Chapter 7: I’ll Give It Back to You Just As It Was

With his piercing blue-green eyes glinting, Calliod spoke a cold warning, closing the distance as if he might kiss her.

“From now on, don’t you dare turn away from me without my permission. Don’t forget—you’re my spoils now. Just as you once decided my fate without hesitation, from this moment on, your life belongs to me.”

“……”

“And another thing. My name is Calliod Lorcan Gladius. The name you just called me—didn’t you personally strip it away from me long ago?”

Calliod spat out the last words as if chewing glass, then—just as abruptly as he’d threatened her—he stepped away without hesitation.

Elana could only part her lips soundlessly; no reply would come.

Looking down at her as if she were nothing more than an object, Calliod turned to the distant knights and gave his order.

“Escort the princess. She’s a precious guest—see that you treat her with all due respect.”

The word “respect” dripped with mockery.

Not bothering to wait for the knights’ reply, Calliod spun on his heel and strode away.

Maybe it was because of his coldness—so biting it bordered on cruelty.

As she left with the knights, the snow that had paused during their descent began to fall again, light and steady.

A single flake landed beneath Elana’s eye and quickly melted, trailing a wet line down her cheek.

With an utterly blank expression, she brushed the dampness away as if wiping away tears.

Yet, for some reason, the wetness on her cheek would not disappear so easily.

Almost as if she really were crying.

***

“Damn it!”

Calliod slammed his palm on the table the moment he entered the temporary chamber he’d been given in Cliphes, leaving Elana behind.

The water bottle and glasses on the table wobbled precariously from the blow.

‘I thought I’d feel better than this.’

His breathing was ragged with frustration from the moment he entered the room.

Grinding his teeth, he glared into the distance.

He thought once he conquered Cliphes, made Alan grovel and beg for mercy at his feet, severed Alan’s head, destroyed Robellina and her wretched family, and forced Elana herself to bow before him, the weight of the last ten years would finally lift.

That by making them grovel as he and his family had, by making her—the princess who so ruthlessly discarded him—bend the knee, the suffocating pressure in his chest would finally dissipate.

But instead of relief, he felt as though a heavier boulder was crushing him, heat bubbling under his skin, anger rising to a fever.

The only moment of catharsis had been when he killed Alan.

Just that brief, fleeting instant.

“Father. I’ve finally come this far, and yet you cannot come back to me.”

His sigh was heavy with regret.

Branded a traitor, stripped of his chance to even plead his case, Calliod had lost his father and his family name.

Dragged away with nothing left to his name, forced into slavery.

When he finally escaped the mines and crossed the border to his mother’s homeland of Gladius, the resolve he’d carried was razor sharp:

‘I’ll clear the filthy stain from the House of Ridges. I’ll restore our honor, no matter the cost. I’ll return everything they did to us, exactly as it was done to us. I’ll give the princess—who so heartlessly cast us aside—a taste of her own medicine.’

Vengeance had been all he had left.

He’d even erased his past, abandoning the name he’d used his whole life and assuming the identity of the illegitimate son of Gladius’s king, just to survive.

To secure his position, he’d thrown himself into countless battlefields, surviving by clinging to that burning hatred and need for revenge, surviving against all odds—like a demon—by reliving his rage over and over.

He’d lived for nothing else for eight long years—just for this moment.

And now, having finally accomplished everything—what was left?

His father was still dead, a soul never to return.

He could never be Killian again.

There was nothing he could change, nothing he could restore.

Everything he’d clung to so desperately was slipping away, like sand through his fingers.

There was nothing he could truly restore, nothing he could wholly hold on to—and yet, that woman called his name as if nothing had changed.

“Killian.”

Elana’s voice echoed in his ears, haunting and persistent.

The gold of her eyes, always fixed on him, wouldn’t let him go.

“Elana.”

He spoke her name aloud—the name he had forbidden himself for so long.

‘As if everything between us meant nothing, she cut me off without a flicker of hesitation.’

From the very moment Calliod was born a boy and Elana a girl, their engagement had been decided by their elders.

