297

***

"Has he been unable to get an erection ever since that day?" Inés muttered to herself, deep in thought.

Luciano froze mid-step and whipped his head around, looking at her in disbelief. She was still pale and seemed unwell, but she bore a placid expression that only deepened his unease. "Excuse me?"

"Oh, the crown prince, I mean," she explained briefly, as if she hadn't expected him to overhear her. Then she glided through the door he had opened for her and took a seat first.

Luciano looked conflicted as he sat down by her side. He seemed disturbed at the words he had just heard her mutter, especially because he hadn't had the chance to ask her what had happened out on that balcony. Inés felt the urge to tease her brother and prolong this pause for a while, but quickly decided against it when she noticed his gaze shifting worriedly to her clothes.

"As I said before, I am all right," she assured him. "He did not touch a single hair on me."

"Then why would you say..." he trailed off, unable to repeat her earlier comment.

Since the moment Inés had emerged from the balcony, pale and trembling, Luciano's imagination had conjured only the worst possibilities. He had been busy arguing with the knights, trapped behind the blockade of them, when the balcony doors suddenly crashed opened. She had staggered through them and crumpled to the ground between the knights, her strength utterly spent. Anyone was able to tell that she had burst through the doors by ramming them in a desperate escape. Her arms were too weak to bear her weight as she collapsed onto the floor. It looked like she had tried to flee from some unspeakable threat without the time or sense to calculate her actions.

Luciano had shoved past the knights, seizing a pistol from one of their belts, which he had then pointed at the crown prince's closest aide. He had no clue that Inés had already been desperately pale even before the crown prince had joined her out on the balcony. He thought that the crown prince had driven her into a corner by flaunting his damned authority as a member of the imperial family.

But Oscar followed her back into the manor and worriedly checked on her as though her panic and blanching had nothing to do with him. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, supporting her as she sank to the floor. He looked at her with concern and affection, taking her face in as though the time he had with her was far too short, before allowing Luciano to approach.

"Take your sister home," Oscar had finally said, his voice subdued. "She is feeling unwell."

That was all Luciano had witnessed, but it had been enough to send a chill down his spine. It had felt as though he could do nothing but watch as Inés fell into a pit of snakes. A few moments later, Inés had come to again and calmly risen to her feet with the crown prince's assistance, and had even said a proper farewell, which Luciano had foregone. Even after watching her gather herself, he hadn't been able to dispel his suspicions at all.

Inés met his troubled eyes and clarified, her voice drawing him back to the present, "You told me he was taking vergo." Her tone was light, as though her remark required no further explanation.

Luciano sighed, dragging a hand down his face. "You spoke as if you had become a test subject yourself." His brow furrowed in shame as he gave her an apologetic look for saying as much, despite being vague enough to be polite. "I am sorry for evoking such terrible images."

"I was the one who mentioned erections first," she said, shrugging.

Inés thought back to those times Oscar had mentioned before. If he had spoken of having romantic dreams of her every night, she would have felt nothing but disgust. She might have been unable to stop herself from slapping him across the face. But no, he had spoken of nightmares-visions of her gruesome suicide. It occurred to her then that the way she had died in that life must have been one of the worst ways for anyone to die.

The familiar air of the residence cooled her head. Inés let a soft chuckle escape her still pale lips. Now that Oscar was out of her sight, the absurdity of it all struck her. She found the situation almost entertaining. His stricken face whenever he spoke of her death made her laugh.

What she had wished for in return for her death was nothing compared to the suffering she had endured. She had hoped to expose the crown prince's monstrous nature. She had believed that she would be able to at least topple him from his perch. But she had never expected that her death would leave an unhealing wound in his soul. She had no idea that her tragic death could have been so useful-a tragedy so shattering it pushed him over the edge of sanity.

"Greedy men are known to take vergo as well," Luciano said, his voice cutting through her thoughts.

"To match ambitions their bodies cannot fulfill?" she replied dryly.

He shot her a wary look. "Did you... hit your head earlier?"

