"Rosalind Abel! As of this day, our engagement is broken!"
The great hall of the royal palace. The Founding Day ball, right in the middle of it all.
Crown Prince Alfred's voice rang out beneath the chandeliers.
Every noble in the room turned to look. Murmurs spread through the crowd like ripples.
Young ladies twisted their lips behind their fans. Old ministers exchanged glances and froze. Count Galeon, head of the Chancellor's faction, was the first to press a hand to his forehead—a gesture that all but said, You've done it now, Your Highness.
Ah. The whole kingdom in miniature.
Some sneered, some hesitated, some went pale. Not one of them moved to stop it.
"A cold-hearted, charmless woman. A wicked duke's daughter who tormented the Saint Miria behind closed doors...! A woman like you is unfit to be our future queen!"
Beside Prince Alfred, the Saint candidate Miria Lowe clutched the hem of her pure white gown, trembling.
Moist eyes. Lashes lowered demurely. A single tear, falling at the perfect angle.
"Prince Alfred... please, you needn't say so much for my sake..."
My, she's good. Even the way she stops the tears is calculated.
Rosalind closed her fan and looked straight up at the Crown Prince.
"Prince Alfred."
"I'll hear no excuses!"
"No. This is not an excuse, I assure you."
Somewhere deep in her gut, something quietly burst.
"A woman like you."
The words overlapped with another voice.
"Tanaka, a woman like you won't make it anywhere."
Two in the morning. Fluorescent lights. Mountains of paperwork.
The back of a boss who went home right on time.
The next morning, on his desk, her proposal. Only the name erased.
"—Oh. This is mine."
Even the voice she'd muttered in, alone in the office kitchenette, came back to her.
Ah. Now I remember.
There had been a woman named Ritsuko Tanaka, who collapsed from overwork.
Twenty-eight years. And she died without anyone ever noticing her.
And now I was about to do it all over again.
Cleaning up after a husband, unpaid. Welcoming his favorites with a smile. Bearing his heirs.
My name erased, replaced with "the Crown Prince's wife."
Absolutely not.
No salary. No days off. No resignation permitted.
That was supposed to be the chair I'd be stuck in—and they were telling me to get out of it, all on their own.
The resignation letter had come from management.
Much obliged.
"Rosalind! What are you smiling about?!"
Prince Alfred's voice climbed a notch higher.
Rosalind brought her fan lightly together before her chest and bowed her head, deeply, deeply.
"Prince Alfred. Your proposal to break off our engagement—I, Rosalind Abel, gratefully accept."
"Wh..."
For the first time, a draft of agitation swept across the Crown Prince's carefully composed face. His shapely lips fell open. Before everyone's eyes, the color in his cheeks tumbled from red to white.
"I accept it with the utmost respect."
The air in the hall stopped dead.
Even through her gown, it was plain that the Saint candidate Miria's shoulders had jolted.
The angle of her tears faltered, for just a moment.
"B-Big Sister...? U-um, you mustn't, smile like, that..."
Miria's thin voice wavered slightly higher. —Big Sister, she calls me. Though there isn't a drop of blood between us. Ever since the day she was summoned from her baron's house to the capital as a Saint candidate, she has called me that, but only when others are watching. The trembling was still there, but the pauses between her words were, ever so slightly, out of place. Her eyes were drifting.
Oh, my. Wasn't it in the script? The villainess not clinging and weeping?
Rosalind raised her head and gave the Saint candidate a bright smile.
It was a genuine smile, one the woman they called "the cold-blooded villainess" rarely showed in public.
"Lady Miria. I understand you are now to become Crown Princess. My heartfelt congratulations."
"Huh..."
"I pray, with all my heart, for the prosperity of the royal House of Albert."
It was a blessing. It was also the grandest of sarcasms.
Only Miria, it seemed, caught the second meaning.
The Saint candidate's pale fingers squeezed the fabric of her gown tight.
Hidden behind the angle of her tears, something deep in the Saint candidate's eyes glinted cold, for just an instant. —A single blink, and they were wet and glistening once more.
Rosalind didn't notice it, but the man in the shadow of the pillar did.
Rosalind lifted the hem of her gown lightly in one hand and executed the deepest curtsy—the one meant to be performed at the end of the ball—without a single flaw.
The angle at which the grandest courtesy becomes the grandest sarcasm. —The art of silencing someone with nothing but the way you lower your head was one she'd honed more than enough in her past life.
And inside, with one hand only, she secretly pulled off a fist pump.
Now I can get off this ship.
This ship called a kingdom, which the numbers in the ledgers had already told her would sink.
"I shall inform my father at once. —And with that, good evening to you all."
With a swirl of her skirts, Rosalind headed straight for the doors of the great hall.
Behind her, she faintly caught someone whispering behind a fan.
"Did she just... smile?"
"That villainess?"
No voice called her back.
And in a corner of the hall, Count Galeon, head of the Chancellor's faction, was already tugging at the sleeve of an old minister from another faction and whispering something rapid. —Before the echo of the Crown Prince's voice had even faded, the floor beneath their feet had already begun, soundlessly, to creak.
To be precise, neither the Crown Prince nor the Saint candidate had yet grasped what had happened.
And not one person noticed.
That at the very back of the hall, in the shadow of a pillar, a tall man had watched the whole affair from start to finish with a face as expressionless as ice.
The man's pale blue eyes followed Rosalind's retreating figure and narrowed, ever so slightly.
The length of her stride across the hall. The way she swept her hem aside. The order in which she folded her fan. —He knew every bit of it.
For three years. By the library window. At the edge of ballroom terraces. In the corridors before dawn, as she carried ledgers to the office.
"...Finally."
It was a low murmur, audible only to the aide beside him.
"Your Grace. We should make ready."
"Yes. Three years, I've waited."
Lucas Vernant, head of the Grand Duchy of Vernant.
The man every young lady on the continent longed for, the one they called "the Ice Grand Duke," began to walk slowly toward the doors.
Rosalind did not yet know.
That long before this night, she had already been watched by that man for three years.