Prologue

I knew it was her the moment we passed each other.

It was during my first long vacation in a good while, after somehow managing to finish a job that was an intense pain in the ass. I’d been drowning my sorrows over the unbearable way it ended in cheap booze, but when that didn’t make me feel any better, I started dragging my heavy head and legs through the crowds of the royal capital.

But the sudden whiff of a scent painted a vivid scene in my head.

A room without its owner. A room without any of the trappings befitting the owner’s high station, and only the overlapping scent of flowers to show that she had been there.

I remembered it clearly. There was no way I could forget.

“W-Wait! You. Miss, I bid you, please wait!”

I called out to her before I consciously decided to do so.

There was no way. That was what my mind was telling me. But my feelings, my instincts, were saying something else.

It’s her.

Those fruitless days flooded my memory. A kind, honest, hardworking, yet ultimately unacknowledged person. A princess offered as a hostage, without a single gown to her name, or even a portrait. Aside from her lingering scent, there was no proof that she had ever been there.

That was why. That scent was how I noticed. And I couldn’t let her go.

She turned to look at me. She looked just like I had imagined. Before I realized it, I was crying.

The moment he called out, I knew he was speaking to me.

I had been born as a princess, yet I’d spent my days shunned and abused. Not only was I deprived of gowns or jewels, but I was barely given an education either, which forced me to desperately teach myself. But my family might’ve found even that unacceptable.

A war had happened somewhere that had nothing to do with me, and it had ended without me knowing anything about it.

“I’m being sent to the country next door?”

After being offered to our enemies as a disposable pawn, I pretended to obey, then fled. I couldn’t care less about what happened to my country. If anything, I wanted to cause problems for them.

Having thrown away both my title and status, I became a nobody, which meant that no one would be able to find me—no one would ever call out to me.

But even knowing all that, I knew. The voice now calling out through the busy crowd was directed at me.

It couldn’t be. Shouldn’t be.

But I still turned around. And he really was looking at me. Right at me.

He really found me, I thought. The moment I realized that, my heart thumped in a way I’d never felt before.

I didn’t know. That the story that should have ended was beginning once again.

I didn’t know. That the fate that should have never come to me would arrive like this.