Warmth of Her Nearness

Chapter 32: Warmth of Her Nearness

━━━━━━ʕ• · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·•ʔ━━━━━━

“Turn your wrist.”

Her fingers were on my neck again.

“—h.”

They were cold, steady, and rough.

Yet, her touch felt familiar, for reason I don’t know.

The spell circle on the floor flared as the mana shifted.

They weren’t running wild. Or blasting explosives. Just… quiet like a lake.

“Like this,” the Saintess said. “Your mana control is worse than a rookie. And your core is leaking too much mana on the outer line.”

“No, It’s not,” I muttered. “Besides, didn't you say I was talented?”

“I said you were talented when you had your memories,” she said. “Right now, you’re pouring mana like a broken jug. Still, with time, I can help you regain control.”

I snorted.

“But this isn’t really about helping me, is it?” I said. “It’s for your own gain, too.”

She didn’t reply.

The circle settled.

A soft glow spread out from where my palm hovered, washed over the cracked relic at the centre, and

seeped into the fracture lines.

Support magic: Stability. Reinforcement.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered.

I did.

“Again,” she said.

“How many broken toys do you have?” I asked.

She glanced at the shelves.

The office we were in. She called it a “research wing”, but it was just four walls, three overloaded

bookcases, two desks, and one long couch that I had accidentally fallen asleep on twice, was stuffed with things that hummed.

It felt far too modest for someone like her. I couldn’t imagine why she preferred a place like this.

Old icons. Fragments of gates. Pages that had to be read through three different filters because one glance unshielded would fry the brain

“You wanted something low‑risk?” she said calmly. “This is low‑risk.”

“What part of ‘ancient cursed artifact’ says low‑risk to you?” I asked.

“I’m here,” she said softly, closing the gap and letting her fingers brush mine. “I won’t let any harm touch you and because the oath binds us, your life is mine as much as my own. Should you die… I die

too.”

“Well… we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

I pulled my hand back.

The relic held.

No cracks spread.

No screams.

Small win.

I rolled my shoulders.

“So,” I said, glancing at her, “another relic stabilized. Should I be expecting a reward? A stamp card, maybe? Ten of these and I get something fancy, right?

“No,” she said. “You live to see another day. And you get the honor of joining me for dinner.”

Her mouth twitched, just enough for me to file it under ‘almost smiled’.

─ ·𖥸· ─

The terrace we sat on jutted out from one side of the Saintess’s residence. It was all pale stone and glass, overlooking the inner garden that the Church pretended was public but everyone knew belonged to her.

Vines climbed the pillars. White flowers clustered along the railing in thick waves. Somewhere water ran, soft and continuous, hidden by greenery.

Her fork dipped, flicked, and the sliver of garnish disappeared from the edge of my meat. She set it aside on her own plate without looking down, her eyes still turned toward the glass wall and the garden beyond.

I watched the empty spot on my plate for a moment.

Of all the things that had happened to me lately, that tiny movement bothered me more than it

should have.

“…You don’t like that?” I asked.

She turned back to me, the light from the terrace catching on her lashes.

“I don’t,” she answered simply.

“That wasn’t on your plate.”

“It was about to be in your mouth,” she said. “You were already pushing it away with your knife.”

I glanced at my hand.

She was right. My grip on the knife had shifted without my notice, the blade angled to nudge the thing

aside.

“You could’ve said it, no? I could have handled it myself,” I said.

“I know,” she replied. “I didn’t do it because you couldn’t. I did it because it bothered me.”

I cut a piece of meat and tasted it. No sharp bitterness or unwanted aftertaste.

She had been right, which annoyed me more.

Our table was small. Intimate. Only two settings. The attendants had placed dishes and vanished with soundless steps, leaving us alone the way they had done every day since I’d agreed to “co-operate.”

“Does the food suit your taste?” she asked, breaking the quiet.

“It’s edible,” I said.

“I’m glad.”

“You seem to know my taste.”

She lifted her glass, cradling it by the stem. “You were difficult to please in the past,” she said. “That

much was clear long before you walked into this house.”

“How long ‘before’ are we talking?” I asked.

She sipped, then set the glass down untouched after the first taste, as if she’d only used it to mark time.

“Long enough,” she said. “The Association sends us reports, you know. On promising talents. On dangerous ones. You were often in the middle, where those two lists overlapped.”

