"No." Ciel said when he saw the stack of envelopes. "Why are you still giving me these invitations? You know I never want to attend any of them."

"Young Master, please consider attending at least one of them." Sebastian tried to persuade him.

"Why?" Ciel asked.

Sebastian sighed. "Because, my lord, you are getting older now and it is part of your responsibilities as the Earl of Phantomhive."

"My company is my responsibility, policing the underworld is my responsibility, making sure that everyone in my domain is doing well is my responsibility, but attending balls and soirees is definitely not my responsibility."

"Balls and soirees are perfect occasions for you to find business opportunities. It is formal enough that you can talk business, but casual enough that you do not have to conduct a proper business meeting. It gives you exposure to opportunities that are otherwise not available to you in other settings." Sebastian countered.

Ciel seemed to think about it. "That makes sense..."

"So, shall we start again, sir?" Sebastian asked cheerfully, gesturing at the stack of envelopes.

Ciel looked at the envelopes with disdain.

"How about this? Choose three and I will not bother you with any more invitations for the rest of The Season." Sebastian compromised.

Ciel pursed his lips as he considered his options. Three parties should be tolerable and it would get his butler to leave him alone. "Fine."

Sebastian clapped his hands. "Excellent. Now, if you could..." He trailed off when Ciel picked three envelopes from the top of the stack and tossed them on the desk. "Well, I suppose that will work too."

"There. Now, leave me alone already." Ciel said.

"Of course, sir." Sebastian gathered the envelopes. "I will send the acceptance letters to these three lucky winners."

"Whatever." Ciel waved him off. "Oh, and Sebastian? If you present me with any more invitation, I will start calling you Sebas-chan."

"Understood, sir." Sebastian said and bowed before leaving.

"Young Master, Lady Elizabeth is here to see you." Sebastian announced a couple of hours later.

Ciel looked up in surprise. "What?"

"Lady Elizabeth is..."

"Yes, I heard you, Sebastian." Ciel said. "What does she want?"

"Unfortunately, nobody seems to tell me anything these days. Not Prince Soma and definitely not Lady Elizabeth." Sebastian said, shaking his head sadly. "She is waiting for you in the drawing room, sir."

Ciel gave him a look, but got to his feet. "Very well, let's see what she wants."

Ciel made his way to the drawing room with Sebastian following behind him. They reached the drawing room and Sebastian held the door open for Ciel.

"Good afternoon, Elizabeth." Ciel greeted his cousin. "What brought you here today?"

"I'd like to talk to you in private." Elizabeth said. "Paula, leave us." She told her maid.

Ciel nodded at his butler, dismissing him too. Sebastian and Paula left the room closing the door behind them.

Ciel sat down across from Elizabeth and simply looked at her, waiting.

"I want to ask you to reconsider your decision in regards to our engagement." Elizabeth said. "You are making a mistake, Ciel."

Ciel told her what he told Soma just a few days ago. "My decision is final, Elizabeth."

"I don't understand!" Elizabeth said. "I thought we were happy? I thought everything was okay? I mean, what went wrong? What... How could you do this, Ciel?!"

"I've told you, this is something that I've been struggling with for years now. I thought we could be happy, but as it turns out, it's not meant to be." Ciel said.

"Are you not happy with us?" Elizabeth asked.

"No." Ciel said truthfully. He didn't want to hurt her any further, but at this point, being blunt might be the only way to get his point across.

"Do you not love me at all?" Elizabeth asked again.

"Not in the way that you want me to, no." Ciel said. "I love you like a sister, a dear friend, nothing less, nothing more."

Elizabeth bit her lip to stop herself from sobbing. She took a moment to compose herself. "How about your parents?"

Ciel was surprised at her question. "What did they have to do with this?"

"This engagement is what your parents wanted for you. You have the obligation to them, to continue the Phantomhive line, to marry me. Are you really going to dishonor them by doing this?"

Ciel was shocked. He never thought that Elizabeth would ever bring up his parents this way. "What?"

Elizabeth looked at him. "It's your parents' wish for you, for us, to be married, Ciel!"

Ciel stared at her. Emotions brewing inside him, shock, anger, disbelief...

"Is this how you're going to honour them?! By breaking our engagement?!"

