Whether it was due to the nightmare that had visited him without fail today or because of the stomach ache, the boy’s mind couldn’t easily return to reality.
Furrowing his brow slightly as he retraced his hazy memories, Caelus blinked slowly.
He could feel his memories growing a fraction clearer each time his vision closed and opened.
‘Ah…’
‘I was kidnapped.’
‘But my stomach doesn’t hurt.’
The pain that felt as though someone were violently wringing out his insides had vanished as if it were a lie.
Unless one had consumed a panacea, some trace of discomfort usually lingered, but right now, he felt completely fine, as though he had never been sick in the first place.
“Your Highness.”
He recalled the person who had called out to him with a deeply troubled expression.
The gaze that was always angled away had been directed straight toward him.
The dark green eyes that used to be hazy shone with clarity.
The face that had been utterly indifferent—as if it wouldn’t even care if a person died right in front of him—had been dead serious.
As if some catastrophic event had occurred.
That man was Caelus’s kidnapper.
Caelus slowly pushed himself up.
The kidnapper lay slumped on the bed, having offered up his thigh while his upper body remained hunched over.
‘Why?’
A question arose in Caelus’s mind.
His luminous violet eyes calmly scrutinized the man before him.
Though it was originally dark brown, his hair was somehow gradually becoming stained black.
Dark green eyes devoid of any vitality, paired with a pale complexion.
A sharp gaze with the outer corners of his eyes tilted slightly upward.
He possessed an appearance that couldn’t be called pleasant even as a courtesy.
When he first faced that face after opening his eyes, Caelus had felt a sense of bleakness.
He had an intuition that it might be difficult to make it out of this place alive.
However, that thought vanished before long.
The kidnapper had meticulously checked over Caelus with a blunt face.
Not only had he treated the injuries sustained during the kidnapping process, but he had also provided meals.
And…
“Your Highness is not useless. Rather, you are so noble that it is a problem.”
“Your Highness is a precious person!”
“Your Highness did nothing wrong. And I am not scolding you for it either. How could I dare scold Your Highness? So, you don’t need to shrink back.”
The kidnapper had said incomprehensible things.
Every time he listened to what the kidnapper said, the boy felt a sharp, prickling ache in his heart.
Those words weren’t actually much different from what his mother used to say.
Yet, they sounded entirely different.
Was it because the tone was slightly different?
Or else…
‘Strange person!’
There were many people who treated Caelus well.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say he had received the most precious treatment in the empire before the Empress died.
Perhaps because of that, Caelus couldn’t help but notice it even more keenly: the strange warmth hidden within Enoch’s actions.
That warmth resembled what he used to feel from his nanny.
‘Nanny.’
It was a presence he hadn’t thought of in a very long time.
Caelus’s first nanny, and the person who had cared for him until he was around four years old.
The person who had vanished one day without a trace or rumor, under the pretext that she was making Caelus weak.
When she vanished, Caelus had bawled his eyes out.
The Empress had looked at her son pitifully and starved him for two days.
Holding the boy—whose mind had grown hazy from extreme hunger—in her arms, his mother had said firmly:
“Prince, does it hurt? Do not forget this current pain. This is precisely the price of weakness. Weakness always exacts a price like this. Do not trust anyone except this mother of yours. The only one who loves the Prince is me.”
His mother’s embrace as she spoke those words had been deeply uncomfortable, and her hands were nothing but cold.
After that day, Caelus had intentionally forgotten his nanny’s existence.
Because remembering her only brought tears and made his heart ache.
As he tried to forget her like that, at some point, she truly was forgotten.
In fact, the boy hadn’t thought of or missed his nanny once over the past few years.
Yet, Enoch had dragged that presence back out.
A man who was the prince’s kidnapper, and someone he had spent a mere single day with.
“…”
At night, his nanny used to read various fairy tales to Caelus.
Among them, Caelus’s favorite was a story about a knight who went to rescue a princess kidnapped by a dragon.
For some reason, the young Caelus had thought of himself as the kidnapped princess.
“A princess? Our Prince, do you want to be the princess in this story?”
“I don’t want to be her, I am a princess!”
The nanny would look at the boy with slightly sad eyes before gently stroking his hair.
“Then, who might the knight be who will come to rescue our Prince?”
“I don’t know! But I’ll wait anyway!”
“Shall we do that? Our lovely Prince.”
The past memories resurfaced so vividly that it made his previous forgetfulness feel like a lie.
‘The knight…’
The knight who would come to rescue him.
He had waited for such a presence.
To the point where he didn’t even know why he was waiting.
He simply thought that if he met the knight, he would be able to go somewhere other than this place.
To a world entirely filled with nothing but happiness, just like the fairy tales described.
Emerging from his past memories, Caelus gazed at Enoch once more.
Staring at Enoch without so much as blinking, a deeper intensity, different from before, lingered in his eyes.
Caelus reached out a hand toward Enoch with utmost caution.
The boy gently caressed his cheek with a clumsy touch.
Strangely, no warmth could be felt from the smooth skin.
Yet, for some reason, he didn’t dislike the feeling at all.
Emboldened, the boy also gently touched the tips of Enoch’s exceptionally long, dense eyelashes.
Feeling a ticklish sensation at his fingertips, he firmly suppressed a reflex to burst into laughter.
Next, he wound the long hair that fell past the nape of Enoch’s neck around his finger.
Not knowing how to treat the entity that had caught his eye, he was caressing him with his own version of gentleness, but the gestures—steeped in clumsiness—resembled a young child touching a newborn puppy for the very first time.
The corners of Caelus’s mouth turned up soundlessly.
‘Finally, the knight has come to rescue me.’
It was a hasty conclusion that he could only make because he was still young.
But from Caelus’s perspective, it was an undeniable truth.
The fact that Enoch was his kidnapper didn’t matter much.
Though he was in a space that was incomparably uncomfortable and dilapidated compared to the imperial palace, his heart was more at peace than ever before.
Moving his body cautiously, Caelus lay down right beside Enoch.
The boy’s gaze remained fixed unmovingly on Enoch.
His mind was filled entirely with a single thought.
‘I will absolutely never lose him.’
The warmth he had barely managed to grasp would never be lost in vain again.
