Leon’s lips quirked into a slight smile as he settled beside her with his own plate.
“Who knows? Maybe you are a patient. Is there anything wrong with you?”
“Oh, my monthly cycles have actually stopped,” she blurted while absently stirring her stew.
The implications of her words didn’t register until she felt the silence settle between them. Looking up, she caught Leon’s rare expression of bewilderment, and she hastily waved her hands.
“No, not like that! Heavens, absolutely not. It’s been far too brief a time for… that sort of reason!”
“…That sort of reason?” Leon echoed.
“What I mean is,” she clarified, “my cycles have been absent for two years now. I tend to stop eating when anxiety takes hold, and that’s likely the cause.”
In her rush to explain, she’d confessed a secret she’d never intended to reveal. Never before had she shared something so intimate with another soul. Mental afflictions always made one appear more pitiful than they really were. The last thing she wanted was to seem broken. She couldn’t fathom why she was suddenly baring her soul to him.
Feeling his gaze shift into something different from before, Veronica deliberately focused on her meal. She wanted him to see that she was eating properly now. The watery stew tasted bland, the flavor diluted. The military camp had clearly begun rationing its provisions.
“What drove you to starve yourself?” Leon asked directly. He wouldn’t let the matter rest, apparently.
Veronica quietly stirred her stew before answering with feigned nonchalance. “Two years ago, I doubted my ability to join the theater troupe. In Bayern, joining the troupe was the only viable option for a dancer. Failure meant exile from the city.”
“No,” Leon pressed, his gaze unwavering. “I’m asking about the trigger.”
Veronica’s spoon trembled slightly. The word “trigger” had evoked memories so painfully cold they made her shiver to her core.
She remembered one winter night when howling winds rattled the shutters. It was not long after her mother’s passing. Her father would vanish for days at a time, leaving Veronica utterly alone in that empty house. She would curl beneath the blankets, listening to the sea’s mournful wailing beyond the walls.
“I suppose…” Her lips barely moved. “I wanted my father to notice me?”
As memories of her foolish childhood surfaced, a bittersweet mixture of sadness and self-mockery washed over her.
“When you’re young, you foolishly believe that destroying yourself is the perfect revenge against parents who’ve wronged you,” she said. “You think, ‘I’ll refuse food, I won’t sleep a wink, I’ll never speak another word—I’ll make them worry until their hearts shatter with guilt.’”
It had been so childish and naïve in hindsight. Veronica’s father hadn’t even noticed as she wasted away to nothing.
“I didn’t understand then,” she concluded with a self-deprecating smile, “that such tactics only work on those who actually care about you.”
After that confession, Veronica focused intently on cutting and eating her bread. The silence stretched between them until Leon finally broke it.
“That must have been hard for you.”
Feeling a sharp throb in her heart, she froze mid-motion and looked up at him. When their gazes locked, she felt a piercing sensation as if his eyes had penetrated straight through her carefully constructed defenses. Only then did Leon slowly lower his gaze and begin eating.
Her stomach fluttered with an unfamiliar sensation. It was like watching a single droplet of dew fall from a cave ceiling into a perfectly still lake, creating gentle ripples that spread outward in perfect circles. It wasn’t an overwhelming surge of emotion, but just one drop of understanding was enough for their hearts to bridge the distance between them.
They continued their meal in companionable silence. Veronica scraped her plate clean, not leaving a single crumb. Despite being watery with pitiful amounts of meat, she found it inexplicably delicious for the first time.
They carried their plates outside, then brushed their teeth side by side. Then they washed their sweat-dampened bodies with olive soap and cleaned their swords using the bed as a makeshift chair. It was only afterward that their conversation hesitantly resumed.
“I never realized until now,” Veronica admitted, “but that’s likely why I bristled so much at being called childish. It was hard to think of myself as a real woman, somehow.”
Too much time had elapsed to naturally continue their earlier topic, but Leon made no comment about the abrupt return to their previous conversation. Setting down his polished sword, he corrected her misunderstanding with gentle firmness.
“I don’t see you as a child. If anything, lately I find you more mature than myself.”
“My, isn’t that going too far?” She let out an exaggerated sigh and playfully rolled her eyes. “You’re a bit too weathered to be pretending you’re younger than me.”
Leon’s lips curved into that crooked half-smile that always made her heart skip.
“Ah, you’ve caught me,” he said. “It was the perfect opportunity to shave a decade off my age.”
“A decade?” Veronica’s eyes widened in surprise. “So you’re twenty-nine?”
Leon nodded with his characteristic air of casual indifference. “Yes. Had I never mentioned it?”