My fork paused.

“That’s a nice euphemism for ‘problematic,’” I said.

" 'Problematic’ hunters die quickly,” she said. “However, you did not.”

I chewed, swallowed, and let my eyes wander over her face instead of answering.

The Saintess today was not the Saintess of that day. The light robe draped over her shoulders was softer, half open at the throat, the formal gold embroidery traded for simpler thread.

Her hair was still braided back, but one small strand had come loose and fell along her cheek.

She hadn’t noticed.

“Before I lost my memories,” I said, “What kind of past did we share and what was I to you?”

Her fingers stilled where they had been tucking the napkin more neatly at her side.

It was the question I was curious about:what was her relationship with Han Si-woo, and how much

had she lied about? What was her real agenda?

“To me?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “You know my name. You speak as if you’ve known and watched me. You have me here,

eating your food. That’s not just out of some Church duty.”

She folded her hands on the table. She had long fingers, the kind that should have held instruments or weapons, not rosaries.

“We met at Association assemblies,” she said at last. “Conferences, joint raids, negotiations. You were always standing just behind someone more important, doing most of the work, saying very little.”

“Ah, sounds so like me,” I lied.

“You annoyed my priests,” she continued. “They said you asked too many pointed questions. About resource allocation. About risk.”

“Still sounds like me.”

“You never asked me a single thing,” she said.

My tongue stalled.

“Is that a complaint?” I asked.

“It’s an observation,” she said. “I remember everyone who looks at me too much. Or not at all.”

Her gaze met mine across the table, steady and level.

“So what was I?” I asked again. “An annoyance? A name on a report? Someone special? Or… what did you call it, Storm?”

“A storm is chaos that doesn’t know what it wants,” she said. “You were not that.”

She let the next silence stretch, as if weighing each word.

“You were…special,” she said, and the word landed oddly between us.

Familiar.

The way those blue eyes had watched me walk in, the first day. Not with surprise that I was alive, but with the weary relief of someone who had been waiting too long for a late train.

I pushed my plate back an inch.

Still it wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now you are here,” she said simply. “Eating with me instead of throwing yourself into whatever mess

the Association sets on fire next. For that, I am… grateful.”

Her tone didn’t soften much on that last word, but something in her expression did. The hard line at

the corners of her mouth wavered.

She really meant it.

“You’re being honest awfully freely for someone who deals in half-truths by profession,” I said.

“We are not in the cathedral,” she said. “I do not have to perform all the time.”

She reached for her own plate. Her grip on the fork was neat and practical; no affectation. She cut her food into smaller pieces than necessary, as though more concerned with control than pleasure.

It was the small things that told you what they were used to.

The Saintess chewed, swallowed, set her fork down between bites instead of keeping it poised. She

took her time. Not because she enjoyed the taste; because she was measuring her presence at this table like a variable in a ritual.

Like my mood might shift with each bite.

Sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t watching, her eyes dropped to my hands. To the way my

fingers curled on the table edge. To the small scars.

Not in disgust.

As if she was tracing a map she knew by heart and checking for new marks.

“So,” I said, keeping my voice flat, “at those assemblies, was I the one avoiding you? Or were you the one watching me from afar?”

A flicker crossed her face. Not quite amusement. Not quite guilt.

“I was the one standing on a dais, surrounded by officials,” she said. “You were the one slipping out of the hall the moment the speeches ended.”

“Still me,” I said.

“You never once approached me,” she went on. “That alone made you interesting.”

“Everyone else tried to climb you,” I said.

“Yes.” Her lip curled, very slightly. “Or to use me as a ladder. It becomes… predictable.”

Something in my chest twisted.

I’ve seen that expression before.

Not on an altar. Or a couch. Or an office where holy light didn’t reach.

The details blurred when I pushed at them. Names, places, voices. It was like trying to remember a word in a language I hadn’t spoken for years.

Only the feeling stayed.

She cut another piece, then paused halfway and set her knife down instead.

“You asked another question,” she said quietly. “Why I chose you. For this… research.”

She said the last word in a way that told me she knew I didn’t trust it.

“I did,” I said. “You avoid crowds. You avoid attention that isn’t worship. Yet somehow you find time to bring a supposedly dead traitor into your private residence and feed him.”

I leaned back in my chair.