"Perhaps. In any case," she murmured, her thoughts drifting once more.

Oscar was a man who had witnessed his wife killing herself before his eyes by making her head burst apart in the most gruesome way. Whether the shock of that night had withered his mental state or his filthy member, either way she had managed to deal a fatal blow to him that would prevent him from becoming emperor. Though a nasty past could be covered up with enough money and bloodshed, someone who was clearly insane in anyone's eyes couldn't ascend the throne. Though he might be able to hide his inability to even couple with a woman, let alone sire children, the throne would be meaningless for him. He would be starting his reign by giving everyone around him the means to overthrow him.

"No matter how many times I go back in time, I cannot save that Inés. Even if you are alive again now, that Inés is always destined to die. Miserably. Horribly... I couldn't bear how helpless and pathetic I was, being unable to stop it," Oscar had told her. "After you died, I felt like I was locked inside a prison barely bigger than my body. I wasn't able to breathe until I could bring you back. I couldn't hear anyone. You kept dying. Always before me... I would wake from sleep and see you before me, the moment before you died. Glaring at me as if you meant to kill me. Then I would be able to smile, thinking that it was finally over. That you would grant me the mercy of death. I would think that it would have been better for me to die, just as I thought the first time, and then you would die again... slowly, before my very eyes. I would see details I didn't notice the first time. The way your face slowly distorted, the skin bursting open, the blood, the ear-splitting noise that seemed like it would never end..."

She had stared at him in silence.

"Oh Inés... you cannot possibly imagine it. The sensation of pieces of your flesh and brain splattering over me... You know nothing of your death, Inés."

His eyes had held a mixture of madness and horror. It was clear that his fragile constitution, as frail as that of a child hiding under his authority, had crumbled like sand. And it was just as evident that he had lost his mind. He was unable to hide it as he recalled that moment. He had seemed terrified, as though it was happening again before his eyes.

Aside from the story he had told himself and the facts he had chosen to forget, along with the disgusting feelings he was fostering for her, if the crown prince really had lived with the memory of her suicide day in and out in that life, he cannot have hidden his madness much longer. And once he had become skilled enough to hide his madness after turning back time, he would have had to hide the fact that he had become completely impotent.

"I only ever thought of you. For over twenty years, my head was filled with nothing but you..." he had said desperately. "I considered it to be my punishment to be unable to reach you, even with just a few words."

"And yet you always had women at your side," Inés had retorted.

"Are you jealous, just as you were before?"

"I am saying that your words are hard to believe because of this."

"No, you're wrong, Inés... Those people were nothing to me. They are not even worthy of your jealousy."

Thinking back to the women who had accompanied him as mistresses and Alicia's maids who had frequented his bed chamber, everything had seemed too intermittent and as though he were showing them off while pretending to hide them. Of course, it was unclear how much of this was the crown prince's doing and how much was Alicia's. It was also impossible to confirm how much of it each of them had not wished for.

For example, while Oscar may have been wanting to prove his manhood by taking women to bed, Alicia may have been throwing women into his bed chamber in droves in fear that he might take a specific woman as his lover. Alicia was more than capable of such a thing. She could have also been trying to ruin her husband's good reputation so she could display her generosity by accepting him anyway, or she could have also wished for him to become isolated so that her presence at his side would seem much more significant. Though it was unclear how addicted he was to the drug by now, the fact that he was using it meant that Alicia now controlled his nightly activities. It was even possible that the crown prince had little desire for the orgies that were happening in Alicia's bedroom.

"Whenever I thought of you, no one else could compare. I have never once ejaculated without thinking of you. My body has never been so pure, Inés. Those people were nothing more or less than substitutes for you. I only allowed those who looked particularly like you to take my body. And all that time, I wished for the day I could finally embrace you once again. I only took women who had black hair and forest green eyes. Whenever I was under the influence of the medicine and alcohol, I felt like I was back in bed with you. And it felt like things were back to the time before you died..."

