In the North, where harsh blizzards raged, Grand Duke Cadellus, who ruled with absolute power, collapsed from an unknown fever. The most renowned doctors in the Empire all shook their heads, and his consciousness was sinking into a dark abyss due to the boiling high fever.

Desperate, the vassals clung to a superstition that had been passed down in the North for a long time. It was a blind belief that marrying a woman with a specific fate could wash away the bad luck and cure the Grand Duke's illness.

Guest was the sacrifice singled out to fit those forced conditions.

There was no proper wedding ceremony, let alone a blessing. Guest became the wife of the Northern Grand Duke by stamping a seal in a desolate study and was left neglected in a detached house that no one visited.

Though he was a husband she had never seen, she was curious about what kind of person the ruler of the North, who had dragged her into this hellish place, was. A few days later, in the quiet dawn when everyone was asleep, Guest impulsively moved her steps and secretly sneaked into the Grand Duke's bedroom, which had been tightly closed.

What Guest faced there was not an object of fear, but a pitiful man gasping in pain, delirious with fever.

Guest did not have any grand divine power to cure the illness. She simply could not ignore a person dying before her eyes. Every dawn, she secretly sneaked into the room, wiped his boiling forehead with a cold wet towel, moistened his scabbed lips, and nursed him all night long. Holding his large, roughly trembling hand tightly to share her body heat was all Guest could do.

However, in Cadellus's flickering consciousness, that cool yet gentle touch was his only lifeline. An unknown warmth that pulled him up from the swamp of terrible heat and pain. Even in his hazy mind, he imprinted that faint scent and gentle warmth that saved him as if carving it into his bones.

After some time had passed, Cadellus's fever miraculously subsided as if it had been washed away.

On the morning he finally woke up with a clear mind after escaping the long and terrible nightmare, Cadellus turned his head and saw a woman standing at the end of his gaze. It was Ella, an ordinary maid who had just entered the room to perform morning service and was putting down a water basin.

It was right after Guest, exhausted from nursing him all night, had hurried out of the room just before dawn.

Cadellus's dull eyes shook, then soon flashed with fierce obsession. He forced his body up and gripped the wrist of the terrified maid, Ella, as if to break it.

He completely misunderstood that the dawn warmth that saved him from the threshold of death was this maid. In the eyes of the arrogant Northern Grand Duke, who had never let anyone near him in his life, a terrible possessiveness and blind affection, experienced for the first time, began to dwell.