“Thank you.”
Rock closed her eyes, wrapped up in pure bliss. At the same time, the anxiety she never realized she had nestling in her chest disappeared. Apparently, sympathizing with Nisha had bred unnecessary unease within her.
“I kept thinking about what I’d do…if you disappeared,” she confessed in a breathless whisper. “I never want that to happen, so please don’t go anywhere.”
“I would never go anywhere without you,” Ebel declared without hesitation. “Besides, all hell would break loose if I vanished, even if I didn’t want it to.”
Unlike the people of the slums, Ebel was a bona fide citizen of the imperial capital and a count at that. Someone would notice if he suddenly went missing, and a search would be conducted right away, especially when he had servants like Johanna and Ludovicus who’d immediately report his absence.
“I’m more worried about you.”
“I’ll be fine. I have Phoebe.”
“You do, but…we still don’t know a thing about Krister’s case,” Ebel said, rubbing his cheek against Rock’s. “Please don’t disappear on me, Roxy.”
He hugged her tightly, as if she were his most precious and irreplaceable treasure.
Rock relished every moment of their embrace.
She mustn’t keep him too long, which was why she silently enjoyed the time they had.
Through their wet clothes, she felt every aspect of the body she’d measured that day. And she also caught a whiff of his smell. It was the faint, pleasant scent of soap on human skin rather than the doglike smell of his werewolf form.
Now that she thought about it, Phoebe had scrunched up his nose and asked her if she’d brought home a stray the day after Ebel had first visited her shop. It was kind of strange to think the werewolf curse even changed a person’s scent, but it was a little late to be surprised by that when it already changed their physique and mass.
As Rock was becoming better acquainted with his human scent, she suddenly remembered the sweet fragrance hanging thick in Krister’s apartment. She couldn’t shake the feeling she was intimately familiar with the fragrant wood smell.
She’d smelled that same scent while being embraced, just as she was right now.
“My mother smelled like that fragrant wood incense once,” Rock said as the memory came to her.
The smell had come from her mother’s apron pocket when they’d hugged. That was the same day a thief had broken into her mother’s shop and stolen all her proceeds. No one could find the thief in the sparsely populated mountain village, and that’s when Rock’s mother comforted her with these words:
“Don’t worry about the money. We’ll manage.”
“Mother had the incense on her…” Rock furrowed her brow as the memory grew clearer.
“If I’m not mistaken, your mother was also a tailor, right? Did she like incense?”
“No. She just had it on her. I never saw her burn it.”
Expensive incense wasn’t the kind of thing a poor mountain tailor would freely carry on them. But why she had it made more sense after Rock learned about her mother’s family history.
How did Vale Floria feel when she traded her treasured incense for money?
“My father says Mother was the daughter of a low-ranking imperial nobleman,” Rock confided in Ebel, lifting her head to look into his eyes. He was naturally taken by surprise and gasped.
“Really?”
“Yes… Although it seems like she fled home and had nothing to do with her family after that.”
But when she thought back on it now, there were various things throughout her childhood that attested to her mother’s noble upbringing.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Valencia Alexis…or so Father says.”
Ebel’s expression changed as soon as she shared that information. He released her from his embrace and placed his hands on her shoulders. Then he peered down at her face and grimly asked, “Who else knows this?”
“I’m the only one Father told,” Rock replied, feeling overwhelmed. “And you’re the only one I’ve told, Ebel.”
“…Then I suggest you don’t tell another soul,” Ebel instructed her in an unusually hard voice.
“I haven’t had any direct contact with the Alexis family, but I’ve heard the rumors. It seems the youngest sister left the family, and the parents died one after another right after. The remaining sister lost the will to protect the family name and was forced to take a husband to who she entrusted headship. But then they were unable to have any children and are currently looking into adopting an heir, but are hesitant to pass on the title to someone who isn’t at least distantly related.”
Rock struggled to wrap her head around the flood of information he presented her.
Seeing her expression, Ebel kindly simplified the issue. “All that is to say they might seek you out as an heir if news of your relationship gets out.”
“They’d want me?!”
Rock was stunned.
An even more unbelievable reality had just been added to the already surreal story of her mother’s family.
But there’s no way some fancy nobles would want a tailor from the slums as their heir…
“But Father said Mother no longer has any connection to her family…”
“That probably has more to do with what your parents wanted.”
Ebel was the picture of calm after he got over his initial shock. He staidly advised Rock.
“We don’t know if the Alexis family feels the same. Keep your connection a secret if you don’t want to get roped into anything.”
Rock never planned on sharing this secret from the start. Phoebe likely divulged the information to his daughter with that intention too, and Rock had only told Ebel because she trusted him fully.
While she was curious about her mother’s past, she didn’t want anything to do with it. There was no reason for her to deliberately go after what her mother had tossed aside.
“I won’t tell anyone else,” Rock vowed as she stared into his golden eyes. Ebel’s features finally softened and he nodded.
“That’s for the best. I’ll keep your secret too.”
“I trust you.”
“I’m honored, Roxy.”
His eyes lingered on her face, studying her in earnest as his still wet hair stuck to his cheeks.
“…I must admit, you remain a mystery to me,” he whispered in a velvety voice. “You dress as a man, yet you aren’t one. I met you in the slums, but you have noble blood running through you. It’s been quite a while since we first met, and it seems I’ll need much more time to learn about you.”
“I don’t have any other secrets…probably,” Rock said bashfully.
“Probably, eh?” Ebel grinned. “I’d love the opportunity to uncover everything there is to know about you.”
“Everything?” Rock repeated, catching on to the double meaning just as his lips pressed against hers.
“I won’t take a thing from you,” he vowed after their fleeting kiss. “I’ve decided to only receive what you give.”
“What are you talking about, Ebel…?”
“I want to share our future together.” Ebel didn’t give Rock a second to process his sudden proposal. “I’d love to introduce you to my father in the near future. Well, I’d like to bring you to his grave, to be precise…” He intertwined his fingers with hers and whispered almost pleadingly into her ear. “Won’t you consider it, Roxy?”
✦ ✦ ✦
♚♚♚
ROCK stripped out of her wet clothes after Ebel left. She felt like his warmth was leaving her too as she slipped her arms through clean sleeves. But staying wet would only lead to a cold, so she changed despite the loneliness it brought.
His proposal lingered in her thoughts.
“Share our future together, huh…?”
Rock was delighted he felt that way about her, and she wanted the same thing. But she felt insecure. Not because of Ebel, but because of the things she didn’t know about her mother’s family.
I want to decide my future for myself. And I have to keep my lineage a secret to do that.
Rock firmly made up her mind to keep her secret that way for good.