The initial shock and disbelief were gone, leaving him with anger.

"Please leave." Ciel said quietly, his hands shaking.

"No!" Elizabeth said and got to her feet. "I will not leave until you see reasons! Until you come back to your senses and resume the engagement!"

"Enough!" Ciel got up from his seat and glared at Elizabeth that actually made her take a step back.

"Ciel...?" Elizabeth was unsure now.

"How could you, Elizabeth?!"

"How could I?! How could you?! How could you do this to us when I love you so?!" Elizabeth yelled angrily.

"Is this what you do to someone whom you claim to love?" Ciel asked, anger and hurt lacing his voice.

"I didn't want to hurt you, Ciel! I just want you to see that we're meant to be! That we love each other and whatever it is that you think you're going through, I'm going to be there with you!" Elizabeth said.

"I do not love you." Ciel said coldly.

Elizabeth looked like Ciel had just slapped her. "You're lying!"

"Look me in the eye and see for yourself then, Elizabeth." Ciel said.

Elizabeth was hiccupping and tears streamed down her cheeks. "How could you do this to me? How could you hurt me so? I love you, Ciel... I really do."

"It's time for you to leave." Ciel strode over to the door and threw it open. "Sebastian!"

The butler materialized shortly.

"Escort Lady Elizabeth to her carriage." Ciel said and walked away.

"Yes, my lord." Sebastian said with a bow as Ciel started climbing the stairs.

Ciel was pacing in his study. He knew what he did was highly inappropriate, but at this point, he couldn't care less. How could she say those things to him? He was growing more and more agitated and he needed to vent. So he pulled at the call bell.

Two minutes later, someone knocked on the door.

"Enter." Ciel said and Sebastian slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. He stood by the door silently as he watched Ciel pace.

"She said..." Ciel started. "She said that I'm dishonouring my parents and my family name by not marrying her. After that, she told me she loves me."

"She is angry." Sebastian offered.

"I know that!" Ciel snapped. "I know she's angry, but I just... I never thought that she would do that."

Sebastian said nothing.

"It just caught me by surprise. But why am I even surprised?" Ciel ranted on. "You did say that she wouldn't let this go without a fight. You did say that love could make people do the impossible. And now, look at what she's done. How could one claim to love another and then do something like this?"

Silence.

"Well, say something!" Ciel turned to the demon.

"I cannot give you any answer, my lord. I told you, I do not feel love the way humans do. But right now, Lady Elizabeth is behaving like a cornered prey, if you pardon the analogy. It is exactly the way a human would react, given the circumstances."

"A cornered prey, huh?" Ciel said. "I'm a human too, you know."

"I am aware." Sebastian said.

"I could hurt you in the name of love, just like she hurt me." Ciel said.

"Yes." Sebastian nodded calmly. "May I know where are you going with this, Young Master? Are you planning to hurt me?"

"No." Ciel said, snapping out from whatever state he was in. "I... I will never want to hurt you, not like this. Not deliberately. I... would rather hurt myself."

"And I would rather you hurt me than yourself, but that is beside the point." Sebastian said. "You might be human, but you do not love like humans do, my lord, not entirely."

"Are you saying that I love like demons do?" Ciel asked, not knowing where the butler was going with this.

"Not quite. You love like I do." Sebastian said. "Neither like a human, nor like a demon."

Ciel looked thoughtful as he tried to understand Sebastian's words. "That's true. Back when I was a child, I learned about love from my parents, so I loved like they did. But then that happened and I lost it. The kind of love that Elizabeth wanted, expected from me, it's gone. Then when I learned how to love again, I learned it from you."

"It is not entirely gone, sir. Some parts of it are still there. You do love like humans do, to some extend."

"But not entirely."

"No. And in turn, you teach me how to love like you do."

"So we really do meet each other in the middle." Ciel said with a light chuckle. "As enlightening as this is, I don't understand why we're suddenly talking about it."

"I imagine that Lady Elizabeth's love for you is quite different from this, seeing that she learned it from the old you, along with her family, and dare I say, the society. In other words, it is completely human. Thus, when you did the unexpected, the unthinkable, by breaking off the engagement, it left her confused, lost, and desperate. And you, out of all people, should know what humans are capable of when they are in that state."

