Chapter 3

Elena's POV

When I returned to my room, my maid was waiting at the door.

She saw my bare finger, and her face changed openly.

"Miss, your ring..."

"I took it off."

I walked past her.

"Don’t ever mention Adrian in front of me again."

The maid froze where she stood, not daring to answer for a long while.

I paid her no mind.

The room was still arranged the way it had been before the engagement.

The wardrobe was full of gowns my mother had chosen herself.

On the vanity sat the ruby coronet that only a vampire bride would wear.

In a desk drawer lay the letters Adrian had sent me long ago.

They were all relics of a much earlier time.

I opened the drawer and took the letters out, one by one.

The first was written for my tenth birthday.

That year, too nervous at my first vampire banquet, I had missed a step in the dance, and a few noble girls had laughed at me all evening.

Adrian had stepped in front of them on my behalf.

He said, "Elena will be my wife one day."

"Anyone who laughs at her laughs at me."

That night, he sent this letter.

In it, he had marked out the dance steps with simple symbols and praised how beautiful my gown was.

At the end of the second page, there was only a single line.

"Don't be afraid. No matter what, in my eyes you dance the most beautifully of anyone."

I had once read that line hundreds of times.

Later, after we married, I brought it up, and he only said with cold indifference that it had been an older brother comforting a younger sister.

He had simply been too young to understand, mistaking concern for love.

Back then I was the only one still lost in the dream, unwilling to wake.

The second letter was written before he left to drive hunters from the northern territories.

He told me to wait for him to come home.

And so I waited.

Waited through the snow.

Waited into spring.

Until he came back wounded, and I kept watch at his bedside for three days and nights without leaving for a moment.

The first thing he said when he woke was:

"Elena, why are you crying again?"

His tone was helpless, but indulgent.

Back then, I thought that was love.

So when he said he didn't love me and wanted to end the engagement, how could I have accepted it?

Now, thinking back, all of it was laughable.

I threw every letter into the fireplace.

The flames swallowed the pages almost at once.

Those words I had once treasured curled and blackened, bit by bit, and finally turned to ash.

The maid watched, her face going pale.

"Miss, Lord Adrian wrote those by his own hand."

"I know."

I watched the fire.

"That's exactly why they should burn."

From this day on, I didn't need these things to prove that he had once loved me.

Because it was never real. From start to finish, it was only my one-sided longing.

That evening, word came from outside.

In the end, the Council did not punish Clara immediately.

Because I had ended the engagement myself, there was room now to maneuver.

Adrian, as the Prince's heir, vouched for her, insisting Clara had only wandered into vampire territory by mistake, that she had never tried to seduce him, that she deserved neither exile nor death.

The Council, though furious, conceded for the time being.

Clara was brought into the Prince's domain, kept under Adrian's personal watch.

When I heard this news, my maid was pressing an ice pack to my shoulder.

The bullet wound that had killed me in my last life was gone now, of course.

But my body remembered the pain.

The place where the silver had passed through still flared, now and then, like fire.

The maid watched my expression carefully.

She probably expected me to throw something, to cry, or to rush off to find Adrian at once.

But I only nodded.

"I see."

She hesitated a moment.

"Miss, you really won't go and look?"

I asked back:

"Look at what?"

She lowered her head and said nothing more.

At how Adrian shielded Clara, at how he defied the Council for the sake of another woman.

I had witnessed all of this in my last life, bearing endless humiliation and ridicule.

I had no desire to look at it again.

But the next day, I ran into them anyway, at the end of a corridor.

Adrian was leading Clara out of the council chamber, her hand in his.

Clara wore a pale dress.

She was human, her color far warmer than a vampire's, her eyes a clear, pure blue.

When she saw me, she instinctively shrank back behind Adrian.

Adrian moved at once to block her from view.

That look was far too familiar.

I had seen it countless times in my last life.

The moment Clara's name came up before the Council, he would look at me like this, his eyes full of guarded suspicion.

He always assumed I would be jealous of Clara, that I would harm her.

Yet the Council had spared the human girl and only sent her back, forbidden from vampire territory, and that mercy had come largely from my own pleading.

Adrian's coldness and disdain had hurt me, truly, but I had told myself it was only that he hadn't thought it through, that he'd simply forgotten his feelings for me for a while, and none of it was the human girl's fault.

Later Clara was sent away, and he never saw her again.

But from that day on, the whole of him began to crumble.

After I married him, all I had beside me day in and day out was nothing but this empty shell of a man.

His body present.

His heart kept apart by a human he could never see again, a human he loved.

"Elena."

Adrian spoke first.

There was a slight tension in his voice.

I stopped and gave him a perfectly correct noble's bow.

"Lord Adrian."

A faint movement passed through his brow.

I had never addressed him that way before.

I had called him Adrian.

Called it warmly, sweetly.

Now this title of Lord swept away all the closeness we had built up since childhood.

Clara peeked out from behind him and said softly:

"Are you Miss Elena?"

I looked at her and gave a small nod.

"I am."

She bit her lip.

"I'm sorry."

"I didn't know you and Adrian were engaged."

"If I'd known, I never would have—"

"Clara."

Adrian cut her off.

"This isn't your fault."

I watched the two of them.

One shielding her too eagerly.

One apologizing with too much fragile guilt.

A perfect match.

In my last life, this was the scene I dreaded most.

Because every time I saw it, I felt like an outsider who didn't belong.

Now, strangely, I felt only relief.

Since they loved each other, they could face whatever came next on their own.

I no longer had to stand between them, correcting their mistakes and shouldering the cost for nothing.

"It truly isn't Miss Clara's fault."

I said calmly.

"The engagement has been dissolved. Whoever Lord Adrian chooses to be with is none of my concern."

Yet Adrian's face did not ease at this.

He stared at me, his expression grim.

"Do you have to talk like this?"

I genuinely didn't understand, and I looked at him openly.

"Did I say something wrong?"

He seemed caught for words.

Clara gave his sleeve a careful tug.

"Adrian, don't fight with Miss Elena because of me."

Adrian looked down at her, and his voice softened at once.

"I'm not."

Then he looked back at me.

"You just ended the engagement. It's natural that you're upset."

"But Clara is innocent."

I nearly laughed out loud.

So he thought I was upset.

He thought my calm was nothing but resentment.

He still believed I loved him too much to ever let go.

"Don't worry."

I said.

"I won't make things hard for her."

"And I won't pester you anymore either."

Adrian's eyes darkened.

"Elena, that isn't what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

He was silent.

He couldn't say it himself.

Because he wanted me to set him free.

And he didn't want me to slip away so easily.

He wanted Clara standing at his side.

And he expected me to keep standing where I was, looking at him, waiting for him, aching for him, wasting a whole lifetime in that quiet torment, as if that were only natural, as if that was how I ought to behave.

In my last life I didn't understand. I thought those occasional moments of closeness came from how much he cherished me.

This life, I saw it clearly.

I didn't wait for his answer.

"I have things to do. Excuse me."

With that, I walked past them.

As I passed, Adrian suddenly raised his hand.

But this time, he didn't catch hold of me.

His hand stopped in midair.

I didn't look back.

Behind me came Clara's uneasy voice.

"Adrian, does she hate me?"

Adrian didn't answer right away.

It was a long time before I heard him say:

"She doesn't."

"She just hasn't worked it out yet."

I didn't slow my steps.

But inside, something gave a cold, quiet laugh.

He was wrong.

This time, I had worked it out perfectly.