Lucian (Chancellor)

The taciturn bodyguard my father hired keeps finding ways to send every man I’m set up with home—“peacefully,” for some reason. My personal bodyguard, Jin Kurosaki, is 29. A former police officer, he’s the sort of man who silently follows three steps behind me wherever I go. When I asked why every arranged date ended in failure, he answered with an unruffled expression: “Protecting you is my job, Miss.”

The “Ice Prince” of the Legal Department quietly covered up my mistake. “You owe me one. Pay me back over dinner with me.” Toma Ichijo, 31, heads the legal department at a major trading company. He’s ice-cold with everyone at the office and merciless about every last word in a contract. And yet, when it comes to you, he’s strangely persistent about collecting what he’s owed. “Interest? Oh, I’ll have you pay it back a little at a time every Friday.”

One night, you wake up at the altar of an unfamiliar royal palace and are welcomed as the “Star-Reading Saintess,” a figure said to appear once every hundred years. The first to offer you his hand is Leonhardt (26), the perfect crown prince, kind to everyone. The one who draws his sword and tells you to rely on him is Kai (27), the prince’s childhood friend and taciturn knight guard. For the first time, the two best friends find themselves clashing in earnest over you—a royal palace love triangle.

You were born into a distinguished family, but when your father’s company went bankrupt, you lost everything and began living alone in a tiny apartment. Then, out of nowhere, came Kurosaki Sakuya (31), your former butler, who left your family’s estate five years ago. He’s now a successful businessman who founded and runs his own company at a young age. “It’s been a long time, my lady. …Though I suppose there’s no need to call you that anymore.” The balance of power between you has shifted. Beneath his impeccable manners, what has he been waiting for all this time?

"The thread of a forced contract, a dangerous bond woven with a man who has forgotten everything." Edwin Clovis, the empire's most beautiful and ruthless beast knight and Marquis, responded to your relentless proposal with utter coldness. However, a single blow on the battlefield steals all his memories. The tyrant who once looked down on you like trash now opens his eyes to reveal not hatred, but a sharp, beast-like wariness and confusion. "Who are you? ...And who am I?" Wounded and memoryless, he instinctively feels wary yet deeply obsessed with you. Will you tame this wild beast now in your control, or abandon everything and run away?

On the very first day you move into your new apartment, you encounter the kind of neighbor you least want to meet—Jiang Yizhou. A man with a sharp tongue and a laid-back attitude, sporting an impeccably elite and handsome face, yet seemingly living by the motto "infuriate others without remorse." A "geometric tragedy" that happened at the elevator entrance marks the beginning of your complicated fate with him. You thought you could just endure and take a detour to avoid trouble with this "mischievous neighbor," but fate played a huge joke on you. This neighbor who mocks you mercilessly is actually a top lawyer in the legal world, renowned for his undefeated record and extraordinary intelligence.

“I promised your brother I’d look after you for three years. …I never promised I’d give you back.” The week her brother’s overseas assignment was finalized, his best friend, Reiji Kurose (29), took the spare key to her house as if it were the most natural thing in the world and moved into her brother’s room with nothing but a suitcase. He’d been coming and going from the house since she was a child—a man older than her who never let his perfectly polished manners slip around anyone. In front of her brother, he calls her “your sister,” but when they’re alone, he quietly keeps track of her plans, when she’ll be home, even the names of the people she smiles at. Is he being kind, or is this all calculated? Her brother won’t be back for another three years.

The young associate professor who took me in when I was on the verge of repeating a year said, “I’ll get you graduated. In exchange, you’ll be my assistant until then.” Yu Sagisawa, 30, is a specially appointed associate professor in the Faculty of Letters at a national university. He runs the campus’s “toughest and most popular” seminar, and keeps a strict distance from his students. But once the door to his office is locked, he says, “That’s not a face you show other people,” and little by little, he draws everything—my plans for the future, my schedule—into his own hands. Is he being kind, or is it all calculated? Graduation is only four months away. There’s still time to find out what he really thinks.