Chương 97: 39-2.First Kiss

That was a proper farewell.

"Likewise, Your Highness," I returned.

"You're considerably harder to deal with when you're not singing." Julian's jaw visibly twitched. Gaelus looked as though he hadn't heard any of it, simply stepping aside to create one deliberate path. That step said everything. It's time. Erina didn't delay. She turned, her shoulder drape shifting with the movement, and walked toward the hall doors. Gaelus fell half a step behind her. Julian further back. The Tideguards fell into formation without a sound.

The arrangement was clean—the kind of clean that came from having done this a thousand times. I watched her back and felt something absurd move through me. Last night she had been at this table, being plied with wine by Jessi, singing songs that would have embarrassed a dockside drunk. This morning she walked away like that, straight-backed and certain, stepping back into the order that had always been hers. As if nothing had happened. And as if everything had. No one in the hall spoke.

I just stood there, watching her move forward one step at a time. Then, just as she reached the door— She stopped. Not because Gaelus said something. Not because anyone outside intervened. She stopped herself. Without warning. Without reason. The hall went very quiet. I assumed she was going to turn and deliver some parting line. Something ceremonial, like thank you for your hospitality—or something more like her, like don't imagine I'll remember any of you. It was neither.

Erina lowered her head slightly first, as if pressing something down into a place it would stay. Then she turned around. The movement wasn't fast. But it was decisive enough that there was no time to adjust your breathing before it happened. I blinked. It wasn't that I'd never seen her turn back before. It was that her eyes were different this time. The cold was gone. So was that particular elevation she usually maintained—the deliberate distance she constructed and kept between herself and everything else.

Her gaze landed on me directly, as if, in the moment before leaving, she had finally allowed herself to see clearly everything she had been keeping contained, suppressing, pretending wasn't there. Then she walked back toward me. One step. Two steps. Three steps. No one in the hall moved. Julian's lips parted—he might have been about to say something—and Gaelus pressed him back with a single look. My sister said nothing. Olivia said nothing.

Jessi looked like she'd sobered up completely on the spot, staring at the scene unfolding in front of her with the expression of someone whose mind hadn't yet caught up to her eyes. And I stood where I was and didn't step back. Not that I'd decided not to. My body was simply half a beat behind my thoughts, and by the time I understood that she wasn't coming back to say something, she was already standing in front of me. Close.

Close enough that I could catch the traces of last night's wine that hadn't quite left her, layered with something faint and clean—and underneath both, the particular cold clarity that belongs to early morning air. Then she reached up. Her hand was cool. Her fingers settled at the back of my neck with a certainty that left no room for misreading. And before I had assembled a single coherent thought— She kissed me. Not hesitant. Not apologetic.

The kind of kiss that had clearly been decided before she turned around, before she took those three steps, possibly before she stood up from the table at all. It lasted exactly long enough. Then she stepped back. Her expression, when I finally managed to look at it, was composed. Controlled. The same face she used for everything. Except that her ears— Her ears were red.

"Consider that," she said, her voice carrying the same precise steadiness it always did, "a down payment." She turned back around. Walked through the door. And was gone. The hall was silent for approximately three full seconds. Then Jessi made a sound. Not words. Just a sound—somewhere between a gasp and a laugh and something that might have been a squeak—that she immediately muffled behind both hands. Lucas had apparently discovered something of profound interest on the ceiling. Kuroga pressed his palms together.

His expression was the picture of spiritual transcendence. Matthews stared straight ahead and drank his tea. Gaelus Eberhart, to his considerable credit, had already turned and followed the princess out without a word. Julian stood in the doorway, looking like a man who had witnessed something he wasn't sure he was allowed to have seen, then apparently decided the correct response was to also leave, immediately, which he did. I stood exactly where I was. My brain was running.

I could tell because it was producing thoughts. I just couldn't confirm what any of them were. My sister set her teacup down with a small, precise sound.

"Cedric."

"... Yes."

"Sit down."

"... I'm standing."

"I'm aware," she said.

"Sit down anyway." I sat down. Alvira was looking somewhere else with the focused determination of someone who had decided, as a matter of principle, that she had not seen anything. The tips of her ears were doing something that she would have strongly denied if asked. Olivia von Eisenberg lifted her teacup and took a composed sip.

"Greetings, Lord Cedric," she said, as though we were being introduced for the first time this morning. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"... Don't."

"I'm simply observing," she said, "that a down payment implies an intention to pay the remainder."

"I said don't."

"Of course." She set the cup down.

"I'll file it under pending." I put my face in my hands. Outside, the sound of the Tideguards' footsteps faded down the corridor and disappeared. The morning light came through the windows at its usual angle. Everything was exactly as it had been five minutes ago. Except that it wasn't. My throat tightened. I started to speak.

