Yantis had pulled the barrel of the revolver toward him, still gripping it in his hand.

‘……!!’

His grip was strong enough that despite her body honed through every kind of training, she was pulled along helplessly. He brought the barrel he had pulled straight against his own chest, and the distance between them collapsed in an instant.

A cool, clean scent rolled off the man now inches away.

His calm breath brushed and tickled the top of Bellus’s head. Bellus was not someone who lost in height to many people, but standing before this man, she fell far short.

This was, in fact, the first time they had stood this close.

Bellus felt the need to revise her assessment of the man before her. Setting aside the head of height he had on her, the man she had simply thought of as slender was in truth built on an entirely different frame from her own.

An overwhelming difference in physique.

Bellus’s black eyes took in, in a daze, the man’s broad chest looming before her and the long fingers wrapped around the barrel.

His hands, which she had thought only refined, were far larger than she had expected, the knuckles reddened and thick. Watching his chest rise and fall with each breath, Bellus snapped her head up.

“……!”

The violet eyes that had reminded her, just for a moment when she first saw them, of the finest amethyst, were looking down at her with a soft smile. The eyes of the two people facing each other locked together like magnets, and then Yantis’s soft lips parted.

“I want to know so much about you.”

He tilted his head down slowly, feeling her gaze follow as though drawn in, and pressed his lips to the woman’s delicate ear, whispering in a voice low enough to raise the fine hairs on her skin.

“So for now, start by living with me.”

* * *

Bellus’s face when she came out of the study was twice as dark as when she had gone in, and the household staff watched her feeling like they were treading on thin ice.

‘What if she says she’s leaving right now?’

‘Is our Lord Yantis being cast aside?!’

Unlike their worries, which would have driven Yantis out of his mind had he heard them, Bellus simply went on spending her days as quietly as before.

The problem, however, arose elsewhere.

The master of this estate had left some poor woman sitting in his house and was merrily gadding about outside.

Staying out overnight, no less!

Jane, who had been assigned the task of bringing Bellus her daily newspaper, now that reading it had become part of her routine, was absolutely miserable.

Jane was the assistant maid Lora had selected for Bellus. Lora, as the estate’s head butler, had a fair number of duties beyond caring for Bellus. But because Bellus had an extreme dislike of having anyone near her, Lora alone had been fighting the battle single-handedly until now.

In the midst of that, the one maid Bellus had responded to with indifference rather than sharp wariness was Jane. Lora had no idea it was because Jane reminded Bellus of a harmless hamster, and simply let out a cry of delight.

And so Jane, standing at Bellus’s side in Lora’s brief absence with her pounding heart barely kept in check, had found herself in a state of complete anxiety.

With good reason. The fresh, daily-updated article had yet another mortifying headline today.

[The Prodigal Son Returns! Sets Atlan’s Nights Ablaze!]

The large photograph printed across the page showed Yantis stepping out of a grand banquet hall and climbing into a limousine, one hand wrapped around the slender waist of a woman with voluminous golden hair, kissing her deeply.

And right now, because of Bellus staring quietly at that photograph, Jane was stuck, unable to move forward or back, just fidgeting helplessly!

On top of everything, Lord Yantis had not returned to the estate last night either! Her anxious eyes darting about, Jane squeezed her eyes shut as though making up her mind and opened her mouth.

“Um, Miss Bellus. Lord Yantis does see a different woman every day, but he is by no means a shameless person!”

Bellus, who had been listening in silence to the little hamster-like woman’s rambling non-defense, tilted her head.

‘…Is she insulting him in a roundabout way?’

Bellus’s flat black eyes drifted down to the photograph of Yantis in the newspaper.

Seems like that man has also made quite a mess of his life. Well, what else could you expect from that insufferable personality. Bellus clicked her tongue lightly and set down the newspaper in her hand.

Jane’s anxiety was for nothing. What Bellus had been looking at was not Yantis’s article. She had simply been lost in thought, and the page she happened to have open was the one with the article about him.

