Romei stared silently at Barmas. He wore the most desperate expression she had ever seen, while she displayed the most perplexed look he had ever witnessed.

As their gazes collided silently in the empty air, Romei questioned him back, seemingly unable to comprehend why he would ask such a thing.

“Are you really asking because you don’t know?”

In that moment, the strength drained from Barmas’s hand that held her. Freed from his grasp, Romei left the office without looking back.

The sound of the door closing echoed quietly. Barmas stood emptily in the spot where he had held Romei. Her words kept circling endlessly in his mind.

‘Are you really asking because you don’t know?’

Those words meant that the reason for Romei’s suffering lay with him. Barmas found this fact unbearably painful.

Yet what troubled him even more was that Romei showed no resentment toward him whatsoever.

Barmas couldn’t believe that he meant so little to her that she wouldn’t even resent him.

For a long while, Barmas stood there, retracing what he had done so wrong to Romei, what had made her suffer to the point she could barely breathe.

Since he began noticing something off about Romei after their last bet, that was likely the cause.

But looking back, Barmas had consistently tormented Romei and enjoyed doing so. Perhaps everything since they met—precisely, from the moment he discovered Romei dispatched to Picardin and lured her into his trap—had been wrong.

However, Barmas denied this thought. He couldn’t accept the fact that every moment with him had been nothing but pain and suffering for her.

The moment he acknowledged that his happiness was connected to Romei’s suffering, he would inevitably conclude that for Romei to be happy, she would need to leave his side.

‘That can’t happen. Absolutely not…’

Barmas silently clenched his fist. Surely there must be a way to bring Romei back. If he could just discover that method, everything would be resolved, and Romei would return to her former self.

Only then did he finally move to sit at his desk, when his eyes caught a familiar cloak strewn on the floor. It was the cloak Romei had worn.

Barmas stopped and bent down to pick it up. Despite being given enough clothes to fill her room, Romei had stubbornly insisted on wearing only this cloak.

And now her cloak was in Barmas’s hands.

The woman who, despite countless intimate encounters, felt embarrassed showing her n*ked body to him and always made sure to wear her cloak, had left the office n*ked.

Only then, far too late, did Barmas realize how profoundly Romei had changed.

* * *

When Romei opened the office door and stepped out, the servants, including Rajie, cleared their throats awkwardly with embarrassed expressions.

Wondering what was wrong, Romei scanned their faces, but they quickly turned away, avoiding her gaze.

Though no one said anything, Romei realized they had been eavesdropping on her conversation with Barmas by pressing themselves against the office door. The situation seemed quite unusual, so they must have been curious about what was happening inside.

Romei had no intention whatsoever of scolding them or questioning why they had eavesdropped. More accurately, she didn’t feel any particular emotion about it.

They hadn’t had a major fight; they had simply engaged in an ordinary conversation. Of course, she was disappointed that he wouldn’t torment her anymore, but that was all.

Amidst the awkward atmosphere, Romei alone spoke calmly.

“Isn’t anyone coming with me?”

“…Pardon?”

“Shouldn’t one of you be with me at all times?”

“…”

“Anyone will do. I’d like to take a walk after so long, but I can’t go alone, right?”

The servants hesitated, glancing at each other. While Barmas’s surveillance was common knowledge, Romei’s appearance was hardly appropriate for a walk.

However, the atmosphere made it difficult to speak up, so they just kept eyeing each other until Rajie stepped forward.

“…I’ll go. Before that, don’t you need your cloak?”

“…”

“Or perhaps a bath first…”

“Neither the cloak nor a bath is necessary. I just want to take a walk now.”

“Understood.”

Rajie responded to Romei’s gentle but firm refusal.

Romei quietly moved outside. Rajie carefully followed behind her.

Romei headed toward the outskirts of the castle, a place Barmas had once introduced while showing her around.

Silently, she gazed at the desolate landscape—barren wilderness stretching beyond the horizon, a massive magic circle buried underground preventing the use of magic, and dust clouds rising with every gust of wind.