"Your High—" She reached up and grabbed my collar. The grip wasn't hard, but it was precise—precise enough to strangle the rest of that sentence before it could leave my throat. She pulled me down in one motion, and before I could find my footing, her eyes were filling my entire field of vision. No hesitation in them. At least not in the moment they met mine. She kissed me. Not my cheek. Not my forehead. Not the kind of glancing contact that everyone in the room could generously pretend to have misread. Directly.

On my lips. My brain went blank for one complete beat. It was short. Short as the flash of a drawn blade. It didn't even leave room for a reaction. That warmth pressed against me for one instant—fast enough to be almost cruel—less like a kiss and more like a seal being stamped in front of witnesses. The kind that cannot be undone, cannot be reinterpreted, cannot be politely explained away. Then she released me. No lingering. No second contact. Not a single word.

I was still in the position she'd pulled me into, breath caught in my chest, mind completely empty, fingers not yet having moved—and she had already stepped back, turned, and walked away with the clean finality of someone who had simply completed a task. Her shoulder drape swept behind her. She didn't look back. This time, she didn't stop. The sound of the door closing behind her wasn't loud. But it landed somewhere between my ears like a single, deliberate tap from a hammer against the exact center of my skull.

Not hard. Just precisely, devastatingly placed. I was still standing where she'd left me, posture not yet recovered. The collar she'd grabbed was still creased. And the warmth from that contact—too brief to be anything but an impression—refused to disperse, sitting against my lips like a brand that had decided to stay. My mind went empty for one full second. I'd seen people lose composure in public before. I'd watched nobles do considerably uglier things in front of an audience. But this wasn't losing composure.

That kiss had been clean. Decided. The kind of thing that had been thought through before it happened. Too short, too precise, too completely without exit—it didn't leave room for the comfortable fiction of maybe she acted on impulse. She meant it. She had chosen the most visible possible moment, used the most undeniable possible method, delivered it squarely, and walked out without looking back.

I raised my hand slowly, let my fingertips brush the corner of my mouth, then pulled them away as if the surface were still hot. Hell. The hall was terrifyingly quiet. Gaelus Eberhart—who had been standing like a pike driven into the floor—looked at me once in silence, then returned his gaze forward and followed her out. He said nothing. Which was worse than anything he could have said. That silence wasn't the silence of someone who had witnessed a piece of court gossip.

It was the silence of someone who had just observed an incident that had no business existing, yet could not be denied. Julian was a different matter entirely. The expression on his face from the moment Erina kissed me had been frozen in a shape that could only be described as profoundly stupid. Somewhere between an aborted gasp and the paralysis of a man who had forgotten how to inhale.

When Gaelus moved for the door, Julian snapped back into his body and scrambled after him, nearly catching his foot on the doorframe in the process. Good. At least I wasn't the only one who looked like an idiot. Cold comfort. Emphasis on cold. The footsteps outside faded quickly. What remained was the worst part. Because the people who genuinely knew how badly I wanted to find a hole and disappear into it weren't the father and son who had just left. They were the ones still sitting at this table.

I turned my neck, stiffly, and found Jessi first. Her entire face looked like it was about to split open. Not from anger. Not from shock. From the specific agony of a laugh that had almost escaped and been tackled back by the survival instinct at the last possible moment. Both hands were clamped over her mouth, shoulders shaking with the intensity of someone trying not to short-circuit, eyes wide and bright as a person who had just watched a pig climb onto an altar and kiss the Archbishop.

Her expression was perfectly legible. You are finished. I was aware that I was finished. But if she let that first sound out, I was going to strangle her before it reached its second syllable. Lucas, that magnificent coward, had lowered his head and appeared to be conducting a serious study of his tea's surface reflection. I could see, with perfect clarity, that the line of his mouth was being held down with considerable effort.

The fact that he could maintain this performance at a moment like this confirmed everything I had always suspected about his talent for disappearing at the worst times. Matthews produced a cough. A single, extremely deliberate cough, of the variety that suggests sudden and profound concern for one's own lungs. Kuroga pressed his palms together, eyes lowered in spiritual contemplation. He looked approximately thirty seconds away from beginning funeral rites on my behalf.

I was reasonably certain this monk had already mentally recited half a sutra for my soul. But the one I couldn't bring myself to look at directly was my sister. Victoria Rosa von Blackwell had not made a sound throughout any of it. She was simply sitting there, teacup still held level, without the faintest tremor. Which was precisely why I didn't want to see her face. If she'd slapped the table, laughed coldly, or called my full name—I could have braced for that. I could have pushed back. But she hadn't moved.

