“This is usually where I stayed when I came as a guest,” Aroche said, dragging Bella by the hand into the chamber.

He shot a glance at the maids, double-checking where His Majesty and Her Imperial Smugness had stayed last night. As expected, their love nest was conveniently located at the other end of the hallway.

The room itself hadn’t changed much since his teenage years—nostalgia hit him hard.

“I’ll take the one across the hall. You get this one,” he said, motioning at the room while Bella kept sulking.

He sighed. Fine. He should play soft. “Come now, lay down,” he coaxed, like he was talking to a pouting cat instead of a grown woman.

He tugged her inside, and the maids—bless their innocent little hearts—lowered their heads, blushing furiously like they’d just walked in on the prelude to a bodice-ripper romance.

Right. This was new.

Clearly, these maids were fresh recruits. They didn’t know who he was or what he looked like. Since morning, he’d only run into Rosberg’s usual suspects—Burn’s old regular entourage—who all reacted to him like he was a walking corpse.

Well. Technically, he was a walking corpse. Resurrection side effects and all that.

So compared to the terrified stares of seasoned retainers seeing a ghost in broad daylight, a few innocent blushes? Honestly, not the worst reception.

The sunlight pouring through the open curtains had Bella squinting like a vampire at a tanning salon. Aroche, ever the attentive undead gentleman, noticed and promptly told the maids to draw the curtains. Vampires and sunshine had never been friends, after all.

Now that the room was decently dimmed, he asked the maids to turn on the lights. And of course, flipping a switch made a bunch of glowing orbs on the walls and nightstands spring to life like magic. Aroche was still quietly entertained by it. So was Bella.

Ah yes, courtesy of the Alliance—now proud vendors of nifty household tech, all part of their grand “Please Don’t Vaporize Us Again” initiative. Ever since the Emperor wiped the floor with them three years ago, they’d been buttering everyone up one glowing gadget at a time.

But Bella was reminded of the unfortunate downside: these gadgets made perfect little hideouts for spy tech.

Burn had already roped in Dirk and his whole tinkering family to help Soulnaught citizens learn how to de-bug everything from lamps to teapots. He’d even taken the time to learn a bit himself. But of course, whoever was spying on them now had apparently whipped out the deluxe, top-tier espionage package—gear so cutting-edge, even Burn hadn’t seen it before.

“Do you need anything?” Aroche asked, noticing Bella was unfastening her nun veil.

“Do you need anything?” she shot back, eyes narrowing like she was two seconds from dragging him to a healer by the ear.

Aroche looked away, the very picture of guilt. Yeah, yeah, she was giving him that look. The “I know you're in pain and still pretending you're not, you emotional rock” look.

“I’m just going to lay down,” Bella said, waving off the maids with a smile that barely concealed her exhaustion. She plopped herself down on the edge of the bed like someone done with everyone’s nonsense.

“Okay then. I’ll leave you to rest,” Aroche said, already halfway out the metaphorical door, grateful to escape before any more emotional landmines went off.

But Bella wasn’t done with him. She grabbed his hand immediately. “Where are you going?”

Aroche’s reaction was… dramatic. He froze like someone just threatened him with physical affection. “Why?”

“You need to rest too,” Bella shot back, tone sharp enough to cut steel. “You’re not going to go harass His Majesty, right?”

“No,” he replied, attempting his most reasonable tone. “I’m just going next door to rest so your body stops echoing all my injuries, remember?”

And then—out of nowhere—she dropped the soft bomb.

“Then… do it here,” she said, all quiet and demure, like she hadn’t just casually proposed a co-sleeping arrangement to the emotionally stunted war general.

“What?” Aroche blinked. “Wh—”

And then he saw it—the blush. Nuclear-level. Face-on-fire levels of red.

And, of course, he blushed too. Because why wouldn’t this day involve confusing intimacy, psychic pain-sharing, and absolutely no warning?

Why was this girl like this today?

Seriously.

Was there something in the air? A romance spell? Burn’s smugness leaking into the hallway?

Either way, Aroche was officially flustered. And doomed.

“Sit where I can see you,” Bella ordered, eyes sharp as daggers, before she flopped under the quilt. “Read a book, novel, or something.”

Aroche, still rooted to the floor like an overwhelmed houseplant, turned an even deeper shade of crimson. Oh. She just… wanted to monitor him while he rested? Not seduce him into morally confusing territory?

“I promise I’ll rest properly. Let me go to my own room,” he tried, using the kind of patient tone reserved for negotiating with wild animals—or in this case, Bella.

But then she gave him The Look.

