#6

Amelia quickly supported him.

“Your Highness, everything will be all right.”

“Lady Amelia…?”

“Please understand my choice.”

He felt the strength drain from his legs as he collapsed. Even then, Amelia kept trying to make eye contact with Vincent.

“Your Highness, you need to look at me.”

“What… have you done?”

Vincent was certain Amelia had done something to the cup of tea he had just drunk. But his limbs were gradually becoming stiff, until he could no longer move.

“They said the pain would only last for a moment. Just endure it a little longer, and everything will be peaceful.”

He couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“Cough!”

Soon, a red liquid burst from his mouth and stained the floor. His vision blurred, and he could no longer see Amelia’s expression.

“Your Highness…? Your Highness! Why…? Your Highness!”

Amelia’s voice gradually faded into the distance.

And then everything went black.

‘Amelia poisoned my tea.’

Vincent felt something beyond anger—he was utterly incredulous.

How could someone with such an innocent face casually poison a person to death? Had he trusted Amelia too much? Had her father ordered her to do it?

Regardless of her father’s intentions, Vincent had treated Amelia with courtesy because he believed her feelings for him were genuine.

Vincent had never imagined that, despite being born the Crown Prince, he would meet such an end.

He had always been confident and proud.

Although nobles and his half-siblings occasionally got on his nerves, he had never doubted that he would eventually become Emperor.

Amidst his anger and despair, Vincent suddenly found it strange that his consciousness was still intact.

Slowly opening his eyes, he found himself surrounded by darkness once again. Yet strangely, he could clearly see his own arms and legs.

‘Is this the world after death?’

After blinking several times, he saw a faint light in the distance.

「Do you want to start over?」

The light spoke to him.

He had no idea what it was. Perhaps a god, or some being comparable to one.

It didn’t matter.

As long as he could start over.

“Yes.”

「Things aren’t always what they seem.」

“Of course. If I return, I won’t be deceived again.”

「…That’s not what I meant. But I’ll give you another chance.」

“Can I really live again?”

「That girl is crying so much. She’s noisy. But if you fail to see the truth, you’ll end up with the same conclusion anyway.」

“I can do it.”

「We’ll see about that. Remember, from this moment on, the real ‘beginning’ starts.」

The being answered coldly before disappearing.

Vincent was once again trapped in a world of nothing but darkness.

How much time passed like that?

Suddenly, he felt himself being violently pulled somewhere, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

When he opened them again, he had returned to the past—one year before the day of his death.

It was one week after the horse-riding accident.

He had expected Amelia to be there when he woke up.

Before his regression, he had suffered the exact same accident, and when he woke, Amelia had been sitting beside his bed with tears in her eyes. He remembered how troublesome it had been to get her to leave because she refused to go.

‘Perhaps it’s better this way.’

If Amelia had been the first face he saw upon waking, he might have lost control and strangled her on the spot.

During the several days when she failed to appear, Vincent had barely regained his composure and accepted the fact that he had regressed.

Vincent looked outside from the position where he was leaning against the window of his study.

There was a wide stretch of lush green grass, and beyond it stood the window of the room where Amelia would soon come to live.

Vincent carefully retraced the circumstances surrounding his death.

‘Amelia couldn’t have done this alone.’

Amelia had been the one to put the poison in his tea and make him drink it, but there was undoubtedly Duke Wentworth behind her.

And behind Duke Wentworth, there might even have been a faction of nobles who followed him.

Vincent wanted to know what trap he had fallen into back then, what he had overlooked, and how it had ultimately led to him consuming poison.

‘I was far too careless.’

Looking back, there had been warning signs.

He had received reports that several nobles from the aristocratic faction were behaving suspiciously.

But he had never imagined that they would dare target the imperial family—and him, the Crown Prince—directly through Amelia.

He had been conceited.

And arrogant.

Of course, there had been reason for his confidence at the time.

The nobles, including Duke Wentworth, might have harbored hidden intentions, but whenever they stood before Vincent, they bowed their heads with the utmost respect.

Regardless, Vincent had failed to keep an eye on those around him and had underestimated his enemies.

He had no choice but to painfully acknowledge it himself.

‘The result of that arrogance was my death.’

And then there was his detestable fiancée who had given him that death—Amelia Wentworth.

Even if Amelia hadn’t acted alone, he could never forgive her for poisoning him while claiming that she loved him.

‘I’ll repay her personally.’

He would never give her a peaceful death.

Nor would he spare anyone around her.

‘I’ll seduce Amelia. And at the moment when she is happiest, I’ll send her straight into hell.’

To accomplish that, he intended to bring her as close to him as possible.

But something felt strange.

Unlike before his regression, she hadn’t been there when he woke.

Afterward, he had remained on edge, expecting her to come at any moment, but there had been no sign of her.

In the end, he had been forced to summon her himself.

He had expected that when she came, she would shed tears of concern.

Or perhaps she would be overwhelmed and flustered by his deliberate attempts at seduction.

At this point in time, Amelia should have been desperate to become closer to Vincent.

But what had her reaction actually been?

Vincent tilted his head as he recalled Amelia that day.

‘Was she just too nervous and frozen stiff?’

That explanation was possible.

But then, a conversation they had before drinking tea suddenly flashed through his mind.

“Perhaps it’s because we haven’t seen each other in so long. You don’t seem like yourself today.”

“You’re the same, Your Highness.”

‘Did she change because I was no longer acting like myself?’

Even so, there was something else he found impossible to understand.

Amelia had been the one to bring up breaking off their engagement first.

The Amelia of this time would never have suggested breaking off their engagement, not even as an empty remark.

She, too, had changed from before the regression.

“I’ll have to be more careful.”

What Vincent had learned through his regression was patience and caution.

The scent of flowers filling the room was giving me a splitting headache.

It had originally been an act, but at this rate, I was genuinely going to become sick.

I was lying on the bed with my forehead covered when I heard the door being thrown open.

I turned my head and saw Kate standing there with a flower basket.

Kate looked over the flowers filling the room one by one, then suddenly dropped the flower basket down as if throwing it.

I clearly saw something roll out and disappear beneath the bed.

“Good grief, they should just receive them themselves. What kind of lunatic keeps sending flowers?”

Then she glared at me once, slammed the door shut, and left.

I got up, retrieved whatever had rolled beneath the bed, and casually slipped it into my pocket.

“She’s really something……”

As I thought over her reaction, I couldn’t help but laugh for a moment out of sheer disbelief.

I already knew that Kate was rather arrogant and disrespectful toward Amelia, but wasn’t this taking things a little too far?

And what did she mean by “lunatic”?

It seemed the people in this household still didn’t know that the flowers were being sent by the Crown Prince.

‘How little interest do they have in her?’

Then again, it had already been seven days since I had pretended to be bedridden.

The only visitors I had received were flower deliveries and meal trays.

No one else had come to see me.

Even if I was an illegitimate daughter, I was still a duke’s daughter. I had been lying sick in bed for a week. Even though I had told them not to come, you would think someone might check on me at least once.

At first, I had been too overwhelmed by the situation of possessing Amelia’s body to really notice.

But after lying here like this, I was beginning to truly realize just how much of an outcast Amelia was in this household.

Not that I had wanted a visit like this.

Bang—

“Hey, bastard. How long are you planning to just lie there?”

The eldest son of this household, Aiden Wentworth, had appeared.