[18+]
[MATURE CONTENT]
He died once — pushed to death by the one person who had spent years making his life hell.
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He woke up in someone else's body. Someone else's wedding. Someone else's empire.
The rules of his new life were simple: smile at the banquets, pour the tea, be the perfect house-husband. Survive. Gerffron Wadee was very good at surviving. He had already done it once, in a different body, in a different world, under the hands of someone who hated him for simply existing.
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He had not planned on Styrmir.
He had not planned on the boy locked in the dungeon beneath the estate — eighteen years old, body wasted to half that, eyes like winter that had forgotten it was allowed to melt. He had not planned on the way that boy flinched at raised voices but never at his. Had not planned on the nights spent teaching him to read, the mornings teaching him to fight, the quiet dangerous in-between hours that felt like something Gerffron had never once been allowed to have.
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He told himself it was pity. Then responsibility. He ran out of lies around the time Styrmir started looking at him like he was the only fixed point in a spinning world.
The Duke has her own secrets. The Crown Prince has his own designs. And the past Gerffron thought he'd left behind in another life has followed him across worlds, wearing a brand new face.
Gerffron Wadee has survived one lifetime of being destroyed by someone he trusted. He knows exactly how dangerous it is to let someone matter.
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He lets Styrmir matter anyway.
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Because some loves don't ask permission. They just arrive — quiet, inevitable, and absolutely impossible to undo.

BL isekai | slow burn | dark secrets | he came back to life just to lose his heart all over again

He knew it was her by the footsteps — quick, purposeful, carrying the specific weight of someone who has made a decision and is moving before she can unmake it. She had brought someone with her. Two someones. He heard their breathing in the doorway and felt, distantly, through the thickening haze of fever, the absurdity of being worth a consultation.


"He needs to be moved," Sera said. Not to him. To whoever stood behind her.


"Lady Elowen's orders were that he not leave the grounds." Sera's voice was very even. "She said nothing about the east tower specifically. If he stays here another night in this cold he will not survive to be anyone's prisoner."


Gerffron wanted to tell them not to trouble themselves on his behalf, that he had been inconvenient enough to the Wadee household and preferred not to add dying to the list of grievances. He opened his mouth. What came out was not words.


He had no clear memory of the stairs — only the sensation of movement, of hands that were careful in spite of everything, of cold corridor air giving way to slightly warmer corridor air, of doors. He surfaced briefly in a room that smelled of cedar and old candle wax and something floral that his fevered mind could not immediately place.


The room was familiar in the way that things become familiar when you have not seen them for a long time but they have continued existing in your memory in your absence, unchanged, waiting. The bedroom they had assigned him when he first arrived at Wadee mansion as consort — before the east tower, before the sentencing, before everything. The cedar wardrobe. The window with the heavy curtains. The bed, which was not a pallet on stone.


He felt the mattress beneath him with a gratitude so acute it embarrassed him.


Sera set a cloth on his forehead. Cold water. He closed his eyes.


"Tell no one he has been moved until morning," she said quietly to someone near the door.


Gerffron lay in the old bedroom and felt the fever climb and climb and climb, and thought, in the last clear interval before the delirium began in earnest, that it was a strange thing — to have endured thirteen months in the east tower without breaking, only to be undone by his own blood.


Chapter 44 - Chapter-43~Carried