And just like that, Aroche got it. He suddenly understood why veteran husbands all over the realm said, “I can’t go against my wife.” That level of psychic pressure? Lethal.

Wait a minute. Why did he understand that?

She wasn’t his wife—!

Panic. Existential crisis. And then action.

Aroche fled the battlefield, aka the room, and summoned a maid, requesting a book like it was his last line of defense. He even gave her a specific title, hoping it would delay his demise by at least five minutes.

When the maid came back, she found him seated at a chair beside the bed, already pretending to be a man of calm intellect and not someone whose blood pressure had just spiked.

She quietly wondered, who is this guy? What noble house does he belong to? And is that woman his actual mistress or just his emotional captor?

Then Bella chimed in, ruining her illusion of control: “Why’d you pick a military book? Trying to give yourself a headache?”

“It’s actually therapeutic,” Aroche replied dryly, waving the maid off like a man clinging to the last shreds of his dignity. “This one’s not just war tactics—it’s a historical record. It’s calming.”

The maid, sensing the high-level weirdness radiating from this whole scenario, dipped out quickly and closed the door behind her. Probably off to gossip.

And honestly? Fair.

Aroche flipped open the book, hunting for where he’d left off—five years ago, back before the whole “rebellion and untimely death” situation. Nostalgic, really. He found page 76, and wow, he still remembered the sentence he stopped at. Apparently, dying didn’t delete your memory cache.

It was oddly comforting—this little moment of normalcy after spending years rotting in the abyss of corruption and existential dread. His tense eyebrows even started to loosen. Progress.

And then the words on the page morphed.

He blinked. Frowned. Nope, not a typo. The letters reshuffled themselves like a polite, literary seizure and formed an entirely new message.

“Sir Aroche, don’t react too greatly. I’m okay, not that much in pain..."

Huh?

“Previously, Her Holiness and I connected with a mind reading spell and she told me that there’s a spy from the Alliance who’s got the kind of espionage tech that even His Majesty and Her Holiness couldn’t detect.”

“They don’t know what device the spy’s using yet, but His Majesty and Her Holiness agreed to pretend they’re clueless. They’re acting right now, so they asked me to tell you not to say anything important out loud. This is why I needed to find a way to tell you discreetly… sorry for the whining and yelling…”

Aroche stared, deadpan. Smoke and Mirror. Bella’s Vision specialty. The woman turned a book into a private chatroom.

And as the message went on, his face slowly caught fire. Yep. Bright red. Again.

So this was what it feels like to be humiliated by circumstances. Good to know.

Turns out Bella wasn’t throwing a fit. Burn wasn’t avoiding him because of incest burnout. They were playing dumb for a reason—because some Alliance creeper had tech so advanced it could hide from even them. Spy-level nonsense.

Aroche buried his face in his hand.

He’d spent the whole time thinking Bella was being irresistibly coy and cute, and all of it—all of it—was her trying not to get bugged by espionage gadgets.

It was an act. A brilliant, Oscar-worthy, painful-to-rewatch act.

And he fell for it. Hard.

He mentally smacked himself. This was all on him. Not Bella. He was the clown who got seduced by covert counterintel roleplay. Bravo, Aroche. Bravo.

The letters on the page shuffled again—like they were double-checking if he still had any sanity left to lose.

“Just act like you’re reading normally since only you can see these letters, but also please don’t exert yourself. I do still feel the pain. Be more mindful. Please.”

…Sorry.

“No problem.”

Aroche’s brain promptly blue-screened.

Hold on.

WHY DID THE WORDS REPLY TO HIM?

Was this—

No.

Wait.

Had she been reading his mind this whole time?!

“Not all this time—I just started to read your mind… when you started reading the book…”

Aroche made a face like he just bit into a lemon dipped in shame.

Then came the final blow:

“I’m not being deliberately coy and cute, okay?!”

“...d-don’t… misunderstand… okay?!”

The font on the page actually changed. It got all pointy and emotionally distressed—and it turned pink. Because of course it did. She was flustered too.

Aroche couldn’t take this kind of spiritual assault anymore. He aggressively flipped the page like a man very committed to reading about historical warfare and not blushing over psychically transmitted apologies.

Okay. Okay. New vow: no more getting seduce—misunderstanding Bella. Ever. Again. Seriously.

Meanwhile, Bella was busy fidgeting under the covers, hiding her face in the quilt like that would protect her from how adorably awkward she’d just been.

But of course, Bella wasn’t done.

“Anyway, the spy was that nephew Count Rosberg brought this morning.”

Aroche blinked.

That poor guy was the spy?