Chapter 1
Two full hours had passed.
The maids wiped away the blood that had seeped from Lamberta’s wound and replaced the bedding that had been soaked through with red.
After she drank the sedative that Dr. Rönsten had brought, he applied ointment, then wrapped her tightly in bandages — pulled as taut as a corset — before tying them off with a final knot. Only then could Lamberta breathe again.
“…If you’ve calmed down, my lady, please look at this first.”
Clink.
Rönsten took a small dish from the maid beside him and held it before Lamberta.
“You were lucky, my lady. The arrowhead was of poor quality — it didn’t pierce all the way through you.”
“Ah… the arrow…”
Inside the dish lay a rust-stained arrowhead.
That same arrow had pierced Dione, her betrothed — and the corroded metal had nearly condemned Lamberta herself to death by fever.
Despite the nausea that rose in her throat, she couldn’t tear her eyes from it.
Even now, she wished all of it — the blood, the chaos, the shattered glass — had been a dream. She wanted to believe it was just the fever, that until someone told her otherwise, the horror was nothing but an illusion.
But that arrowhead — that tiny, ugly piece of metal — was both the symbol of malice that had tried to kill her and the proof that the nightmare of that wedding day had been terribly real.
As Lamberta’s face paled, Emma, the elderly head maid, reached out gently and shielded her eyes from the sight.
“That’s enough, Dr. Rönsten. You should go and rest now.”
At her firm tone, Rönsten pressed his hands to his knees and struggled to rise. The maid waiting beside him hurriedly handed him his cane.
“My lady… would you care to visit the lord’s chambers? A familiar face awaits you there.”
He left those words behind as he turned toward the door, his steps weighed down by a sigh that seemed to drag his whole body with it.
Thud!
A leather notebook slammed against the desk, scattering a few sheets of parchment to the floor.
Across the open page, the same phrase had been written again and again, each line shakier, the handwriting more desperate.
The man who threw it buried his face in his hands and scrubbed hard, dragging rough palms over skin already marked by years and fatigue.
“Damn them all… if they’d discovered a new gold mine, they’d have shown more restraint than this!”
It had been ten days.
Ten days since the wedding soaked in blood — since the tragedy that every historian would later call the cursed union.
And for ten days, Erwin, steward of House Coronis, had locked himself in the lord’s study, preparing what he grimly called a financial plan.
From village drunkards to the gossipmongers in the royal court, it had taken exactly one week for all of Asterion to learn of the Coronis catastrophe.
Three days ago, the first couriers arrived — noble messengers who traveled day and night to deliver letters thicker than love poems and far less sincere.
“We express our deepest regret regarding the tragic events at House Coronis.”
Every letter began with the same elegant condolences, followed by what they truly meant — invoices disguised as sympathy.
House Coronis, they wrote, had failed in its most basic duty as host and protector. Compensation would be expected.
Their words were polished, their handwriting graceful — but the greed seeped through like oil.
“Erwin. You should rest.”
“Ah—my lady!”
He hadn’t even heard the door open. Whether someone had left it ajar, or whether he had simply forgotten in his sleepless haze, Lamberta’s soft voice startled him to his feet.
“When did you wake? I thought you were still confined to bed.”
“About four hours ago. Dr. Rönsten said I was well enough to rise.”
Erwin brushed back his thinning, greased hair, suddenly self-conscious. If Rönsten had declared her fit, there was nothing more he could argue.
Still, shame flooded him — shame that she had seen him in such disarray. He stood from his chair and faced her properly.
To him — once her tutor, now her steward — she was both the child he had taught to read and the woman fate had brutalized.
He tried to speak, but his throat tightened with the weight of both duty and grief.
“My lady Lamberta… forgive me, but in these days I…”
“I understand, Erwin.”
Her voice was soft but steady.
“I know what it means to find you in my father’s study. Do what must be done. My father trusted you with the keys to our treasury — and I trust you just as much.”
Her lips curved faintly — a fragile echo of composure.
For Erwin to set foot in the heart of Coronis Castle could only mean one thing: something great and terrible was already in motion — or had already happened.
And the fact that neither her father nor her brother had come to see her since she woke…
That told her everything.
The thought chilled her — that perhaps she was the last living Coronis.
“…The lord is merely wounded, my lady. Gravely, yes, but he will recover. I’ve been preparing for that.”
He said it as though to justify his presence there, as though repetition might make it true.
Erwin knew what Rönsten had told him — that Lamberta had been unconscious for ten days, and that had she not awakened today, he would have had to assume the worst.
If only she would allow herself to weep, he thought. Or even to break down, just once.
Most noblewomen would have done just that — collapsed into their beds and waited for the storm of politics to pass.
But Lamberta Coronis was not most noblewomen.
She had read the mood of the servants, the silence of the halls, and the absence of her family — and she had forced herself upright despite the pain.
“You speak wisely, my lady. It seems only my eyes still see the little girl you once were — but my head knows you’ve become a grown woman.”
“I’m twenty-three, Erwin. Hardly the six-year-old pupil you remember.”
She smiled faintly, bending to pick up a piece of paper that had fallen at her feet.
“Ah—my lady, wait!”
He moved too late. She had already unfolded it.
Lines of venomous ink filled the page — elegant handwriting that dripped with malice and greed.
Erwin’s stomach turned. One of those accursed letters — thrown carelessly aside — had landed right where she would see it.
“It seems,” she said quietly, “I’m being called the fastest widow in the kingdom.”
Her voice was calm — not angry, not broken, not mocking. Simply still.
The kingdom’s swiftest widow.
The champion of the virgin goddess Hermisa.
The devourer of men.
The southern beauty who ended the northern line.
The titles were endless — cruel, poetic, obscene. Even in the few letters that had arrived, each had found a new way to brand her.
Erwin lowered his head, guilt clawing at his chest.
“I should have burned them,” he muttered. “Every last one.”
But the insults were not the only thing written there.
There were also demands — sums of money that bled the family dry, privileges that no sane man would ask, and finally…
“So,” Lamberta murmured, letting the page flutter from her fingers,
“they call me a man-eating widow… and yet they still wish to marry me?”
Because that was the cruelest irony of all.
The same nobles who damned her as a cursed bride now wrote to claim her — to offer her a place as wife, mistress, or political ornament.
To them, Lamberta Coronis — the woman who had survived the bloodied wedding — was no longer a bride, a daughter, or a victim.
She was a possession without an owner.
