The current flowing between them suddenly chilled with an inexplicable cold.

She had only meant to clarify their positions. She could not understand why Ahazan’s mood had shifted so abruptly.

Clodine, momentarily at a loss for words, pressed her parted lips together. She had merely been searching for an appropriate answer, but Ahazan seemed to interpret her silence as agreement.

He pushed himself upright from where he had been lying, then rose from the bed entirely and walked toward the window.

“So that trivial thing was love, was it?”

At his quiet yet unmistakable voice, Clodine’s brows drew together. She too sat up.

“…What did you just say?”

Ahazan turned halfway toward her. His golden eyes, holding a temperature far different from moments ago, looked down at her.

“I asked whether you want to act like you understand love just because you once committed something so pathetic in its name.”

Without realizing it, Clodine gripped the blanket tightly. The force in her fingers turned her knuckles white.

Having loved only one man in her entire life, she could not even imagine that what he called ‘that trivial thing’ or ‘something pathetic’ might refer to some other kind of love.

Ahazan’s gaze slid down her body and settled on her trembling fist. A merciless smile flickered briefly across his face before vanishing.

“If you flare up like that, even you start to look ridiculous.”

Clodine felt a nameless, heated mass surge up within her chest before sinking again. She drew her rigid shoulders inward.

Hearing his cold, mocking tone reminded her of a letter she had long since tried to forget.

[I don’t think I will ever love you.]

If words carried warmth, that sentence would have borne the same chill as the voice she had just heard.

She had not meant to remember it, yet it surfaced vividly all the same. That single line twisted into bitter self-mockery inside her. So much time had passed…should it not have faded by now? She had read it so often it seemed carved into her heart.

‘You did not merely fail to love me, you thought my love for you was insignificant.’

It pained her to realize this only after so much time had gone by. Had she understood sooner, perhaps erasing him from her heart might have been easier.

Her voice, as low and cold as his, answered him.

“It wasn’t a feeling so light that you have the right to speak of it that way.”

She never wanted to mention that love again, yet her lips moved of their own accord.

Ahazan let out a short laugh, as though she had said something amusing. She had not spoken expecting a particular response, yet strength drained from her all the same.

“I don’t care. About the weight of your past love.”

Saying that, Ahazan approached the bed again, his steps longer than usual.

She had never realized that the sound of hard leather brushing softly against wool could feel threatening.

Clodine stared at him as if at a stranger and pressed her arms into the mattress, retreating backward.

It was not merely how it appeared at that moment, Ahazan truly felt like a stranger to her.

He placed one knee upon the bed and leaned toward her. His large shadow fell over her small, fragile frame.

With both hands, he seized her face and tilted it upward until she was forced to look almost straight up at him. His grip was so firm that any attempt to shake her head free was futile.

“Look carefully and remember, Clodine. Whose hands you’re in right now.”

His voice was gentle. His eyes were not.

The face looking down at her held no more mercy or warmth than when he had stood over O’Neil Penelope’s corpse in Rotermann Castle, sword still stained with blood.

“Let go…!”

The cry escaped her before she could stop it.

She did not know if this was the right way to describe it, but in her eyes, Ahazan looked furious.

She could not understand why.

A suffocating fear seized her, the fear that she might never escape his grasp.

Yet contrary to her expectations, he released her easily and stepped back.

Standing against the large full moon, edged in blue backlight, he murmured as if addressing a stray cat.

“If I let you go, could you even run?”

Clodine, her face already brimming with tears, glanced toward the door.

It felt impossibly far away, so distant it might as well have been a vanishing point.

Realizing that, just as he had said, there was no escaping this moment, she felt the same suffocating tightness that had gripped her when she was first brought to the Empire and confined in the annex palace.

It was almost impossible to believe that only the day before, they had lain together on this very bed, yearning for each other’s bodies.

A trembling voice, mixed with fear and anger, slipped from her lips.

“Did my love make you this angry?”

She felt the same anguish as the day he had first broken their engagement. It was as though she could no longer tell whether this conversation belonged to the past or the present.

Clodine was not the only one whose emotions had reached their peak.

Ahazan, too, seemed to have crossed a threshold where laughter held no meaning. Even the faint traces of mockery vanished from his face as he spoke with chilling clarity.

“Yes. That love will anger me until the day I die.”

