Caesar continued speaking with unsettling composure.
“No, if I pass out too suddenly, it’ll seem suspicious… It’d be better if I coughed up some blood before collapsing.”
Poison? Why poison…?
As if answering my unspoken question, Caesar rose from the bed and slowly leaned against the window. The faint moonlight filtering through cast deep shadows over his face.
A face I had never seen before.
Cold. Emotionless. And somehow… bitter.
“I’ll be the one drinking the poison.”
“Your Majesty, why are you going this far?”
Alvin asked, frustration clear in his voice.
“Why?”
Caesar took a step closer.
“Because… that way, Evelyn won’t be able to leave me.”
Creak—thud.
My legs gave out beneath me, and I collapsed. The door I had been leaning against swung open.
“Who’s there?!”
Alvin instantly drew his sword, but when our eyes met, he lowered it with a defeated expression.
“…Lady?”
“What?”
Caesar pushed past Alvin and strode toward me.
“Eve… how much did you hear?”
I stared blankly into his sky-blue eyes.
It was unmistakably Caesar—the same Caesar I had spent years by the emperor’s side, the same Caesar who had supposedly failed to awaken his powers, the same Caesar who had lost control just hours ago.
And yet, the Caesar before me… was also undeniably the same person.
“…Y-Your Majesty.”
Caesar opened his mouth as if to say something, then hesitated. His lips moved, but no words came out.
A dreadful silence filled the room.
I struggled to process what was happening as objectively as possible.
“Caesar… has been lying to me?”
“The outbursts, the moments of weakness… were all fake?”
“Why? Why would he lie to me?”
“…Yo-Your Majesty.”
I called out to him again, my voice trembling.
Caesar flinched.
“What… what does all of this mean?”
I clung to one last desperate hope—that maybe, just maybe, this was all a misunderstanding.
“I…”
But as soon as Caesar began to speak, I wished he would stay silent.
I was afraid.
Afraid he would spout some ridiculous excuse.
Afraid he would keep lying to me until the very end.
I wanted the truth, but I didn’t want to hear the lies that would come before it.
With that contradiction twisting inside me, I looked up at him.
Caesar’s eyes wavered.
His long eyelashes trembled, and his beautiful face—one I had always admired—was now contorted with anguish.
Finally, he hung his head.
He neither spoke nor denied it.
“…Did I understand correctly?”
My voice shook.
“Was it all a lie?”
“…..”
“Yo-Your Majesty… Have you been deceiving me this entire time?”
“Eve, it’s not like that. It’s not—”
“Then what?”
I cut him off, my voice rising with frustration.
“What do those words mean, then? The outbursts, the poison—what is all of this? Why? Why did you lie to me?”
I hadn’t meant to sound so desperate, but the more I thought about it, the less sense it made.
More than anyone, Caesar had wished for his awakening.
So why would he lie?
What reason did he have to hide it from me?
Caesar remained silent.
I watched him, his head still bowed, before slowly pushing myself to my feet.
Every small movement I made caused him to flinch.
“Eve…”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Then, without another word, I turned and run away from Caesar’s bedroom.
****
After Evelyn leave the room as if running away, Caesar remained standing in place, motionless.
He stared blankly at the spot where Evelyn had collapsed, not even twitching.
“……Your Majesty.”
Alvin hesitated before speaking.
“Shall I go after the lady…?”
“Just leave.”
“But….”
Alvin, who had been about to say more, eventually closed his mouth. In the end, he bowed respectfully and cautiously left the room.
Once he was finally alone, Caesar staggered to a chair and barely managed to sit down. His face was deathly pale, as if he had just come face to face with every terror in existence.
He buried his face in his large hands and let out a deep groan.
Evelyn’s everything came back to him, vivid and indelible, like a brand burned into his mind—her eyes filled with betrayal, her lips quivering as if unsure what to say, her trembling voice.
‘What should I do?’
He had to explain. He hadn’t meant to deceive her. Things had simply turned out this way. He had only recently awakened, and he hadn’t had the chance to tell her yet. It was all a misunderstanding…
‘…No.’
Saying that would only mean continuing to deceive Evelyn. He couldn’t do that any longer. He never wanted to see that wounded expression on her face again.
