Free Web NovelChapter 93: Chapter 93: One Last Time
Chapter 93: One Last Time
—CELIA—
"I... will stay here."
Even saying it felt strange, like I was signing away a future I had barely begun to understand. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to continue anyway because Aria deserved better than being dragged into my mess.
"In exchange for Aria..." I swallowed, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "You can do whatever you want with me... just let her go. Just like you promised."
His silence answered me.
When I looked up again, Aelith hadn’t moved. He wasn’t smiling anymore either. Instead, there was a quiet sadness on his face that I hadn’t expected to see. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t triumph.
It almost looked... disappointed.
I could tell the moment the words left my mouth that they had hurt him.
His eyes lowered briefly before he let out the faintest sigh.
"You speak as though this is a transaction," he said at last, his voice gentle enough that it caught me completely off guard. "As though your life may simply be exchanged for another."
I frowned slightly.
Wasn’t that exactly what this was?
Aria would return to the people waiting for her.
And I...
Well.
I wasn’t entirely sure where I belonged anymore.
Before I realized it, Aelith had stepped closer.
"That was never my intention," he continued quietly. "I did not bring you here to reduce you into a bargain."
His emerald eyes met mine again, unwavering.
"And I will not allow you to think of yourself as one."
I stared at him, unsure how I was even supposed to respond to that.
Because nothing about this man made sense.
He threatened to start a war and overthrown an entire kingdom.
He kidnapped me and locked me inside a barrier.
And yet...
The way he looked at me now...
It wasn’t the look of someone admiring a possession.
It was as if... he was terrified of losing the only thing keeping him alive.
"I only wish for your love, Celia..."
His voice softened even further.
Before I could react, he slowly reached for my hand.
Instinctively, I thought about pulling away.
But I didn’t.
His fingers wrapped around mine with surprising care, as though I were something painfully fragile. There was no force behind the gesture, no attempt to restrain me. Just warmth.
Then, to my complete surprise, he gently lifted my hand and rested it against his chest.
My eyes widened.
Beneath my palm...
I felt his heartbeat.
It caught me completely off guard because, somehow, I had stopped seeing him as... someone bad.
No.
Somewhere along the way, Aelith had slowly become nothing more than the villain inside my head.
Not because I didn’t understand what he had done. I understood it too well, in fact. It was easier that way, simpler to label him as someone dangerous and wrong rather than sit with the uncomfortable reality of what he was actually doing.
Not just because he had kidnapped me.
Not just because he had started a war.
But because I had already made up my mind about him before I ever truly tried to understand him.
If I called him a villain, then everything he did had a clear meaning. Everything became easier to categorize. Everything became something I didn’t have to question too deeply.
After all, I already knew this story... or at least I thought I did.
Aelith was supposed to be the fourth male lead, right? The lonely, tragic prince written into the narrative like a shadow that softened the heroine’s path. A character designed to exist at the edges of someone else’s love story, never quite the center of it, always orbiting but never fully belonging.
That was what I believed. That was what I remembered from the novel.
He was supposed to fall in love with Aria.
That was his role.
That was his fate.
That was the only version of him that made sense in my head.
Except...
The more I replayed everything, the more that certainty began to fracture.
Because nothing about what I was experiencing now matched the story I thought I knew.
No.
It wasn’t just that something had gone wrong.
It felt more like the story had never been about Aria at all.
The realization settled heavily, almost violently, deep inside my chest until it became impossible to ignore.
Aelith had never thought of Aria the way I had assumed he would.
He had never pursued her.
Never reached for her.
Never loved her.
From the very beginning, his attention had never truly belonged to her.
It had been directed...
...At me.
Not the daughter of House Valen.
Not the heroine everyone else saw when they looked at this world.
But me.
Celia.
An ordinary girl from another world who had no reason to be here, no place in this world’s logic, and no rightful existence in its story.
A nobody who had slipped through the cracks of reality itself.
An otherworlder who should have never been seen, let alone noticed.
And yet...
He had seen me.
He had followed me.
He had searched for me across months of uncertainty and impossible assumptions.
He had challenged an entire kingdom without hesitation.
Seized a throne with blood staining his path.
Declared war against an empire as if the world itself was negotiable.
Risked becoming the enemy of the entire continent without ever once stepping back.
All of it.
Everything.
For me?
