That girl had been the Snow Princess.

The girl who had reached out her hand to him in his most agonizing moment.

‘Shh.’

‘……’

‘What a shame it would be to die.’

‘……Who are you?’

‘I’m helping you because of the look in your eyes — the look of someone who wants to live. I can’t tell you to give up that profession, and I’m in no position to take you in…… but live. Survive to the very end and hold your ground from the highest place you can reach.’

He had thought her a rather arrogant girl, but he never could have dreamed she was the Snow Princess. Yet how could he kill the one who had saved his life? Kaian abandoned the mission.

He returned without killing the girl, and for that he was tortured within an inch of his life. Defying orders was the one thing an assassin must never do.

Having nearly died for it, he took on every manner of contract after that and clawed his way to where he now stood. When the head’s adopted son was unmasked, he seized the position of official heir.

And yet.

“Even sitting in this seat, I’m still repeating the same thing.”

Bound by pain and suffering, by medicine once a month. Nothing had changed. He was sick of living.

Keeping watch from afar over the wellbeing of Iberis, the emperor who had turned into a tyrant, had finally reached its limit.

Perhaps it would be better to……

His dull amber eyes settled low, taking on a cold light.

If he gave up on his life. What if he killed them all right now and ended this life of his as well?

Marquis Tessa’s adopted son.

Every time he put on a good face and came back from playing the part, emotions like these boiled up to the very edge of his throat. Kill them all. Give it all up. Just end this heavy life already.

Whenever that happened, one more time, just one more time.

He wanted to see the face of the girl he had kept alive. He wanted to confirm the emperor’s face up close. Whether she was living well. Whether his choice had been worth something.

He even felt the urge to sneer at her — to tell her that the worthless assassin she had saved as a child had grown up so well, into a villain who killed countless people.

It was a pathetic attachment.

Like an unrequited love.

He wetted his lips with red wine and closed his eyes deeply. When he dozed off briefly and opened them again, a small card lay before him. It seemed one of the message carriers had come and gone — the ones called crows in their circles.

“A new contract.”

He had just been thinking about dying, and now this. Out of habit, Kaian unfolded the contract, and his face went rigid as a still life.

“……”

A laugh burst out of him. Pfft. It swelled like a wave and twisted into full-throated laughter. The laughter spread until his shoulders trembled and tears gathered at the corners of his eyes, then stopped dead all at once.

This insane guild had finally gone and done it.

“D*mn.”

He barely swallowed the vicious curse. Had the head lost his mind? Was he trying to bring the entire assassination guild crashing down?

If not that, then.

His fingertip tapped the small card-shaped contract. Tap.

“Kill the emperor?”

His girl. His hope.

The only life an assassin had ever spared.

“Kill Iberis.”

What was he supposed to do with this?

Perhaps the head had caught on to something. If he refused, he would die. If he accepted…… he would die too.

And rightly so, for who could kill the emperor? A fully awakened true dragon, a woman who could turn any human before her into a block of ice with the flick of a single finger. Even that fearsome Grand Duke of the North had not managed to kill the emperor.

“This is telling me to go die.”

His languid eyes narrowed slightly. He had been staring at the intricate pattern of the carpet beneath him, and at some point, resolve settled into his expression.

“Well……”

Dying like this isn’t so bad.

He had been circling around her all this time, doing nothing but checking from a distance. Even during the year he had spent sunk in dreadful helplessness, he had tracked news of the emperor with something close to obsession.

Whether she was safe, whether today had been all right for her…… Of course, being a man skilled only in killing, there were limits to how closely he could monitor the movements of the highest person in the imperial family, but even that had been enough to keep him going.

And yet he was supposed to kill that light with his own hands.

How could they ask him to kill her?

“Ha ha!”

If he was going to die anyway, it didn’t seem so bad to get one proper look at that face before he did. Since it was that small hand that had kept this life going, it didn’t seem so bad to go and ask her to take it back.

“Fine.”

Now that he had decided, his body felt lighter, laughably so. With a feeling lighter and more pleasant than he had ever known, he rose to his feet. He gripped his sword. He began to prepare for killing.