"We desperately try to grasp at any chance to get out, even if the chance was as thin as a spider thread." Ciel said. "A cornered prey indeed..."

"It is not about hurting you, my lord. It is about gaining control of the situation, of making sense of everything. Being engaged to you was her life, being your wife was her purpose. And you took that away from her. Right now, in her mind, the only thing that will make it right is to have you back. Just like how people would bargain with me for their souls when it was time for me to take them. They were scared and desperate and they were trying to grasp at that thin thread of hope. The hope that if only they could keep their soul, everything would be alright. Just like how Lady Elizabeth hopes that if only she could have you back, then everything would be alright. Holding onto that hope, she will do anything and use everything to climb out, even if it means hurting you."

Ciel sighed. "And you keep saying you don't understand human love."

"I do not. But I am a hunter and I understand my preys." Sebastian said.

"What can I do then?"

"That, I do not know..." Sebastian admitted.

Ciel sighed. "That makes the two of us. I guess, there's really nothing that I can do. I've done what I did and there's nothing that I can do to help her at this point."

Sebastian inclined his head. "Then what can I do for you? Would you like your tea and afternoon snack now, sir? It is still quite early, but given the recent events..."

Ciel was about to say yes, but a thought occurred to him suddenly. "Not yet. There's something that I want to do first. Something that I should've done a while back. I'm going on a walk and don't follow me."

Now Sebastian looked confused, but bowed and obeyed. "Yes, my lord."

"And no listening in either, Sebastian!" Ciel said warningly.

"Yes, sir." Sebastian complied, albeit curious.

After his anger died down, something occurred to Ciel. Elizabeth was right. He wasn't honouring his parents by breaking off the engagement. He wasn't honouring his family name by courting a demon either. So, he had to atone for that.

First, he stopped by the garden. He couldn't go empty-handed. He picked out some white roses. They were from a section of the garden that Sebastian personally attended to, that Finny wasn't allowed to touch.

Armed with some roses, Ciel made his way to the Phantomhive family cemetery and headed straight to his parents' graves.

Ever since they passed, Ciel had only visited their graves twice, something that he had to rectify. He visited them when he first got back from that horrible month. He had sat down by their graves for hours, mourning them. After that, he stood up and told himself that he couldn't grieve anymore, that he had a task to do, a revenge to get. He walked away and didn't look back.

The second time he visited them was after he finally got his revenge. He had felt obligated to tell them about it, to tell them that he had avenged them, that he had achieved what he had promised himself, and them, to do.

"Good afternoon, Father and Mother." Ciel addressed them formally. He then placed a few stems of roses on each grave. "I... I know I should have visited you more often, but I could not even bring myself to do that. I'm sorry."

Ciel didn't allow himself to think too much because he knew that he wouldn't be able to say anything then. He just opened his mouth and said whatever came to his mind without overthinking it.

"I just want to let you know, although you probably have known anyway, wherever you are..." Ciel trailed off when he realized he was starting to ramble. "I broke off the engagement with Elizabeth. I know that you wanted me to marry her, to continue the family line, but I cannot do it, not to her, not to myself."

Ciel brushed some twigs and dry leaves from the top of the gravestone. They looked like they could use some thorough cleaning. He had disappointed them, the least that he could do was to keep their graves clean. He made a mental note to talk to Sebastian about it later. Speaking of the demon...

"I don't know how you did it, Father, how you kept the darkness at bay, while having to carry this burden... I know you must be very disappointed in me. I mean, I literally made a deal with a demon." He chuckled. "Instead of living in the light, I let myself be consumed with my hatred and chose to give myself over to the darkness. Instead of marrying Elizabeth, like you wanted me to, I fell in love with a demon."

Ciel smiled wistfully as he continued to clean the gravestones.

"I will not be so bold as to ask for your blessing. I know you would not have approved of it. But I just want you to know that I'm happy. After I lost you, after that horrible month, I thought I would never be happy again, but I am happy now. He makes me happy. I can only hope that you would understand. I'm sorry for not honouring you, for not being able to be the son that you wanted me to be, for being selfish... Wherever you are, I hope you can forgive me. That's all I can ask of you."

Ciel stood there in silence for a few more minutes before he turned around and left.