She was waiting in the particular silence of someone who had decided to let you die first before she said anything. I finally looked. My sister was looking at me. More precisely—at my mouth. Her expression was the studied calm of a master tailor examining a piece of fabric that had just been cut wrong, weighing whether it could be salvaged or whether the whole thing needed to be taken apart and started over. Her lashes moved, very slightly. Then she set her teacup down on its saucer. Clink.

The cold moved down my spine in an instant.

"..." She said nothing. Just that. Which was worse than anything. Because I knew my sister. If she spoke now, there would still be two parts joke to it. But her silence meant that even she was still deciding—whether what had just happened belonged in the category of absurd, problematic, or catastrophic. My throat was dry. I reached for something to say.

"I—""Be quiet." Her voice was flat. Flat as snow falling into a well, with no echo at all. I was quiet. This was not the moment to push back. Not unless I was in a hurry to die. Then I made the mistake of meeting Olivia von Eisenberg's eyes. She was still seated with perfect posture, fingertips resting lightly at the base of her cup, as though nothing had just happened in the middle of the Blackwell family hall involving someone's mouth and my face. But I knew she'd understood.

Probably the first person in the room who had. She wasn't startled. She wasn't suppressing laughter. She didn't have Jessi's expression of someone about to expire from containment. She simply watched me, the faint light in her eyes cold and clear—the look of someone observing a blade that had just come out of the forge, still glowing red. She had understood what Erina's kiss actually was. Not what it felt like. What it meant. It wasn't about leaving something behind. It was the opposite.

In front of every witness in that room, she had cut the line—the one that could still have been ignored, deferred, left to everyone's private speculation. She had ended that possibility in a single, irreversible motion. So Olivia had no reaction to spare. She only looked at me, as if confirming whether I had understood it too. Honestly, I would have preferred if she'd laughed like Jessi. At least that would have been lighter.

But this expression—this quiet, precise, I see exactly what happened expression—pushed the weight in my chest lower. Because it meant no one in this room could treat what had just occurred as a mere lapse in decorum. Including me. I forced my gaze away. And found Alvira. She hadn't reacted the way the others had. No sound. No laughter. Not my sister's unnerving stillness either. She was simply in her seat, hand still resting against her cup—except that her knuckles had gone noticeably white with pressure.

The exhausted pallor from the hangover had shifted into something sharper. More awake. She was looking at me. And the look on her face was difficult to name. Not the sharpness she used when she wanted to cut me with words. Not the hollow, drained quality from last night before she'd gone under. This was something else—something that looked like it had been pulled out of her chest before she'd had time to put it away properly. She'd gotten her expression under control. But her eyes had been half a beat too slow.

The next second, she looked away. Fast. The way you move when you've realized a moment too late that someone was watching. But it was already too late. I'd seen it. Not all of it. Enough. In that instant, the chaos already running through my head received one more thing thrown into it. God, that's enough. I couldn't even decide which problem to be anxious about first. On one side: a princess who had just kissed me and walked out.

On the other: Alvira, who hadn't said a single word, and was somehow making me more unsettled than the princess had. And sitting between them in my awareness: a sister who had managed me since childhood, and a woman who saw everything too clearly. If there was a punishment that consisted of being nailed to a chair and made to face the silence of every woman in the room simultaneously, I was currently serving that sentence. Jessi finally couldn't hold it. A short, strangled sound leaked through her fingers.

Like a laugh. Like someone nearly choking themselves to death. My sister didn't look at her.

"If you let that out," she said mildly, "I'll have Vincent deliver your lunch to a monastery." Jessi died on the spot. Every trace of that laugh was swallowed back down along with what appeared to be her entire soul. I almost felt grateful. At least someone was closer to death than I was. The hall went quiet again. But this quiet was different from before. Before, it had been ice. Now it was ice beginning, slowly, to crack underneath. Everyone knew what had happened.

Everyone knew it wasn't something that could be covered by a polite how unfortunate. And yet no one could be the first to name it. Because once it was named, there was nowhere left to retreat. I stood for a moment, then finally pressed my fingers to my temple. The hangover hadn't lifted. My head was worse. The impression on my lips felt like a needle that refused to dissolve. I opened my mouth, reached for something—anything—and found nothing. It was my sister who moved first.

She rose slowly, the black-ribbed folding fan turning once between her fingers before she snapped it shut. Click. The sound wasn't loud. But it felt like a formal verdict being delivered over something absurd and dangerous. She looked at me first. No mockery in it. No outrage. Just the deep, unhurried message of we will settle this account later. Then she spoke.

"Vincent." The old steward appeared at the door as though he had always been standing there.

"Madam."

"Close the doors," my sister said.

"And this morning—no interruptions. From anyone." I heard the words from anyone and felt one thought form with complete clarity. I'm done. This time, genuinely.