Back In Suegra state

After returning from Jarl palace.

Ivan leaned back, taking a deep breath as he watched his nephew fuming beside him, Bjorn’s fists clenched in frustration. The boy was only seventeen, but already he was obsessed with finding "his woman," convinced she was somehow hidden away by Neil Holland. Ivan felt a strange mix of amusement and exhaustion. Bjorn, barely out of his teens, dreaming of marriage, while Ivan himself—thirty years old, unbound by anything resembling commitment—remained single and indifferent to the thought.

“There are twenty-one girls in the Jarl family,” Ivan muttered, still in disbelief. “And every one of them looks nearly the same. Same long orange hair, same pale skin, same willowy figure.” His brows knitted in frustration as he ran through each encounter in his mind. “But none of them looked like her. She was… different.” The memory of that night flashed through his mind, the girl’s features burned into his memory in ways that haunted him, tugging at something he d