Her superior’s urgent face flashed through her mind.

The order that had come down without warning.

The laboratory she had arrived at, under orders to rescue the researchers, had been strangely, completely empty.

As though everyone had simply vanished somewhere.

And from that laboratory, she had ended up here, in Attica fifty years in the past.

It was difficult to think of it as a simple accident. But was magic that moved through time even possible to begin with? At the very least, she had understood the domain of time to be one no human could touch.

Yet it was clear the laboratory had been researching exactly that. She herself was the proof. She had confirmed countless times by now that this was Attica of the past.

If that was the case, only one fact remained.

There were quite a number of people from the future here besides herself.

And in absolute secrecy, at that.

‘…To end the war?’

The fact that she had arrived specifically in the year 1341 lent weight to the theory. 1341 was the year just before the first civil war broke out.

Bellus’s black eyes deepened as she sank into thought. Even after fifty years of war, the identity of Justia’s leader remained completely veiled.

‘What if I could find the leader of the rebel forces and eliminate them here in the past?’

Seated on the drawing room sofa that had become her designated spot, the only sound was the steady tap of her index finger against the armrest.

There was no shortage of things to verify. First, she needed to find Dolor, who had surely landed somewhere just as she had. For that, she needed to be able to move freely in and out of this estate.

‘That man won’t simply let me wander around.’

The platinum-haired man came to mind. Along with the conversation they had exchanged a few days ago.

His aim was nothing more than finding out who she was, and yet the things he said, wanting to know her, living together, every last one of them made her skin crawl. Having spent her whole life among rough, hard-edged people, Bellus found that kind of speech nothing short of skin-crawlingly honeyed.

And that sweetly gentle voice was the biggest reason she found him insufferable. Hearing it made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up, stirring a strangely unsettling feeling in her.

‘The prodigal son returns, was it…’

Bellus’s eyes drifted back to the newspaper on the table.

The man in the large photograph did look undeniably at home in the scene. Insufferable and dissolute on top of it. Bellus twisted her lips lightly and found herself thinking back to the previous evening.

The man had cheerfully pushed her out the door as though his business was done, and the words he had tossed out just before the door closed, saying he had almost forgotten, still made her blood boil.

‘Oh, and. If you stay on your best behavior, I might just undo the lock?’

The door had shut right in her face after that, and she had let out a hollow laugh at the sheer nerve of it. She wasn’t some dog, to be told to behave.

But what truly galled her was the reality that she had no choice but to behave, just as he said.

She was a complete stranger here.

This was the Attica she had lived in her whole life, and yet the Attica here was entirely unlike anything she had ever known.

A brilliant Attica blanketed in nature.

In this place that was far too unfamiliar, Bellus could not afford to move carelessly.

* * *

Yantis woke in the hotel and walked out of the bedroom, pulling his robe closed over his shoulders.

His bright platinum hair, untended, was disheveled in the way of someone who had just rolled out of bed, but even that only served to soften the sharp impression of his handsome face rather than diminish it.

Thump.

Yantis ran his fingers carelessly through the tangled back of his hair and dropped onto the sofa.

It was not often visible beneath the bright smile he always wore, but with the smile gone entirely, Yantis’s face gave off an unexpectedly cold air rather than a soft one.

No longer needing to conceal his natural sharpness, he let it show as he turned over the memories of the previous night.

Finding women to fill Yantis’s scandals was Madam Lucy’s job.

The owner of Luna, a high-end establishment in Atlan.

The women she selected were mostly ones she held fatal leverage over, making them ideal for performing whatever role Yantis needed and keeping their mouths shut afterward.

There were, however, women who gave him trouble from time to time.

Like the woman he had checked into the hotel with last night.

The woman, whose name was something like Devila or Debula, had probably been staying somewhere on this floor.

Whatever she had been thinking, he had wasted a great deal of time shaking her off as she clung to him relentlessly. A woman from a family with nothing left but an empty name, who had made herself a mistress for money.