Chapter : 1303

A rough, hateful laugh tore out of his throat. The sound was raw and broken in the quiet night. He was a fool. A huge, world-changing, and completely doomed fool.

He had just done something incredibly cruel. He had publicly shamed Rosa, the woman who had, in her own strange, broken way, become his partner. He had then taken Mina, a sad widow herself, and used her as a stand-in for his own selfish love for a dead person. He had not offered her a future; he had tried to trap her in his past.

The political problems were a small, secondary issue. The insult to House Siddik, his father's anger, the chaos in the court—it was all just noise. The real disaster was the human one. He had taken two women who had, against all expectations, started to trust him, and he had betrayed them both in the deepest and most unforgivable way.

He was a monster. He had always known it, deep down. He was a weapon, a tool made in the fires of war. But he had let himself believe, for a short, foolish moment, that he could be something more. He had allowed himself to feel, to hope, to connect with others. And this was the result. A pile of ashes. A line of broken hearts. A deep, and very personal, ruin.

He gripped the railing, his only support in a world that was spinning. He was a man who had controlled gods and built empires. But tonight, on a quiet, moonlit balcony, he had been beaten. Not by a sword or a magic spell, but by the one enemy he could never escape: himself.

The cool night air, which at first felt good, now felt like it was choking him. Lloyd pushed himself away from the railing. The smooth, cold marble was wet with sweat from his hands. He began to walk back and forth, like a trapped general whose battle plans had just been burned. The soldier inside him, the cold, logical part that had been his shield and his sword for two lifetimes, was desperately trying to take back control. It was trying to assess the terrible damage and create a new plan.

But how can you make a plan to fight a wound in your own soul?

His mind was usually a clean, effective machine for thinking. Now it was a muddy, chaotic mess. Every time he tried to think logically, a new wave of guilt or a fresh, painful memory would stop him.

Assess the damage, the general whispered in the back of his mind. Analyze the results.

The results were a complete disaster.

First, Rosa. He had taken the delicate, new trust that had grown between them on the mountain—a thing of impossible, amazing beauty—and had crushed it. He had not just broken her heart; he had proven her deepest, most bitter belief about the world to be true: that feelings are a weakness, and trust is a weapon other people use against you. He had proven she was right. The thought was a new kind of pain.

Second, Mina. He had gone to her, a woman already drowning in her own sadness, and had tried to make her support his own sadness. He had disrespected her mourning, insulted her honor, and turned her into a public show. He had taken her quiet respect for him and twisted it into a tool for his own selfish needs. The shame of it felt like a sickness in his stomach.

Third, the political problems. He, the heir of House Ferrum, had publicly and brutally insulted the daughter of Viscount Siddik. The Viscount was a key ally in the south, and his support was vital for the coming war against the Devil Race. He had then followed this brilliant diplomatic move by making a shockingly improper proposal to her widowed sister. He hadn't just made a small mistake. He had made a huge, dramatic mistake that would cause massive problems.

His father’s reaction would be explosive. The council would demand his punishment. The court, which had just started to see him as a hero, would now see him as a reckless, emotionally unstable problem. In the time it took to dance one waltz, he had destroyed months of careful, hard work.

The general screamed for a plan, a way to fix the situation, a way to reduce the damage. But what could he possibly do?

He imagined talking to Mina. 'I am so sorry, Lady Mina. It seems I confused you with my dead lover from a past life. It's a common and understandable social mistake. Can we just pretend it never happened?' The idea was so tragically ridiculous that it almost made him laugh.

Chapter : 1304

He was a walking disaster. His past life was not a strategic tool; it was a curse. It was a powerful, soul-deep poison that was ruining everything he touched in this new world. He was a danger to himself and, even worse, a danger to everyone around him.

He stopped pacing and stood at the edge of the balcony. A deep, soul-crushing tiredness washed over him. He had fought so hard. He had pulled himself up from being average, had built an empire, had commanded gods. He had done it all with one single, burning goal: to survive, to protect his family, to build a fortress so strong that the sad events of his past could never touch him again.

And here he was. Defeated. Not by an assassin’s knife or a demon’s fire, but by a memory. By a love that would not die.

He was truly, and for the first time in this new, impossibly difficult life, completely and totally lost. He had no map, no plan, no clear goal. He was a general without a war, a king without a kingdom, a man without a future. He was just Lloyd Ferrum, a broken man standing on a lonely balcony, haunted by the ghosts of who he was, who he loved, and who he could never be again. The night was cold and silent, and for the first time, he felt a fear that was pure and total. It was the fear of a man who had finally looked into the deep emptiness of his own heart and had found nothing but ruins.

"That was a foolish move."

The voice was a shard of ice in the warm, festive air, a sound so cold and sharp it seemed to cut through the distant music of the orchestra. Lloyd froze, his hand halfway to a tankard of ale on a passing tray. The chaotic, self-loathing fog in his mind, a toxic brew of resurrected grief and fresh guilt, was instantly burned away by a new, more immediate, and far more dangerous emotion: a surge of pure, undiluted irritation that bordered on rage.

He turned slowly. Rosa stood in the archway of the balcony, a silhouette against the golden light of the ballroom. She was a specter of winter, her silver hair a halo of moonlight, her eyes two chips of frozen, unreadable darkness. She had moved with an impossible silence, a ghost in her own right, and her presence was not a passive thing. It was a living, breathing storm of contained power, a pressure so immense it felt like the very air was growing heavy and thick around him.

The sight of her, the last person in the universe he wanted to see right now, was like salt in a fresh wound. He was a man standing on the wreckage of his own emotional detonation, and she had arrived to conduct a clinical damage assessment.

"You are lucky I did not freeze you where you stood," she continued, her voice devoid of its usual cold, clinical detachment. This was not the Ice Queen speaking. This was something else. Something older, colder, and far more dangerous. The polite, distant shell had cracked, and the raw, Sovereign-level power beneath was leaking out, a beautiful and terrifying aura of absolute zero.

Lloyd’s exhaustion and grief curdled into a cold, hard anger. He was in no mood for her cryptic threats or her suffocating presence. "Is that what you came here for?" he snarled, his voice a low, dangerous rasp. "To deliver threats?"

"I came," she said, taking a single, slow, deliberate step out of the light and into the shadows of the balcony with him, "to understand the strategic benefit of publicly discarding your wife in favor of her sister." The temperature on the balcony dropped by ten degrees. A delicate, beautiful filigree of frost began to form on the marble balustrade. "I have run the calculations a hundred times. There is no political advantage. There is no economic gain. There is only insult. It was a move devoid of logic. It was… emotional. Explain it."

Her demand for a logical explanation for an act of pure, emotional chaos was so absurdly, so quintessentially her, that it almost made him laugh. Almost. The rage was still too raw.

"I don't have to explain anything to you," he shot back, his voice dripping with a venom he hadn't realized he possessed. "My actions are my own. You and I have an arrangement, a contract. It does not give you the right to audit my personal life."