"What happened, Father?"
Jaden appeared before Duke Rizwell with visible concern in his eyes.
The atmosphere across the drill grounds was tense and chaotic. Several injured guards remained kneeling on the ground with pale faces while trembling in fear. Some of them still carried wounds from the clash in the no man’s land, yet none of them even dared to seek treatment first. Their attention remained fixed entirely on the duke standing before them.
They had failed in their duty, and the young master had been kidnapped under their protection. For soldiers entrusted with the safety of a noble heir, such failure was often enough to warrant execution.
Rizwell looked toward Jaden with exhaustion and worry written clearly across his face before turning his gaze back toward the kneeling men.
"They claim that a powerful vampire abducted the entire group of first years," Rizwell said heavily. "Alfred was taken along with them."
Jaden immediately frowned.
"A vampire?" he repeated slowly before looking around at the injured guards. "But Prince Galeion of the Titans and Prince Desmond of the Dwarves were part of that expedition as well. Their empires would certainly have assigned far stronger experts than we did. It feels impossible for a single individual to overpower all of them and carry out a kidnapping so easily."
Rizwell sighed deeply.
"I understand your reasoning, and under normal circumstances I would agree with you completely," he replied. "However, I know these men well enough to understand when they are lying. If they say it was a single female vampire, then I believe them. More importantly, it must have been an exceptionally high-ranking one if she managed to deal with the guards assigned to those princes without difficulty as well."
His expression darkened further as he continued.
"The involvement of the vampire race makes this matter extremely dangerous. Right now, we cannot determine whether that woman belonged to a rogue cult or whether the Bloodveil Empire is somehow involved."
Relations between races had always remained delicate, and any conflict involving vampires carried the potential to spiral into a political disaster.
Rizwell turned sharply and spoke with urgency.
"Whatever the truth may be, we need to act quickly."
"Quickly, about what, Father?"
A familiar voice suddenly echoed through the training grounds, freezing everyone in place.
Jaden’s eyes widened as he immediately turned toward the source. Alfred Draconis walked calmly across the courtyard as though nothing unusual had happened at all.
No one on the ground had sensed his arrival, not even the guards or servants at the entrance of the mansion.
Even Duke Rizwell himself looked surprised.
For several seconds, the entire courtyard fell silent in complete disbelief. The kneeling soldiers looked as though they had just seen a ghost.
Meanwhile, Rizwell and Jaden slowly turned toward each other with cold sweat forming across their foreheads.
Neither of them understood what was happening anymore. Jaden swallowed hard before suddenly looking toward his father.
"...Father, please tell me you didn’t inform Mother already."
Rizwell’s expression instantly stiffened.
"I did." The duke rubbed his forehead with visible despair.
"She is going to kill me. She’s going to think this entire situation was some elaborate joke at her expense."
Jaden could already imagine the coming disaster. Meanwhile, Alfred simply stood there with a mildly confused expression while watching the exchange unfold.
"Why have so many soldiers been gathered, Father?" Alfred asked with confusion etched on his face.
Jaden stepped toward his younger brother and placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Where exactly have you been?" he asked carefully. "The guards reported that you were kidnapped."
Alfred blinked before he realized they were right; he clicked his hands.
"Well... technically, I was kidnapped."
The moment those words left his mouth, the kneeling guards nearly collapsed from relief. Several of them visibly relaxed for the first time since the incident began. Had Alfred denied the story entirely, they would have faced catastrophic punishment for incompetence.
Jaden narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Something about Alfred’s behavior felt strange; well, he had been acting strange the day he returned from the Clayman cult’s stronghold. Duke Rizwell brushed it all off as post-trauma changes.
Before Jaden could continue questioning him, Duke Rizwell raised a hand and dismissed the gathered troops for the time being.
The drill grounds slowly began clearing out as Rizwell, Jaden, Alfred, and Butler Adam headed back toward the mansion together.
There were too many things that required explanation.
Most importantly, they somehow needed to explain everything to the duchess. And none of them believed that would end peacefully.
A few hours later, Jaden quietly left the mansion grounds with a tired sigh and made his way toward Emily’s residence.
A faint smile rested on his face as thoughts of her surfaced in his mind. At this point, the feeling no longer surprised him.