At his blunt answer, Clodine bit down hard, her heart aching.

All harsh emotions, when surrendered to the passage of time, tended to melt and soften somewhere along the way. Anger, hatred, betrayal, it made no difference.

Put simply, those fierce emotions were like fog. They could obscure one’s vision so completely it felt impossible to break through, yet a single ray of sunlight could scatter them as though they had never existed.

Clodine had once believed that only in theory. But lately, she had begun to experience that truth for herself.

Since reuniting with Ahazan, she had found that the blazing hatred and sense of betrayal she once held toward him sometimes faded without a trace.

The past, when she had writhed in agony, felt at times like a summer night’s dream. And perhaps, foolishly, she had begun to hope that even this suffocating relationship might still have room to improve.

That was why his words hurt so much now.

If even her wounds, once so painful they made her want to abandon life itself, had gradually faded, then how vast must Ahazan’s anger be, if he claimed it would never disappear, not even until death?

And how was she meant to accept that the source of that endless fury was nothing more than her own powerless love for him?

His words echoed, stabbing at her heart again and again.

‘So that trivial thing was love, was it.’

‘I don’t care. About the weight of your past love.’

‘That love will anger me until the day I die.’

With eyes that had already run dry of tears, Clodine looked up at him quietly. Her lips, like blood-stained petals, parted and closed once before she forced herself to speak.

“Rest assured. That love will never turn toward you again. Not as long as I live.”

Their gazes…thick with misunderstanding and unable to meet on the same path scraped against each other without pause, leaving wounds large and small throughout the night.

For a fleeting moment, sorrow flickered in Ahazan’s golden eyes. But the merciless night concealed even that light from Clodine’s sight.

***

“I tried to narrow it down carefully, but it’s still quite a list.”

Clodine handed Cal Regerson the list of guests to be invited to the maids’ upcoming funeral.

“I’ve written the most important names first. Refer to that order.”

“Yes, Your Majesty the Empress.”

Cal answered with his usual dependable expression.

“Use my personal funds to provide them with proper clothing and all necessary items. I don’t want them lacking in anything.”

“Ah, as for that matter…His Majesty the Emperor has already ordered that no national support be spared. Please do not worry, Your Majesty.”

At the mention of Ahazan, Clodine’s expression stiffened unconsciously.

The conversation from the previous night resurfaced in her mind.

After she had declared she would never love him again, Ahazan had remained silent for a long while. Then, with a cold smile, he left the room.

Clodine, who had stayed awake all night, fled the chamber as soon as morning broke. She did not know where his footsteps had led after midnight, but since their rooms stood side by side, separated by only a thin wall, she could not shake the feeling of facing him still.

“I was just on my way to see His Majesty the Emperor. Would you care to join me?”

Unaware of what had transpired the night before, Cal, who had assumed the two had grown closer of late, asked cheerfully.

Clodine shook her head, her face paling.

“I’ll pass. Go alone.”

Her tone was firm enough that anyone might have sensed she was refusing outright, yet Cal replied brightly,

“Ah, I’m not going alone. This fellow is coming with me.”

The “fellow” he indicated was a stout man who had been standing a short distance behind him all along.

He had a youthful face and curly red hair, strangely familiar the longer she looked at him.

“I pay my respects to Her Majesty the Empress of the Empire.”

Was he greeting her only because the situation required it?

His stiff expression and low voice carried a faint lack of sincerity.

It was a reasonable suspicion. They had been conversing for quite some time in the quiet corridor, yet he only now offered his greeting.

Clodine regarded him coolly and asked,

“You look familiar.”

Standing upright, as though deliberately looking down at her, the man answered in a voice that unmistakably held hostility.

“Rekri Alexia.”

At his reply, Clodine’s expression noticeably softened. A subtle warmth entered her voice as she responded at once.

“Rekri? That Rekri Alexia from the imperial forge?”

Between ‘that’ and ‘Rekri Alexia,’ the word little remained unspoken. It would have been rude to use such a term for a grown man, yet in her mind she saw clearly the small red-haired boy who had been unusually short for his age.

Now that she looked at him properly, he was unmistakably Rekri Alexia.

“I was, in the past. Now I serve in His Majesty the Emperor’s direct knight order.”

Clodine’s gaze narrowed slightly as she looked up at him.

“The Pantheon Knights?”