s deft hand snatched the mask free.

Renard went still.

But so did Vivian. Vivian looked at Renard Callen’s exposed face and stopped breathing. Time seemed to stop.

A strand of black hair, disturbed by the motion of removing the mask, fell across his forehead. The exposed skin carried the pallor particular to someone long deprived of sunlight, but it was clearly different from the pallor of illness. It was closer to white, gleaming cold as snow.

The bone structure from his cheekbones to his jawline was firm and defined. The line from between his brows down the bridge of his nose was long and straight, and the tip of his nose was slightly angular, seemingly declaring his strength. His closed lips looked resolute, but the sense was that if their shape changed, they could give an entirely different impression. Overall, his features were sharply sculpted, clean-lined, without a single unnecessary element.

And among all of it, Vivian could not take her eyes off Renard Callen’s.

The dark eyes dimly visible through the holes in the mask now lay before her, unshielded by shadow. The jet-black irises visible beneath thick lashes did not brighten even in the sunlight.

They were deep, still eyes. No, not still. In Renard’s eyes right now she could read bewilderment clearly enough. But even that trembling could not shatter the overall impression of his face.

A shallow scar crossing diagonally from his left temple to his cheekbone, and a short, dark scar below the right side of his jaw, both stood out. They were unmistakably wounds from the battlefield.

But beyond that, there was nothing.

The cursed mark, the dreadful brand of a curse so terrible one could not bear to look at it, the thing said to curse anyone who laid eyes on it, was nowhere to be found.

Two propositions surfaced in Vivian’s mind simultaneously.

First. Renard Callen has no cursed mark.

Second. Renard Callen is handsome.

Vivian saw quite a few men over the years. In Petrasia’s social circles, it was not only women who weaponized their looks. Young noblemen, imperial palace knights, diplomats. She was thoroughly tired of the countless peacocks preening and hoping to catch even one more admiring glance, and she knew them all too well.