Having known her from such a young age, what he’d felt was more habit than love.

He hadn’t felt excitement or nervousness, but her actions were always cute, her presence familiar.

There was no one else who caught his eye, so he played along—partly out of a sense of duty, partly because he didn’t mind.

He regarded her like a playmate, with a fair amount of obligation and a bit of genuine fondness.

But Elana, from the beginning, had given her love with her whole being.

As a baby, she would cry herself into fits—until Calliod appeared, and she’d instantly fall quiet.

From her first words and steps, there had never been a moment she didn’t reach for him with affection.

Even when she grew old enough to understand embarrassment, she still showed her love for him more fiercely than anyone else.

“If you were going to be like this, why did you act like you’d give me everything? Why did you care for everyone like they were your own flesh and blood?”

Thinking of the little girl Elana had been, her big eyes sparkling as if she’d give him the whole world, only made Calliod angrier.

Even if you set love aside, what about all the years of attachment they’d built?

Yet the Elana who stood in that courtroom eight years ago had cut off the Ridges family—as if all those words of love, all those memories, had been lies.

She hadn’t shown even a trace of mercy, not for her subjects, not for her vassals.

The resentment, which should have dulled with time, only tangled with his sense of betrayal.

‘Not a single sign of regret, as if she was innocent.’

The Elana he met after eight years was brazen, almost shameless.

She merely knelt, still proud, without the slightest hint of guilt.

If only she’d shown the tiniest sign of remorse—if only she’d begged for forgiveness, or said she regretted what she’d done.

If she’d even cried and pleaded for her life, maybe he wouldn’t feel this way.

“Because of you, my father ended up like that! Damn it.”

A fragment of his unspoken rage slipped out.

Crash!

The chair toppled to the floor as his hand lashed out.

Calliod ran a hand through his hair, exhaling a deep, rough sigh.

In the bitter taste left by his breath, he pictured her standing on the edge of the snowy cliff, everything in the world beneath her feet.

“She didn’t even beg…”

For the briefest moment, she might have hesitated—but then she had so easily chosen to die.

She had chosen a place for her end where not even a corpse would be found—or if it were, it would never be whole—and yet there hadn’t been a shred of fear in her.

Even knights hardened by the battlefield trembled at the thought of death, but a princess raised like a hothouse flower had been able to fling herself from a cliff without the slightest hesitation.

“As if it were some noble sacrifice. How disgusting.”

A new fury mingled with the hatred already raging in his chest.

How dare she kill others in disgrace while plotting to die herself in glory.

Countless emotions—none of them simple or easily named—knotted together and made a mess of him.

“Why do you act like you’re the victim? What do you have to be proud of?”

Calliod clenched his fist so tightly his knuckles turned white.

The memory of her warmth—back in his arms after so many years—still seemed to linger in his palm.

He hadn’t even been able to gather his father’s cold corpse, and yet she still lived, warm and alive.

The injustice of it made his blood boil.

“Princess, do you think you can just die so easily, after what I went through to survive and get here?”

She’d ruined his family with her verdict, destroyed everything, and now she thought she could just die and be done with it.

Suicide?

Taking the easy way out without ever paying the price, ending things on her own terms just to soothe her conscience—he could never forgive that.

“I won’t let you die so easily, Elana. You’ll feel for yourself just how brutal life can be when your fate is decided by someone else.”

Calliod was determined to show her, to make her feel it.

To know the agony of losing everything at someone else’s hands, even if you gained something greater—it was empty, meaningless.

No one else mattered, but she, at least, could not be allowed such a simple end.

The Ridges family had served the kingdom and the royal house for generations, faithfully and with devotion.

A betrayal of that trust wasn’t something that could be repaid with death—it had to be repaid with life.

Death was too easy; she needed to know that.

And he intended to ask her.

Had she truly known nothing that day?

Did she really believe his family had committed treason?

Did she think all the loyalty and sincerity they’d given the crown meant nothing?

He was tired of waiting for answers that never came.

He wanted to hear it from her own lips, no matter how much it tormented her.