"I exist. In a thousand agonies. I exist"

Agony was the word he sought among all his pains, that bitter taste running like a bile through every corner of his being,eating away at what little will he had left and irrevocably destroyinglike a voracious fire that security he had created around her. He had so carefully built a little bubble to protect her, and the bubble had burst. To see her there in front of the entire naval fleet dressed in the uniform of a non-commissioned officer, Gilbert would kill him. And she looked at him, she smiled at him with her eyes lit with that color she idolized, and she could not, it was impossible, her mind had derailed without brakes before this unheard-of news, it was unfair, how could it be possible that she, having already lost so much being part of the military with her brother, was embarking on this journey.

She wanted, she wanted to make sense of it, but inside Everything was chaos; her body was in a cold sweat, she clenched her fists again and again and again under the table, she pressed her lips against her teeth insistently looking for a solution. The unrestraint of Violet's drastic ways of acting had now created a permanent sense of danger in Dietfried, that fear he felt of losing her was now fixed.

"Nor the chosen by god, but cursed"

He opened and closed his fist absorbed in his own thoughts, his hands trembled, there had been once this fear, but he had known how to deal with it, hide it and suffer it alone, today was different, today that fear had a smile.

The door to his cabin opened, he knew that whoever would enter would make him vulnerable, before it could close, he pounced on her skirts surrounding her waist hiding his ashamed feelings under the wood paneling against his knees, Violet's fingers sank into his back as she pressed herself against Dietfried with all her strength. Suddenly the captain's hands rushed across her shoulders, down her neck, to slide down her chin and hide behind her ears into the depths of her hair, the breath of his mouth burned, then suddenly he simply pushed her away, and rushed into the bathroom, all that unbridled fear and bitter taste going down the toilet now.

He turned his gaze towards her, sweat running down his forehead between his disheveled locks, Violet could see in those darken eyes, under the arch of his eyebrows that same look, the gunpowder and the sound of the cannons in the distance resounding again in his ears, and the captain's condemnation in his pupil her cardinal sin.

Violet fixed her wrinkled uniform, composed herself and in the blink of an eye simply made a bow as a sign of respect, at that hour, at that moment and on that ship she was no longer the Violet he once loved, she was just another crewman in his charge, her body froze before the coldness of the gaze of the one who had once wrapped him in her arms on those stormy nights in the bougainvillea village. Dietfried had become that sea she admired so much, stormy, cold and gelid.

The pupil of his eyes had become dark, and the wrinkle in his forehead had become so pronounced that it could almost become Everest itself. That fear masked in a reaction that for the Violet of this story was still very unknown, she did not yet know that there was such a thing as deception, her heart was still very innocent at this stage of her life.

Dietfried was vulnerable on that ship with her there, enemy spies had eyes and ears everywhere, even more so if it was Captain Bouganvillea who had survived a huge ambush, the one that had almost prevented him from returning to Violet, it was so simple to pronounce, but who knows why men always complicate things so much that have to do with feelings.

He didn't see when Violet left his office, he slammed his fist into his side cursing himself for the decision he was making, to push her away when all he wished was to have taken her hand and run her off the ship leaving her safely back in that little matchbox he had built as her home, a place where she could be safe, where he could return without thinking about the circumstances of the country.

"People aren't homes"

clearly people are not homes, they are ever changing, murky, rimonabants rivers and Violet was like one, he had stopped thinking of her as that little heart he could hide in a box in his desk; and he forgot until this instant how wild and intense her feelings were in every situation, he had let her go unnoticed and didn't take it for granted that she could find peace in the distance between them that was the size of the sea.

It was like a sound that you don't know how to explain, like when something you can't see breaks as if it were a glass when it touches the ground, maybe that was the best explanation Violet could give to Dietfried's look that day, in her cabin watching the sunset over the ocean, while the ship sailed she tried to find some logic, because hers didn't fit anymore.

In her utterly irrational happiness for any lady of the time she had found a way to break the distance between the shore and the sea, but even though she was in the same boat, she felt that now they were even farther away from each other's hearts and she could not help realizing that perhaps Dietfried did not think as she did, perhaps she could not yet visualize what her presence in the duty of a naval captain on the level of an heir to the Bouganvillea family meant, and at this thought her chest tightened, as if something or someone from within had squeezed her heart.

But Violet Evergarden was no longer the protégée of the Bouganvillea family. Violet was now an unknown naval petty officer under the tutelage of Captain Dietfried Bouganvillea, under strict orders from the maritime board as a secret weapon in the new strategy to recover the territories lost on the high seas.