I take a shaky breath. “Without that tarot card, without this place, I would’ve spent my whole life thinking I was weak. That I needed someone like you to shape me. But I don’t. I never did.”
The rain streaks down my cheeks, tears I refuse to cry.
“But tell me, Alder. Just one thing.Why?Why stay here? In a Renaissance kingdom with no electricity, no hospitals, no modern anything? Why abandon a life of power and money and control for this?”
For a second, he doesn’t answer. Then he straightens.
“Because, if you saw it like I do, you would know this kingdom could be paradise. And that is exactly what I deserve.”
He steps forward, his voice darkening, deepening. “After everything I’ve done—for politicians, for corporate royalty, for billionaires who couldn’t wipe their own asses without a fixer—I earned this. I pulled the strings. Cleaned up the messes. Protected people who didn’t deserve it. I built empires, and the second things got complicated, they turned their backs on me.”
He looks at me then, his gaze wild. “Youturned your back on me.”
My mouth opens, but no sound comes.
“I needed you,” he says, and it’s the most honestthing he’s ever admitted. “When you left, everything unraveled. The company. The board. The press. I was going to be indicted, Gemma. For fraud. For wiretapping. For things no one was ever supposed to tie to me.”
“And what?” I whisper. “You thought if you brought home your sweet, small-town ex, it would all just…go away?”
“You made people believe in me,” he says quietly. “Even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Was I always just a PR move?” My voice cracks. “Have the past ten years meant anything to you?”
His silence is a confession.
“God,” I whisper. “You are so much worse than I thought.”
Lightning cracks overhead, and somewhere in the distance, the chapel doors creak open.
“Lord Lockhart!” The queen’s voice cuts across the courtyard, sharp and clear through the storm.
He stiffens.
Her silhouette appears in the archway—framed by candlelight, shrouded in shadow, her silver cloak snapping in the wind.
“You should go,” I say, nodding toward the chapel. “Your crown is calling.”
He hesitates. Just for a breath. Then he turns and walks away. Back to her. Back to the kingdom he’s chosen. Back to everything I now know he was never planning to leave.
Twenty-Four
The storm fades, but it leaves behind ruin—emotionalif not physical.
I stepped out of the courtyard, away from the stone halls that echo with power and betrayal. Now, the castle looms behind me, its dark towers jagged against a sky washed clean by rain and studded with cold, indifferent stars.
God, if I could leave this kingdom entirely, I would. I’d carve a door into the sky and walk through it without looking back.
The path softens as I descend, the harsh cliffs giving way to gentler curves where waves kiss the shoreline with quiet insistence. The air is different here—salt-tinged, threaded with the scent of wet pine and earth.
My body moves without thought, as if it knows where to go even when my mind doesn’t. And when I look up to see the small dock nestled at the edge of the moat, something in me splinters.
There, tethered to the worn wood, is the sailboat.
It rocks gently in the water like it’s been waiting for me. Like it remembers.
The sight of it punches through me—grief and memory crashing together in my chest. The wind in my hair. His laughter. Strawberries and honey. The moment I let myself believe I was seen. That my heart was safe.
I hesitate at the edge of the dock, breath clouding in the cool night air. I take a tentative step as if I can walk backward through time, and the wood creaks softly beneath my feet.
