Blood stains the rug—dark, spreading, wrong.Too much.
It blooms outwards like ink spilled on parchment. Writing an ending he cannot unread.
It doesn’t stop.
Like something already set in motion long before he walked through the door.
Nalya lies limp across the rug, the skirts of her gown soaking up the crimson, while her eyes blink slowly, fluttering open and closed.
For a heartbeat, Kael doesn’t move.
“Your Majesty… what do we do?” A voice asks, and he hears it like a distant echo.
“Leave,” he breathes, eyes fixed on Nalya’s limp form.
“Your Majesty?” the voice asks again.
Emotion floods him—grief, fury, confusion, anger. All of it, all at once. A collision. “Leave!” he commands, his voice dropping into a lethal growl.
Footsteps scatter, until there is nothing. Only the consuming silence ofher. It presses against his ribs like it’s trying to take up space where she used to be.
His legs move without thought, rushing to her.
He drops to his knees, and something inside him knows—before he can name it, before he can fight it—that he is already losing her. Like he is arriving at the end of something that has already happened. Because this didn’t begin today. It began the first time Maldrak taught her she did not belong to herself.
His hands shake as he reaches for her.
Not as a king.
Not as a warrior.
But as a boy who once swore he would never let anything hurt her.
A promise made with scraped knees and childish certainty—the kind that never imagined a world where he would fail.
“I can fix this,” he says, voice breaking under the weight of a promise he can no longer keep. “I can—just stay. Stay with me.”
She looks at him then. Fully. And it is worse than anything he has seen on a battlefield. Because she is not asking to be saved.She is asking to be released.
And for the first time in his life, he does not know how to fight it.
He pulls her into his lap and her body sags across his knees.
“No,” he breathes, reaching for the sheet spilling over the side of the bed. “Nalya, please. Stay with me,” he begs.
Her pale blue eyes are trained on him from somewhere distant.
“Kael,” she whispers.
His name sounds like it doesn’t belong in her mouth anymore. Like she found it somewhere far away and brought it back with her.
“It doesn’t stop,” she whispers. “Even here. Even with you.”
Her voice cracks—not loud, not dramatic. Just… worn thin.
“I thought it would. I thought if I made it back to you, it would stop.”
Her fingers curl weakly in his sleeve.