The thought should have shattered me with fear. It should have made me recoil, panic, reject it outright as something unnatural and wrong.
Instead, it left me strangely still.
Because I couldn’t understand it.
I couldn’t understand how someone could look at another person and decide they were worth burning everything down for.
How love could become so absolute that it stopped being gentle and started becoming destructive.
And worse than that...
I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do with the fact that I was the reason for it.
My thoughts felt heavier, like they were sinking deeper into somewhere I couldn’t pull myself out of.
Because no matter how I tried to rationalize it, no matter how many times I told myself this was wrong, there was still that uncomfortable truth sitting right in the middle of everything.
Aelith wasn’t looking for Aria.
He had never been looking for Aria.
But more than that, what would Ren think?
That thought hit harder than I expected.
Ren’s face surfaced in my memory so clearly it almost hurt, the way he looked at me before everything went dark, the way his voice had broken when he called my name.
Somehow, Aelith had a point.
I had been so caught up in everything happening around me that I had stopped paying attention to the most fundamental truth of all.
I am not Aria Valen.
I never was.
I was simply... Celia.
A girl who had existed in an entirely different world, in a completely different life, before everything collapsed and I woke up inside someone else’s story wearing her face like it belonged to me.
And that was the part that made everything feel unsteady.
Because I had been walking through this world with Aria’s body as if it were mine. Speaking with her voice. Moving with her mannerisms. Being perceived through her existence.
At some point, I had stopped questioning how much of what people saw was actually me and how much of it was simply the shape I had been placed into.
Aelith was right about one point.
How could I be so confident that the sincerity I had been receiving from the others... from Ren, from the others who had stayed close, was directed at me at all?
Was it truly me they were reacting to, or was it the version of Aria I had unknowingly been shaping?
The "villainess" turned "better person," the narrative arc I had been unconsciously steering just by existing inside her life?
It wasn’t impossible.
In fact, it made far too much sense.
And if I told them the truth... would they even accept it?
The answer came too quickly in my mind.
No.
They wouldn’t.
Because what was I, really?
A soul that didn’t belong here.
A mistake in the structure of a story that was never meant to have me inside it. A parasite, surviving in someone else’s body, borrowing her name, her life, her existence, until I could figure out how to keep breathing without being erased.
I looked down at my hands and let out a slow breath. Then I lifted my gaze again to Aelith. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
Surely... this is the best for me, isn’t it?
If he truly meant what he said... if he was sincere, if this really was love directed at me and not some illusion wrapped around Aria’s existence... then I should be relieved. I should be happy. I should feel like I finally understood where I stood in all of this chaos.
So why did it feel wrong?
Why did it feel like something is missing?
My eyes stayed on him for a moment longer before I forced myself to push those thoughts aside. It was easier to act than to unravel everything happening inside my head.
"Very well," I finally said, my voice steadier than I felt. "Since you already know I’m Celia... then you should get to know me properly before deciding anything like marriage."
I paused slightly, searching for the right words, trying to ground myself in something logical.
"If you think I’m some well-mannered woman who is—"
"And very talented, skilled, beautiful, smart, confident, kind," Aelith cut in smoothly, as if listing facts rather than compliments, his expression completely innocent while he essentially dismantled whatever composure I had left.
My brain froze.
My face immediately betrayed me, heat rushing up so fast I could feel it in my ears.
"S-stop it!" I blurted, instantly reaching out and covering his mouth with my hand out of sheer instinct, because apparently that was the only way my body knew how to handle embarrassment.
Aelith blinked once, then only smiled against my palm like this entire situation amused him.
I quickly pulled my hand back and cleared my throat, forcing myself to regain control of the conversation before it completely spiraled.
"What I’m trying to say," I continued, a little more firmly this time, "is that since you think you already know me, shouldn’t I also get to know you properly before anything like... tying the knot even becomes a discussion?"
My brows furrowed slightly as I spoke, trying to organize my thoughts.
"I don’t have a problem with marriage in theory," I admitted, though the words still felt strange leaving my mouth in this situation. "But it should only happen when both people actually understand each other. When they’ve fully accepted each other. Flaws included. Not based on obsession or assumptions or whatever this is supposed to be."
My voice softened slightly toward the end, but the honesty remained.
Then I hesitated.
A smaller thought slipped out before I could stop it.
"Also..." I looked away briefly, my fingers curling slightly at my side. "I... want to see them one last time."