The times she had struggled to escape from here felt quite distant now. Her memories were vivid of the non-walk “walks” when she was violated by snake-shaped familiars in this place.

‘Back then, enduring the pleasure was so difficult…’

That’s why she couldn’t help but despise Barmas, who had observed her with satisfied eyes.

He had spewed words of humiliation, mockery, and violation naturally with every breath, and when he occasionally hit the mark with undeniable truths that left her unable to refute, she found him not just hateful but downright unfair.

Now, however, all of that had become a distant memory.

‘Even bad memories become nostalgic over time, I guess.’

Romei laughed self-deprecatingly. She found it somewhat amusing that she was reminiscing about her time with Barmas, even though most of those memories were uniformly unpleasant.

A dry wind blowing in from the horizon swept through Romei’s hair. Her hair, which had grown to her waist since she had never cut it after arriving here, fluttered in the breeze.

Rajie, who had been silently guarding her side while suppressing his presence, carefully broke the silence.

“Are you alright?”

“About what?”

“I heard you being questioned by Lord Barmas.”

“Oh, that. I’m fine.”

Romei, sensing what he wanted to say, answered preemptively. Rajie felt guilty about reporting Romei’s previous words to Barmas.

“You were just doing your job.”

“But still…”

“Isn’t it fortunate that I was the one interrogated, not you? You said you didn’t want to go to the t*rture chamber.”

“…”

“Thanks to you, I discovered I quite enjoy being tied up with rope. I wish we could have continued—it’s a bit disappointing.”

Romei’s voice carried genuine disappointment. And indeed, that was what she regretted most.

Barmas had discovered that she was using him for her own selfish desires. Therefore, he would no longer embrace her. He wasn’t the type to allow himself to be used even if he knew he was being manipulated.

‘What should I do now…’

Behind her seemingly carefree expression, Romei continued her serious contemplation.

She could no longer escape from the terrible memories and emotions. Neither pleasure nor sleep could erase them all. Instead, everything had become increasingly vivid.

Painful though it was, Romei decided to accept the fact that she could no longer avoid confronting everything after two months and a half.

The time had come to face her trauma.

When Barmas asked what had made even breathing painful for her, Romei had retorted by asking if he really didn’t know, but in truth, even she wasn’t entirely certain. Naturally so, since she had covered up and avoided examining everything from that day.

‘Perhaps I just wanted to blame Barmas. Weakly, I wanted to blame others for my suffering.’

She felt pathetic for blaming Barmas when she herself had chosen to save her friends, but Romei acknowledged these honest feelings.

And deep in her heart, she also acknowledged that she regretted the choice she had made that day to save her friends.

‘I care for and love my friends dearly, but to save them, I didn’t consider myself—the most important person.’

While it was truly fortunate that her friends were safe, because of this, Romei had to give up most of what constituted her identity.

She had to abandon her faith in God, and by placing the hilt of the holy sword given by Brodie, who had taken her in, inside herself, she had simultaneously betrayed her only family and her mission as a holy knight.

Additionally, all the time and effort she had invested in trying to escape this place and reveal the secret of the trap had been in vain.

The single fact of saving her friends’ lives was hardly enough to endure all of this.

So Romei despaired.

She felt tormented by the thought that she had become a selfish person who didn’t value her friends as much as she had believed. Yet having abandoned God, betrayed Brodie, and given up being a holy knight, she had nowhere to return to.

All that remained for Romei was a single future—living in service to Barmas.

Feeling suffocated and tormented by life, like being trapped in a narrow space surrounded by walls on all sides, Romei had tried to live by using Barmas.

But now it was time for even Barmas, her last resort, to turn his back on her.

‘There’s no way to put spilled water back in the cup.’

She couldn’t undo the bet she had made with her friends’ lives at stake, nor could she take back the harsh truths she had fired at Barmas.

‘If only I had died back then…’

Unable to recover from the sense of loss she felt that day when she lost everything, Romei’s thoughts instantly raced toward the extreme.

She wished she had died from the arrows when Barmas saved her from the rain of arrows.

At the very moment her only good memory of Barmas transformed into regret, Romei discovered an unexpected solution.