The Demon in the Painting

"You're a demon, aren't you?"

There was no pretending I hadn't seen it anymore, so I finally spat out the words I'd been swallowing all this time.

"Just chalk it up to bad luck—I won't break our contract over it. So do me the courtesy of being honest."

"Where is this even coming from?"

I had sharpened my tone when I threw the question out, but the man answered it with nothing more than a light snort.

"Aub. I'm your husband, remember?"

"……"

"Mm? Darling."

Letting his silken, perfectly timed reply slide past me, I shifted my gaze and slowly looked the man over.

Two sharp horns rising from the top of his head.

A long, arrowhead-shaped tail trailing behind him.

"To anyone else, I look like a perfectly ordinary human. Right?"

Oh, sure they would.

I sighed and said, "I have eyes too, Camille."

Not that it landed.

"I know. What about it?"

"……"

"Want me to kiss your eyes?"

No. There is simply no talking to him.

I groaned openly. I got the feeling even a wall shaped like a person would be easier to reason with than this.

How could anyone be this shameless? At this point, it had to be talent.

This man was my husband. The husband who had thrown his own life away two months ago.

His revival inside a canvas I'd painted was miraculous enough—and somehow, on top of that, he'd come back a demon.

This is reality?

Either I had gone mad, or the world had. One of the two was definitely not in its right mind.

"Aub. Setting that aside."

Before I'd noticed, the man had drawn close, the sunlight behind him casting his shadow over me. Between cherry-blossom-colored strands of hair stirring in the breeze, a pair of clear blue eyes stared straight into mine.

"You're not doing that thing today? Again?"

"……The walk, you mean?"

"Yeah. I even got ready early for it."

Thump. A red ribbon dropped onto my knee.

When I looked down and raised my eyes again, Camille was calmly tying the other end of the ribbon around his own neck.

"……Are you serious right now?"

"Mm? About what?"

The red ribbon.

That was what my dead husband had prepared for me—because I couldn't bear to touch him. Not so he could wear it like a dog collar!

"It goes around the wrist, not the neck. I've told you."

I pointed this out patiently, calmly, but as usual he didn't even pretend to hear.

"I like it this way better, though. Feels more like an actual walk."

"You're indecent."

"Which is exactly why I like it."

"……"

For the sake of clarity, let me make one thing plain: the husband I'd married was never like this. The Angel of Ortega. The perfect groom. The meet-the-in-laws free-pass look.

Those were the nicknames that had followed Camille around. And yet……

"Who should I kill for you this time? Your family? My friends? Or how about Belladonna?"

"Belladonna is your mother."

"Ah. Right."

"……Haaah."

Gazing up at the blue sky beyond an endless field of flowers, I let the past replay itself in my mind.

How on earth did things come to this?

Yes. Looking back, every one of these strange events began that day.

……The day I lost, forever, the person I had loved most of all.

Chapter 1. My Husband's Funeral

My husband's body was found.

The funeral was held in grand style. Perhaps even more lavish than our wedding had been.

"Belladonna, I'm truly sorry to bring you such news."

Even with the eldest son dead, the standing of House Ortega did not waver. No—it felt, if anything, as though it had grown more solid still.

"If there's anything you need, say the word at any time. And do be sure to eat properly. Promise me?"

"Sob…… hic……!"

The nobles gathered for the funeral swarmed around Belladonna like hyenas scenting a kill, each vying to offer condolences. Warm words of comfort flowed back and forth, but to my eyes it was nothing more than a well-rehearsed play.

Is there a single soul among them who grieves in earnest?

A bitter laugh nearly escaped me before it caught in my throat. I composed my expression.

……Ah, right. I'm hardly one to talk.

Pushed to the outer edge of that sea of black-clad mourners, I watched an old priest deliver his hollow eulogy and sank into my own thoughts.

"……"

So. My husband's death had apparently been a considerable shock to me, after all.

