He Told Me to Get Lost

I was born with a one-track mind.

Give me an order that’s clear enough, and I’ll carry it out to the letter.

The Queen who raised me took my hand on her deathbed. “Always obey your brother. Love him and protect him for the rest of your life!”

I nodded. I’d heard her: love my brother for the rest of my life.

Years later, my brother wrested the throne back from our uncle the Regent and asked whether any of the young gentlemen at court had caught my eye.

I looked at him and remembered the Queen’s words.

“The one I love most is you.”

His face went dark on the spot. He jabbed a finger at me and called me shameless—how dare I set my sights on my own brother?

Later, someone drugged him, and I ended up saving him without quite understanding how. When he woke, he pointed at me and snarled:

“Antonina, I have no sister as shameless as you! Get out! I never want to see you again as long as I live!”

After the Queen died, there was no one I obeyed more faithfully than my brother.

So when the palace caught fire and everything dissolved into chaos, I packed my things and ran. Far, far away.

The next time I saw my brother, his eyes were red with fury.

And yet, for some reason, tears kept spilling out of them.

“…Why did you leave me?”

“You said you’d love me for the rest of your life. Was that all a lie?”

Chapter One

I’ve never been quite like other people.

I can’t feel what others are feeling.

Even as a little girl I did things strangely. Unless someone gave me a plain, explicit order, I never knew what I was supposed to do.

The first person to notice something was wrong with me was Queen Isolde.

I was a foundling, left on the steps of St. Mary’s Abbey in the capital. The Queen saw me when she came to hear Mass there, and she carried me home to the palace.

She wasn’t my mother, but she was good to me. She named me Antonina and raised me as a princess.

I didn’t understand anything about gratitude. I only knew that I did whatever she said.

In time the Queen worked it out: anything she told me to do, I would do.

And I would do it perfectly, without a single thing out of place.

The Queen had carried too many worries in her youth, and by the time she reached middle age, someone had been slipping a slow poison into her food for years.

When the royal physicians finally discovered it, the poison had already sunk into her bones.

So she died young.

At the end, she held my hand, her breath barely a whisper.

“…Nina, there’s one thing I must ask of you.”

“Always obey your brother. Love him. Protect him!”

Only after I’d nodded hard did she let her eyes close.

From then on, the person whose word I followed

changed from the Queen to my brother, Lucian.

When Lucian took back the throne from the Regent, the Duke of Ormond, and was formally crowned, he threw a grand ball at the palace.

He pointed out the handsome young noblemen scattered across the ballroom, asked whether any of them had caught my fancy, and made it clear that with one wave of his hand he’d arrange the match.

When I didn’t answer, he asked again.

“Well, Nina? See anyone you like?”

I shook my head, looked into those cold eyes of his, and told him honestly:

“No. I don’t like any of them.”

Then, remembering the Queen’s last wish, I lifted my chin and said, with complete sincerity:

“I want to marry you, Brother, and love and protect you for the rest of my life.”

The words were barely out of my mouth

before Lucian’s face went black.

His brows knotted together, and when he spoke again, his voice had turned to ice.

“Antonina!”

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying?”

I nodded firmly.

“I’m going to love and protect you for the rest of my life.”

Lucian’s face went from black to red to black again.

He flipped the long table in front of him, sending silver and porcelain crashing across the floor.

The orchestra stopped.

Every noble in the room lowered their head. No one dared make a sound.

Those hard dark eyes were locked on me,

as if he were seeing, for the very first time, what I really was.

Lucian pointed at my face, his finger trembling with rage.

Something faint flickered in his eyes—something like shame.

“You have no shame at all! How dare you set your sights on your own brother!”

He was so angry he was tripping over his words.

“How can you be so—so unnatural, so utterly brazen?!”

I couldn’t feel why he was angry.

All I knew was that this was the task the Queen had given me before she died, and I had to see it through.