Chapter 4
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“……!”
Ellia’s eyes flew open.
With a gasp, she clutched her chest and panted for breath.
Her body tilted, and she fell face-first onto the floor.
Clatter!
Her elbow must have struck something as she fell, because a loud noise rang out.
“Your Highness!”
The area around her instantly erupted into commotion.
“Your Highness, are you all right?”
Someone placed a hand on her shoulder. But the pain of a blade piercing her heart remained so vivid that Ellia couldn’t register the voices around her.
“Aaaah!”
She screamed reflexively in shock.
She had mistaken the hand on her shoulder for that of one of her attackers.
After batting the arm away, she sat trembling, only to see the startled face of a knight.
“Your Highness?”
“Hah, hah……”
Only then did she recognize the familiar uniform of a royal guard.
“Did… did you come to……”
Save me?
No, more importantly, hadn’t she clearly been stabbed through the heart?
The hand she braced against the floor trembled as though it didn’t belong to her.
Cold sweat poured down her back until it was soaked.
The murmuring around her buzzed loudly in her ears.
‘Where am I……?’
Ellia looked around with a dazed expression.
People were staring at her with startled faces.
Every one of them was dressed entirely in black, almost unnaturally so.
When she lowered her gaze, she saw that she, too, was wearing a black dress.
It was a scene she had seen before.
Not recently, but a long time ago.
‘Adit’s… funeral?’
Ellia looked at the chrysanthemums scattered across the floor around her.
They were flowers she had knocked over with her elbow when she fell.
“Why is this……”
Ellia murmured in a trembling voice and turned her gaze.
Amid heaps of chrysanthemums piled high enough to dye the entire world white, she saw a long coffin.
Even after so much time had passed, there was no way she could have forgotten the sight of that coffin.
Adit.
It was the coffin containing his body.
‘How……?’
Cold sweat trickled down her cheek.
Ellia stared at the coffin in disbelief.
Her sky-blue eyes shook uncontrollably.
“Adit……”
It had already been more than three years.
Three whole years had passed since Crown Prince Adit died and his funeral was held.
The Crown Prince, who had promised to marry her properly once she came of age and fully presented as an omega, had met an untimely death.
It was the sudden death of a young Crown Prince with a bright future ahead of him. The entire kingdom had been shocked and plunged into mourning.
What happened then had also been a tremendous shock to Ellia.
He had been the only person who could have become family to her after she lost her parents at a young age.
He had been a kind and gentle man who comforted her loneliness.
There had even been a time when she dreamed that she and Adit might build a warm and happy family together.
Had he not died so suddenly.
‘His funeral? That’s impossible.’
He had already died three years ago.
His funeral had also been held back then.
So why was she attending his funeral now?
“Ugh… urgh.”
Her head spun as though it had been violently stirred, and nausea rose inside her.
Ellia covered her mouth and gagged.
The murmuring around her grew louder.
Someone approached her and repeatedly asked whether she was all right.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please excuse me.”
She could feel their gazes clinging to her back, but she had no time to worry about them.
Still in a daze, Ellia pushed her way through the crowd as though fleeing.
Only after reaching a deserted area did she brace herself against a wall and stand there, panting heavily.
‘What is… happening……?’
Everything was confusing.
‘A funeral? Today?’
That couldn’t be.
She had definitely died. She had been stabbed through the heart.
Ellia frantically ran her hands over her body.
She checked the area around her heart again and again. Yet there was no trace anywhere on her body of the horrific wound she remembered.
There was no way the vivid pain that had pierced through her entire body could have been false.
“What happened……?”
She had clearly been in the royal palace when she was suddenly abducted. Then she had been stabbed in the heart and killed.
Yet when she regained consciousness, she found herself at Crown Prince Adit’s funeral three years ago.
Her thoughts were such a tangled mess that Ellia could only stand there blankly.
‘Could it be… that I returned to the past……?’
She had died, yet she was alive.
And today was Adit’s funeral, an event she had already lived through three years ago.
When she pieced together those simple facts, there was only one possible answer.
She had returned to the past.
“…That can’t be.”
It was the only possible conclusion. Even so, the truth was so difficult to accept that Ellia stood there in a daze.
Was she dreaming?
Or had the abduction been a dream from the beginning?
She couldn’t tell which parts of what she had experienced had been real.
Then her face grew hot, and a sudden wave of heat swept over her body.
“Mm……”
Heat had suddenly overtaken her body as though she had come down with an acute fever.
At the same time, her pheromones slipped beyond her control.
Ellia knew this unpleasant sensation, the feeling of her own body refusing to obey her, all too well.
‘A heat? Now, of all times?’
Ellia bit down hard on her lower lip.
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