After all, a memory from my past life—one I'd long forgotten—had surfaced just now, unbidden.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

—The opening line of a novel called Anna Karenina.

But to be honest, I still didn't quite understand what it meant. Which made sense, really.

You'd have to have lived in a happy family to know.

I had lived through two families, and both had been unhappy.

……No, wait.

Would that make it three, counting now?

"Camille Ortega, eldest son of House Ortega and the pride of Lady Belladonna, was an ascetic and virtuous man all his days. Though he was called to God's side earlier than others and left us behind, we shall long remember the exemplary life he led."

When the eulogy—at tedious, interminable length—finally drew to a close, a line of sturdy laborers walked slowly forward, the coffin borne across their shoulders.

The old priest cleared his throat twice, then continued in an even voice.

"……By custom, we would now open the coffin for the rites of farewell, but at the request of the bereaved family, this shall be omitted today."

At the request of the bereaved. I had had no part in it, so the decision had to be Belladonna's will.

And I knew why.

Because my husband's face could not be shown to another soul.

Because his cause of death was……

Rumble—

"……Ah."

As if to see the departed off, the heavens tore open as though a hole had been punched through them, and rain came sheeting down.

"My umbrella……"

Right on cue with the sudden downpour, my mother-in-law Belladonna collapsed over the coffin that had been lowered into the ground.

What followed were the sounds of weeping, louder than the rain itself, and every one of them grating on my ears.

"Just look at Lady Belladonna. That iron-willed woman, weeping like that……"

"She loved her boy more than anything. Of course she would. Tsk."

"Still, they're saying he killed himself…… Is that true?"

"Hey! Mind your tongue! Quiet, I say!"

I clutched the umbrella in my hand hard enough to whiten my knuckles and fixed my gaze stubbornly straight ahead. Biting down on my lip, again and again.

"Ohh, Camille……! How—how could you leave me like this! Hic……!"

The crowd's morbid gossip, and Belladonna's distasteful wailing.

Ugh. So loud.

That was when it started.

The moment this theatrical mourning became more than I could bear.

"I must say, I'm astonished you thought to leave the house in that attire."

"……I apologize."

"I'm well aware of your lowly origins, but once you became an Ortega, you ought to have preserved a minimal measure of dignity."

Belladonna.

She who lived with a noble's decorum forever on her lips—today she hadn't even managed to pin her hair up properly.

She looked utterly unkempt. Undone.

……No. Her son died. Of course she's falling apart.

But I wasn't crying. So didn't that make the sight of that woman mourning with all her dignity in tatters—well, ridiculous?

And yet when I glanced around, everyone except me was a picture of grief.

Even a great-aunt I'd never met in my life was dabbing at her eyes. Even the relatives who hadn't shown their faces once in the entire year since I'd married into the family flung their umbrellas aside to mourn his passing.

So why am I the only one who feels nothing? Have my tear ducts simply run dry?

The question rose on its own, and I found the answer almost immediately.

……Ah.

Right. I had never loved Camille.

Not even a little.

The moment I reached that conclusion, it was as though a stone that had been crushing my chest all this time finally rolled away.

I'm back to normal at last. Yes. This is right.

I would never again be led out beneath the blinding sunlight on Camille's account. Never again would I have to steel myself against that inexplicable wave of nausea that rose whenever I looked at his radiant smile.

In other words—I had, at long last, regained my peace.

At long last. Peace.

And yet, on the night the funeral ended—only when I was finally left alone did I learn the truth.

My first life, cut short at twenty-five by the green bottle in my father's hand.

My second life, born as the eldest daughter of a baron's house still carrying the memories of that past existence, forced to endure another flavor of misery in a different shape.

And then, up to the present, begun with an arranged marriage to Camille.

"Lady Aub, I want to know more about you. So please—keep taking up my time."

Through three aching seasons, the only happiness I had ever known had been that one man, Camille himself. That was what I finally understood.