The amount of time they had spent together over the past few months had naturally allowed affection to grow within him.
Originally, his role had merely been to teach Emily noble etiquette, language, and various literary subjects so she could better adapt to high society. Yet somewhere along the way, those lessons stopped feeling like obligations.
Instead, they became the moments he looked forward to the most in a day. Ironically, Jaden felt that he had learned far more from Emily than she had ever learned from him.
She taught him mundane things like cooking, sewing, and other simple things that a noble would never experience.
Yet those mundane moments changed him more deeply than any formal education.
After betraying his own brother and becoming entangled with demonic cults, Jaden had long since accepted that there was nothing redeemable left within himself. The hatred he once carried toward his father had twisted him into someone he could barely recognize anymore.
By the time he understood the consequences of his actions, he had already lost any real hope for himself. He had fully intended to spend the rest of his life buried within the shadows of his mistakes.
But then Emily entered his life.
At first, he barely paid attention to her beyond his assigned responsibility. Yet day by day, something inside him began changing.
Whenever he spent time with her or her young baby, the darkness inside him seemed to weaken slightly.
The bitterness consuming him slowly lost its grip. Sometimes, Jaden found himself horrified when remembering the kind of person he used to be.
His old self would have looked at someone like Emily with nothing but contempt. A widowed woman with a child, someone abandoned by another man.
Back then, he would not even have considered her a proper person worthy of respect. He would have viewed her as damaged, impure, and beneath his attention entirely.
Now, the mere memory of those thoughts disgusted him. And strangely enough, he knew the exact moment that arrogant version of himself truly died.
It happened in the southern forest when his father caught him red-handed.
The moment he saw his father kneel before him. Even now, the memory remained painfully vivid.
Duke Rizwell—a man feared and respected by countless people—had lowered himself in front of his own soldiers and subjects to beg one son for the life of another.
The proud and domineering image his father had maintained throughout decades of leadership could have been shattered entirely from that single act.
Yet Rizwell still chose to kneel. At that moment, Jaden realized something he had failed to understand his entire life. His father had never been an untouchable tyrant his whole life. He had simply been a desperate father trying to save his child all along.
That realization broke Jaden completely.
All the pride he carried as a noble-born heir suddenly felt hollow and pathetic. Every selfish resentment he nurtured for years collapsed under the weight of that single memory.
And as a son, forcing your own father into such desperation was not a victory; it was a lifelong shame.
His father had failed him in many ways, just as Jaden himself had failed as a son.
That same night, Jaden dreamed of his late mother. In the dream, she slapped him across the face.
When he woke up, he immediately understood why. From that point onward, regret settled inside his heart.
For the rest of the time after that incident, he remained mostly silent, unable to escape his own thoughts.
If Emily had not appeared during that period of his life, Jaden genuinely believed the darkness within him would have swallowed him completely, chipping away at his life.
She became his anchor during the worst period of his existence. And before he even realized it himself, those feelings slowly transformed into love.
What surprised him most was how little he cared about her social standing or past anymore. The questions of purity, status, or reputation never once crossed his mind.
Years ago, his mother once told him something he failed to understand as a child.
Back then, he had innocently asked why she loved his father so deeply despite the emotional distance that often existed between them.
His mother had simply smiled before answering him.
She told him that her feelings for his father had long since moved beyond the simple excitement people called love. She said that Rizwell truly understood her as a person and always tried his best for her, even if circumstances often forced him into difficult decisions.
"The times were cruel to your father," she had said quietly.
At the time, Jaden never understood her meaning. Now he finally did.
Love was not merely passion or desire. Sometimes, it was much simpler and far more profound than that.
His father had seen his mother for who she truly was. He respected her decisions and listened to her.
He protected her from questions she was too weak to answer, and over all of that, he had chosen to be the villain in the eyes of his son to protect him from the clutches of evil.
And in return, his mom loved him despite all his flaws and decisions.
Jaden finally understood the meaning hidden behind her words.
To be truly seen by someone, to have your real self understood and accepted without pretension, was perhaps the deepest form of love a person could ever receive.
And that was what he found in Emily. She looked beyond the titles, the expectations, and even the mistakes he could never forgive himself for.
Somehow, she simply saw him .