“Not once! I thought you were maybe five or six years older than me at most.” Her eyes sparkled mischievously. “Goodness, I should have employed those techniques the senior dancers taught me.”
“What techniques?” Leon’s interest was instantly piqued.
Veronica, who had been excitedly speaking without a filter, clamped her mouth shut in mortification when she realized what she’d revealed.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she demurred. “Just some advice the more experienced dancers shared…”
Her voice trailed off as crimson bloomed across her cheeks, while Leon watched her with undisguised fascination. Veronica pressed her lips together before firmly declaring, “I refuse to elaborate. It feels terribly one-sided that I’m the only one sharing secrets. Don’t you have any secrets of your own?”
“An exchange, then?”
When she nodded, Leon stared contemplatively into the dancing flames of the brazier, lost in thought. Then, suddenly, he brought up a name she hadn’t expected at all.
“Do you recall the name Noah Berg?”
“Noah Berg… the alias you used in the wilderness?”
“Yes.”
“I remember it, but why? Is it the name of someone significant to you?”
“No,” he said quietly. “That’s my true name.”
“What?”
“It’s what I was called before Mecklenburg bestowed a new identity upon me—a secret known only to two souls in the world. The person who once called me by that name has long since departed, but it’s still my most closely guarded secret.”
They say a person’s destiny followed their name. Was it because of this name that he could never find rest, branded as the Messenger of God? As her initial shock subsided, a shadow of melancholy fell over her heart.
“Should I call you Noah, then?”
“No. This name is good enough for me.”
She was about to ask why when Leon added quietly, “Because then it would be as if I’d received nothing from Mecklenburg after all.”
Veronica’s eyes widened. A heavy silence descended between them, so thick she couldn’t move a finger.
Leon maintained his casual tone, which somehow made his words all the more desolate. Perhaps sensing the somber atmosphere, he turned to her with that practiced, composed smile. Fortunately—or, perhaps, unfortunately—she didn’t need to ask what he had received from his mother. The scars his mother had left were plainly visible.
Can we ever truly become adults when we still desperately hunt for traces of love even as we age? Veronica wondered. Perhaps adulthood itself is nothing but an elaborate illusion, and we’re all merely deceiving ourselves. Perhaps there are no adults in this world—only children loving other children while pretending to be grown-ups.
“Is that enough?” Leon asked playfully. “Have I earned your secret yet?”
Veronica gazed up at him with eyes still glistening from unshed tears and extended her hand—not as if for a handshake, but as though placing it against an invisible mirror.
“Do you want to compare hand sizes?” she asked.
“Hand sizes?” he echoed, puzzlement evident in his voice.
Still, he readily offered his palm against hers. She had always been aware of the difference, but seeing their hands directly compared, she realized that his dwarfed hers completely. Scars and calluses mapped his life story across his sun-bronzed skin. His prominent veins and tendons spoke of strength and survival.
“My fellow dancers advised me to do this when I found a man I liked,” she explained. “They said my delicate hands would awaken a man’s protective instincts.”
Leon remained speechless, his eyes fixed on their joined hands.
“There were other strategies as well. Let me think… Ah, yes—maintaining eye contact while smiling.”
Leon, momentarily entranced, found himself unable to tear his gaze away when she met his eyes and offered a radiant smile. Veronica continued speaking in that melodic cadence about other techniques—laughing more enthusiastically at his joke, feigning accidental touches…
When she paused mid-sentence, he tightened his fingers around hers, interlacing them firmly.
“What else?” he demanded. “What other secrets did they share?”
Veronica hesitated before pointing at the brazier with her free hand.
“Look over there,” she said.
The moment Leon turned his head, she leaned forward and pressed a swift kiss on his cheek before retreating just as quickly. The contact was fleeting—just enough to make a soft sound. Having acted on impulse, Veronica’s cheeks flamed crimson when his intense gaze returned to capture hers.
Leon stared at her with darkening eyes, parted his lips slightly, then rubbed the bridge of his nose as he muttered, “This is driving me mad.”
A dangerous smile played at the corner of his mouth.
“Was it that terrible?” Veronica asked, her heart fluttering.
“Yes, it was,” he growled, his eyes darkening further. “It’s completely ineffective. So don’t you dare try such tricks with anyone but me.”
Her captured hand was suddenly pushed backward until her spine met the sheets. Leon moved over her in one fluid motion, his powerful frame caging her beneath him as he lowered his head to claim her lips. Two flames intertwining in a dance as old as time. Each time his heated breath mingled with hers, delicious shivers cascaded down her spine like lightning.
There was a saying: the calm before the storm.
This was their final night of tranquility before the tempest struck, a precious record of the last moment of peace they enjoyed.