He had dared to spew such nonsense as saying that his filthy body was in any way pure, which meant that he didn't want to be particularly promiscuous. Even as he claimed that those women were nothing but substitutes for Inés, he had implied that he could take anyone to bed as long as they looked in any way like her. But he was bluffing. Despite what the knight standing guard outside of his bedroom had said, an orgy would not even have been possible in the first place. And yet, Alicia was oversupplying him with women for whatever reason, and a few of them really had become substitutes for Inés.

Luciano quietly took his sister's hand as she sat there, lost in thought. She squeezed his hand in response and leaned back against the back of her armchair. She slowly closed her eyes.

Luciano had always been wary of being disliked by her in any way. She remembered the way he had even treated everything she had treasured with the utmost care. Even if it held no value to him, if his sister cared, he was unable to even imagine putting the smallest scratch on anything. As much as he must have hated Emiliano, he never would have been able to kill him, knowing that his sister cared for him. Unless, of course, Oscar had pressured him to do so in exchange for her own life.

The Luciano of that lifetime had done everything he could to save his sister, and yet he had been forced to watch her stab herself in the neck in the end. Despair was not something the likes of Oscar could claim to feel in the face of her death. It was only Luciano, who had failed to save his sister in that life, who was allowed this emotion.

As much as Inés still despised the crown prince to her core, he had practically handed her his greatest weakness through this incident. Emiliano served to obscure Lourdes completely, and her body was still the one thing that could make Oscar waver. Whether it be with desire or with terror.

Her heart was finding its regular rhythm again. It had been beating wildly even during their carriage ride back.

"In order to not repeat the same mistake as before, I gave you some room to breathe in the next life. I even allowed another man to be at your side," Oscar had told her, sounding as though he had done her a great favor. "Because even though you came back with a sullied body, I could no longer harm a single hair on your head. I couldn't allow you to ever harm yourself again... So, Inés, please do not test my patience any longer. There is no woman for me aside from you. So please, do not force me to kill Cárcel with my own hands."

Putting aside those words in her memory for a moment, Inés recalled one of Emiliano's paintings. It was of her, sitting at a window and looking at their child, her face turned away. But then, the crown prince's voice invaded her thoughts once more.

"My poor Inés. You can no longer achieve anything with your death. The reason I am telling you this is to prove my sincere love for you. Just as you at twenty-six returned to being sixteen, and when you died at twenty, you became six years old again... I turned from thirty to twenty, then from twenty-four to ten after I died. Ten years of time rewound. You may call them a punishment, but I call them a blessing. Your life repeated itself exactly ten years before the day of your suicides. You can be certain that you will not be able to bring Cárcel back to life the same way I brought you back to life."

"I only came back to life because I killed myself. It was nothing but punishment. You did not bring me back to-"

"If I had not killed myself as well, you would have stayed dead in my world. But thankfully, we are alive at the same time now, aren't we? However, if Cárcel Escalante dies, he will forever be dead to you. And if you were to kill yourself once more, you would be missing from his world forever."

Emiliano's painting became distorted in Inés's mind. Her mind, lost in the past, went blank. She felt as though she might fall into a deep sleep at any moment. But she gritted her teeth and continued to recall what Oscar had said.

"Even if he were to be born again in a time where you never existed, you are too sinful to be born again. At least as Inés Valeztena. What do you think it would be like if you were to come to with all of your memories decades, even centuries after your time, when no one you remember exists any longer? Inés, what if you could never see Cárcel Escalante again, no matter how many times you die?"

The crown prince's expression had changed. He had looked as though he were possessed by something. As though he were speaking of a world he could only dream of, of a time long past. It was like the day, long ago, when she met Anastasio in the mountains.

Inés recalled the way her knees had given out as she had blanched, but she had subconsciously listened to his last words to her even in that state.

"Inés, you can no longer return to the past."

Just as he had said, she no longer had any more "chances." And as much as that was a disadvantage for her, it was an even greater disadvantage for Oscar.