Reborn as a Duke's Son… I Became Her Yandere Villain Chapter 12: Bond

She was quiet for a mont, looking at with those crimson eyes in the afternoon light.

"What do you want to know?" she said.

"This morning in the shed," I said. "When you understood what the package ant, what that person was planning. What was happening for you in that mont?"

A long pause.

"Clarity," she said finally. "When there is a threat to sothing I value, everything else becos very simple. The complexity of the situation, the rules of conduct, the strategic considerations you prioritize." She tilted her head slightly. "They do not disappear. I am aware of them. But they move to a secondary position. The primary position is occupied by the singular fact of the threat and the singular impulse to eliminate it."

"And the effort to hold that impulse back," I said. "How much effort does that take?"

She looked at with an expression that was weighing sothing. Then she said: "Currently? Significant effort. Because the contract is new and I am still calibrating to your preferences and because what I feel toward you is still consolidating." She paused. "In three months, when the bond has settled fully, it will take more effort. Not less."

"More," I said.

"The deeper the bond, the more load bearing the emotional component becos," she said. "And my feelings are not going to beco less intense over ti. That is not how I am built." She said it plainly and without apology. "What I feel when I look at you has been growing since the mont the contract sealed. It will keep growing. The rate will slow eventually but the direction will not change."

I sat with that.

"And Evelyne," I said carefully.

The air changed.

Not dramatically. Seraphine did not move, did not make a sound, her expression did not visibly shift. But sothing in the quality of the air between us beca different in the way a room becos different when a door opens that was previously closed.

"What about her," Seraphine said.

"You noticed her at the ceremony," I said. "You noticed her at dinner. You tracked her this afternoon in the training grounds without my asking you to."

A pause.

"I track everything in your environnt," she said.

"You track her specifically," I said. "With a different quality of attention."

Seraphine was very still.

"She matters to you," she said finally. Not a question.

"Yes."

Another pause. Longer.

"I know," she said quietly. "I can feel it in the channel. When she is near you, sothing in the bond shifts. The resonance changes quality." Her voice remained even but each word was being chosen with care, the way you pick your steps when the ground is uncertain. "I do not like what it feels like."

"Tell what it feels like."

She looked at and sothing moved through her face that she did not fully control. Not anger. Not jealousy in the simple sense. Sothing older and more total than jealousy. The feeling of sothing that had decided on complete and permanent ownership encountering the concept of a competing claim and finding the concept fundantally incompatible with the way it understood the world.

"It feels like sothing reaching for what is mine," she said. "And I understand intellectually that this framing is not appropriate. You are not a possession. I know this. I hold that knowledge clearly." Her hands in her lap were perfectly still but the stillness was constructed. "And I still feel it."

The honesty of it was striking.

"Thank you for telling that directly," I said.

"Would you prefer I had not?"

"No," I said. "This is exactly what I needed to know."

She looked at with an expression that was trying to read where I was going with it.

"Seraphine," I said. "I am not going to ask you to feel differently. I do not think that would work and I do not think it would be honest to ask it." I held her gaze. "What I am going to ask is that you act on what you know intellectually rather than what the instinct wants. Because the intellectual version of you understands that how I feel about soone else does not reduce what I feel in this direction."

She was very still.

"Does it not?" she said quietly.

"No," I said. "It does not."

Sothing in her face did sothing that I had not seen from her before. The composed surface cracked just slightly, the way expensive things crack, showing the material underneath that everything else was built on top of. What was underneath was very old and had been alone for a very long ti and was currently trying to understand what it had found.

She looked away from toward the training grounds.

"I will try," she said. "Again, that is the most honest answer I can give you."

"Again, good enough," I said.

We sat in silence for a while.

Then she said, without looking at , in a voice that was very quiet and very careful: "She is not safe, you know. The girl."

"I know," I said. "That is why I am here."

"I did not an from outside threats," she said.

I looked at her profile. She was still looking at the training grounds, expression composed again, the crack sealed back over.

"I know what you ant," I said.

She nodded once.

I let it sit where it was.

That night I was working at my desk when the enhanced perception caught sothing at the window. Not sound. Presence. Sothing that had been outside and moved to be closer.

I looked up.

Seraphine was standing at the window looking out at the dark grounds below. She had been in the chair when I sat down. At so point in the last hour she had moved to the window and I had not heard her do it.

"Sothing outside?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I was thinking."

"About?"

A pause.

"About the fact that I have been dormant for two hundred and thirty years," she said. "And in the first four days of being awake, the idea of anything happening to you already feels intolerable." She was quiet for a mont. "I find that information interesting."

I looked at her standing at the window, the moonlight catching the white of her hair, her reflection a ghost in the glass looking back at her.

"Interesting," I said.

"And a little frightening," she said. Very quietly. Like she was admitting sothing she had not ant to say that loudly.

I turned back to my desk.

"Get so sleep," I said. And then, because she deserved honesty: "I am glad you are awake."

The silence that followed was warm.

She did not sleep.

But she stayed at the window all night, between and whatever was outside, and that was its own kind of answer.