He had to be honest about everything and beg for her forgiveness. That was all he could do. But…
‘If it were that easy, I would have done it from the start.’
Caesar lacked the courage to confess his own wretched jealousy. That he had done all of this simply because he couldn’t stand the thought of Evelyn leaving. That it had all been for such a petty reason.
Even the uncontrollable outburst of power he had unleashed, the times he had pretended to collapse in pain over and over again—it had all been…
“Eve…….”
Caesar called out Evelyn’s name in a fevered, agonized voice.
How much must she hate him? How disgusted must she be? How deeply disappointed?
If only he had truly failed to awaken. No, if only he had never had this wretched power at all.
A foolish thought. If that had been the case, he never would have met Evelyn. She never would have taken an interest in him.
Nothing could justify his deception. He had brought all of this upon himself.
Caesar roughly ran a hand over his face. The moonlight cast a pale glow over his ashen features.
****
I quickly packed a few things and left the imperial palace.
The place I headed to was the estate within the capital where my mother and father lived. My parents were startled to see me arrive so early in the morning, but I put off explaining anything, telling them we’d talk tomorrow.
I lay down on the familiar bed in my room, but sleep wouldn’t come. No matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn’t understand.
‘Why?’
Why had Caesar lied to me? Why on earth? Should I have pressed him further? Should I have forced him to answer, no matter what?
I knew I had acted foolishly. I knew that instead of running away in that moment, I should have stayed and tried to resolve things.
‘But….’
At that moment, I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to be there any longer.
I felt like a fool. I had thought I was closer to Caesar than anyone else, yet in an instant, I had been cast aside, flung far away.
It wasn’t just about his outburst or his awakening. The expression on his face when he gave orders to Alvin, the tone of his voice—it all felt strangely different from the Caesar I thought I knew.
‘Is that his true self? Had he been pretending all along when he was with me?’
Following that train of thought always led me back to the same question.
‘Why?’
Why had he deceived me? Why had Caesar hidden the truth from me?
The only clue I had was that one sentence he had said.
‘Because… that way, Evelyn won’t be able to leave me.’
That bitter look on his face as he said those words. My mind twisted into a tangled mess, like a knotted thread I couldn’t unravel.
****
Having spent the entire night agonizing over it without getting any proper sleep, I remained holed up in my room until the evening of the next day.
Lying in bed, doing nothing, I simply stared blankly as thoughts of Caesar and what had happened yesterday ran through my mind.
As dawn passed and I carefully sorted through my thoughts again, I started to wonder if I had overreacted.
That power belonged to Caesar. If he wanted to keep it a secret, he had every right to. He was the emperor of an empire, and I was just a mere maid. Caesar had no obligation to share everything with me.
Maybe he had his own reasons. Maybe there was something that forced him to keep it hidden.
Even so, the reason I couldn’t shake this sense of betrayal was probably because I had expected too much.
‘Because I let myself believe there was something special between us…’
Realizing it had all been in my head was a little pathetic—and incredibly embarrassing.
I had no choice but to admit it. The reason I was so hurt by what had happened last night wasn’t simply because Caesar had deceived me.
It was the fact that Alvin had known when I hadn’t. The fact that, in the end, Caesar didn’t think of me as being as close to him as I had assumed. More than anything else, that realization had shaken me the most.
“…Haah.”
Letting out a sigh, I unconsciously ran a hand over my face—only to feel a sharp sting on my cheek.
“Ah…”
It was the wound from when I had been grazed by a shard of the broken vase. I hadn’t even noticed it when I was still, but whenever I touched it absentmindedly, it stung just enough to remind me it was there.
‘Come to think of it, Caesar was worried about this injury, wasn’t he?’
Recalling how he had insisted on replacing the chandelier with a less sharp one, I let out a small, hollow laugh.
‘And yet he lied so easily…’
That side of him wasn’t so different from the Caesar I had always known. Maybe that was why it all felt even more confusing.
Had Caesar really deceived me? Even after seeing it with my own eyes, I kept wanting to believe in him.
‘What is Caesar… doing right now?’
I couldn’t quite picture what he might be doing in that room I had fled from.
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