“That doesn’t sound like something a Saintess would do.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

Outside, the wind stirred the white flowers along the railing. Their petals brushed each other in soft, restless movements.

She folded her hands again, this time more tightly. The knuckles paled.

“The Revelation came,” she said. “Not as a voice. As a weight I could not move from my chest.”

I almost snorted at that, but the look on her face stopped me.

“I saw your name,” she said. "And then… a feeling.”

“What feeling?” I asked.

“That if I let them close the file…” She breathed out slowly. “I would lose something I had no right to lose a second time.”

“I have had many visions,” she said. “Some bright, some cruel. Most fade when they leave my lips. This

one did not. It sat with me. Day and night.”

“And told you to bring me here,” I said.

“It told me,” she answered, “that if I did nothing, I would regret it more than anything else I had already done.”

Her eyes met mine. There was no theatrics in them. Just a bone-deep exhaustion I recognised too well.

“So you acted,” I said. “On a feeling.”

“I am a Saintess,” she said. “If I do not act on revelation, what am I?”

“An ordinary woman,” I said before I could stop myself.

Silence.

Something flickered in her gaze. A thin, sharp crack running through the blue.

“Do I look ordinary to you?” she asked.

The question wasn’t proud. It sounded almost… bitter.

I let my eyes travel over her. The perfect posture. The deliberate movements. The faint dark under her

eyes that the Church’s healers hadn’t erased.

“No,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

Her mouth quirked at that.

“So you saved me because some holy weight sat on your chest,” I said. “Not because of who I am.”

“Who you are,” she said, “is the reason the weight stayed.”

She looked down at the plate again, then pushed it aside untouched.

“When I saw your name,” she said softly, “I knew I would not sleep again until I found out if you were alive or not.”

Coming from her, it sounded less theatrical and more like a quiet confession, scraped raw.

“And now that you know?” I asked. “That I’m alive.”

She held my gaze.

“You are here,” she said. “That is enough to keep me working.”

That was worse.

If she had said “happy,” it would have been easier to dismiss. “Working” meant this was still a task. An ongoing project.

I nodded slowly, buying time.

“So I’m both revelation and workload,” I said. “How nice.”

“You make it sound its not,” she said.

Our eyes locked again. The air between us tightened.

If I pushed now, she might show more. If I stayed quiet, she might fold herself back into the Saintess the rest of the world saw.

I chose the smaller risk.

“Back then,” I said, “before my memories vanished. Did I talk to you? Even once.”

She watched me for a long time.

“Once,” she said.

“How thrilling,” I said dryly. “What did I say? ‘Your Holiness, nice weather?’”

A corner of her mouth lifted, but the humour didn’t stay long.

“You said,” she murmured, “that if the Church wanted more from you than you had left to give, they would have to pay in blood.”

“And what did you say?” I asked.

“I told you,” she said, “that Heaven keeps the receipts.”

My fork lay forgotten.

Her hands were empty now. The way they rested on the table, fingers barely touching the wood, made

them look lonely.

It annoyed me.

“If your Revelation told you I’d be here eating lunch with you,” I said, “it had a sense of humour.”

I pushed my chair back a little. The world swayed, just a fraction, not from mana but from the sheer weight of how she looked at me.

Not like a Saintess.

“It only showed me your name,” she said. “The rest, I chose.”

Like someone who had found a thing they thought they'd lost a long time ago, and hadn’t yet decided

whether to hold it or throw it back into the sea.

I stood.

“I’m going to walk,” I said. “Before your cooks bring dessert and you tell me I liked sweets before my brain got scrambled.”

Her gaze tracked the small movement I made as I adjusted my sleeve. She noticed everything. The tremors I thought I’d hidden. The way I shifted my weight off my left leg first because the right still ached more from Russia’s frozen hell.

I turned away first, breaking the line between us.

Behind me, I heard the whisper of fabric. She had stood as well.

“Si-woo,” she called.

I didn’t turn. “What is it?” I asked.

“The garden here is…" She searched for the word. "Careful. Every line watched. Every leaf expected to behave.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“There is another place,” she said.

That made me turn.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

After that, I wandered through the garden for a while. Before I realized it, night had settled in.

“I’ll have a car prepared,” she added. “You can rest here tonight, or return to your penthouse. Either way, my people will fetch you before sunset.”

“Giving me options,” I said.