If he was going to die anyway, should he finish his revenge today and then go to the emperor? Or should he stake his luck on one last miracle?

When the girl’s gaze, clouded by poison, had met his, he had been curious. Whether she remembered him. And now, whether the emperor still remembered that time.

* * *

The imperial palace was quiet. It was unlike its usual self.

At the emperor’s side there were always two people who guarded her no matter what.

One was Maria, the head lady-in-waiting, who possessed fearsome swordsmanship. The other was Sirak, the commander of the imperial knights, said to be the strongest in the empire after the emperor herself.

Yet today, for some strange reason, neither of them was anywhere near the emperor’s bedchamber.

“……”

Kaian thought: this might be a trap. Even so, the shadow-like man stepped quietly down into the corridor.

Had anyone been standing watch, they might have gasped and cried out in wide-eyed alarm. True to his profession as an assassin, the man left no trace of himself in anything.

He slipped inside so silently that the door did not seem to open at all. He drew closer with footsteps and movements so uncannily quiet that he seemed to become one with the ornate pillars of the bedchamber.

And there she was.

“……”

For a moment, he went blank.

She was beautiful.

In the bright moonlight, beneath a thin chemise, an alluring female form glowed softly.

The utter stillness of her, as though she had fallen into a sleep as deep as a drugged stupor, was unsettling.

Iberis.

The woman held a vivid contrast of colors.

Her hair, spread wide around her, was a sharp, clear black, and her skin was so pale and fine it was almost cruel.

Her lips, a vivid crimson that stood out sharply on her face, made her look not like a human being but like a carefully painted doll.

Kaian furrowed his brow.

A moment of hesitation rippled through him.

Was it all right to move forward like this?

Why wasn’t she moving?

Where did that monstrous sense of hers go?

It really might be a trap.

Kaian gripped the dagger in a reverse hold and stepped quietly one pace closer. He drew his body out toward the light, so that his hair, which had been hidden in shadow, caught it and shone for a moment.

Then, at a speed where not even a tremor in the air could be felt, he raised the reversed dagger in a sharp, gleaming arc.

One forceful downward thr*st, and he could pierce the heart beating beneath the snow-white skin of her chest.

Even dragon blood dies when struck in a vital spot.

He swallowed, and in the moment he was about to drive the blade down.

Crack.

“……!”

Ice erupted in all directions. Silver eyes snapped open, luminous and strange.

“It has been quite a long time.”

The woman smiled.

“To think someone bold enough to kill Us has appeared.”

In that instant, a blade-like slash of ice grazed past his nape, and a sharp, searing pain spread through him.

Ah.

In the midst of vivid pain, Kaian felt as though every moment was passing by in slow motion. Unable even to blink, he stared, transfixed, at the woman at the center of it all.

So that girl had grown up like this.

This beautiful, and terrifyingly cruel.

Just then, Iberis tilted her head to one side as she looked at Kaian standing there with blood running freely down his neck.

“Why?”

What did she mean?

“Why does he say nothing?”

Iberis, the emperor, who had been lying as though dead in sleep, raised herself up. The ebony hair that had been draped over her shoulders cascaded down in a soft, rustling fall. The full, soft-looking female form beneath the thin chemise unsettled the eye. It was as though the rich scent of flowers was drifting through the air.

“No. To be more precise…… why does he not resist?”

Their eyes met clearly.

“Are you not the bold assassin who came to kill the emperor? Come at me then. You have to thrash about like a fish out of water before there’s any fun in killing you.”

At that cruel gaze, Kaian felt dizzy. Quite unsuitably so. But unsuitable impressions were as far as that went.

“Or perhaps not. Perhaps I was mistaken.”

When she blinked, a beautiful hand concealing a monster’s strength seized him by the collar. The wound at his nape, already split cruelly open, tore a little wider under that force and bled freely.

“I saved you, and you came back and saved me. I remember being glad when I saw eyes full of the will to live to the very end. And yet……”

But he felt no pain. Kaian stared blankly at Iberis, who had come right up to his face.