I rejected the startling realization the moment it emerged. I couldn’t care for Evander in such a way. I had spent my life alone, deliberately built myself in such a way until I needed no one, trusted no one, and relied on nothing that could be taken from me. I would not unravel now because of someone I’d built a temporary alliance with.
Yet no amount of denial could reject the truth settling over me: I had not simply grown used to him or merely come to care. Somewhere between the games and the arguments, between the truths he offered and the information he carefully withheld, between the moments I resisted him and the ones I didn’t—I had fallen in love with him.
The thought should have felt impossible. Instead, it felt inevitable—as though the path that led me to him had always been meant to end here.
A hollow, humorless laugh caught in my throat. “Of all the times to realize it.” Of course it would be too late. I had been so certain I could handle everything on my own. So determined to unravel the truth without needing him, without asking the questions that mattered.
And when the answers had finally been within reach, we had wasted the time on a kiss. My lips curved faintly despite myself. I couldn’t really call it a waste.
I lightly traced my lips, my thoughts momentarily drifting to that moment—the warmth of his hand at my cheek, the brush of his lips against mine, the way he had held me as though I might vanish if he let go. As though I had always mattered. For one impossible, fragile moment, I had felt not just wanted but chosen. Seen.Cherished.
I clung to the memory, desperate to anchor myself to it, but it slipped through my grasp like smoke, leaving only the cold echo behind with Evander’s absence. This was different from the hollow emptiness I’d always carried throughout my life, the kind I had learned to fold neatly away and ignore. This ache carved deeper, sharper—because now I knew what it felt like to have my heart held…and to feel it torn from me.
For a fleeting, dangerous breath, something like wonder bloomed in my chest. The realization of it all—of him, of us—radiant and unbearably precious. And then it shattered. What if I never saw him again, but had lost him before truly understood what he meant to me and chosen him in return?
My fingers brushed absently against one of the dried roses beside the bed, the petals were brittle beneath my touch. I had never asked him why he tended them. Never asked how we had first met. Never asked about the memory I’d glimpsed of the games we played on the balcony. Never asked what I had meant to him…before everything was lost.
I had chased mysteries my entire life, believing they would fill something inside me. Now for the first time, I understood: it had never been answers I was searching for. It had been something real and lasting that belonged to me—not stolen or borrowed, but lived.
And I had found that—not in the secrets of this castle or in the relics I had touched, but in him…the man currently beyond my reach.
My fingers tightened slightly around the brittle stem of the rose. “And now he’s gone,” I whispered. The words settled into the silence, heavy and final. For a moment, I let myself feel the loss and the fragile, unbearable possibility that I had been given something only to have it taken away before I could hold onto it.
Slowly, my fear shifted. If what we had shared had been real, then it could not simply vanish. Which meant there had to be a way to reach him.
The thought took hold slowly at first, fragile as everything else. I had felt him and he had answered, meaning the connection had weakened, not vanished. Hope stirred, not the tenuous, desperate kind I had clung to before but something steadier and undeniable.
My gaze dropped to the rose I still cradled. My trembling hands gripped the stem, causing one of the thorns to prick my palm. But the pain was nothing to the thought of never seeing Evander again, a possibility I couldn’t allow myself to even consider.
“If you’re still there…” I lifted the rose, touching it softly to my cheek. “…then I will find whatever part of you I can still reach.”
My gaze lifted slowly, scanning the room again—this time not for him, but for an object that might provide the memory that could guide my search. Out of the quiet, a faint but insistent lure emerged, brushing against my awareness like the echo of a half-remembered thought.
I turned sharply and crossed the room, my steps quicker now, steadier despite the lingering ache in my limbs. The door gave way beneath my hand, the corridor beyond stretching silent and dim as before. I followed the pull through the hall, down thetwisting staircase, back towards the place where everything had begun: the vanished prince’s bedroom.
Evander’s vast chamber remained as I remembered it, still and untouched. This time I entered looking not for the man I loved, but the object I’d touched the night I first infiltrated the palace—the memory from which this long, dreamlike journey had begun.
The crown rested on the nightstand where I had a faint memory of last seeing it before the curse, its surface dulled by a thin veil of dust, as though time itself had tried to forget it. My pulse quickened as I slowly approached, something deep within me already stirring in recognition. I reached out towards it, my hands pausing as I saw the broken piece lying next to it.
The memory of that moment rose with sudden clarity—the weight in my hands, the way the world had seemed to shift when I touched one of its shards, as though something ancient had stirred in response, and the sense that secrets lay deeper than my powers had reached.
I reached out, only to hesitate, just for a moment, before my fingers closed around the crown. Light fractured through my vision, splintering into something too bright to follow. Sound rushed in all at once—the echo of voices, distant and overlapping, as though I stood at the center of a moment I had long forgotten.
The memory gradually settled around me, and I found myself standing in the same room. The castle breathed around me, whole and unbroken. The crown rested in my hands, warm rather than cold, awake in a way I had not understood then.When I had touched the shard so long before, I had seen fragments of memory, but now as I lifted the restored crown, I was flooded with a full, unbroken recollection.
“Careful,” a familiar voice cautioned from behind me.
My breath caught. Evander. I turned and found him standing beside me—not fractured or fading as I had last seen him, but whole, watching me with an intensity that caused my pulse to race.
“I know we’ve made it a game for you to try to take my possessions, but you shouldn’t be touching that.” Though there was no real reprimand in his tone, only concern.
“You well know I view warnings as invitations.” Teasing laced my voice, and even within the haze of this faded memory, I felt the warmth of our familiar banter. I expected his lips to curve into the half-smile I had come to love, but instead his brow furrowed.
I frowned. “Is a thief unworthy to touch a royal relic?”
He reached for my hand, his grip gentle but firm. “It’s not that.” His voice softened. “You know how much you’ve come to mean to me.”
My lips quirked despite myself. “That confession remains my favorite prize I’ve ever claimed from you in this game of ours.”
