Page 34 of Dragon King’s Duty Bride

While Sia was torn on the trip for multiple reasons, the girls, however, were ecstatic.

“Grandma can make us sugar cookies!” Stella squealed.

“And Grandpa lets us feed the chickens!” Luna added.

Even Celeste was excited for the change of scenery and the opportunity to get totally spoiled. They packed small bags with excessive enthusiasm that included stuffed animals and mismatched outfits.

Sia smiled as she let Luna braid hair. She repacked suitcases and kept her voice light, but inside, something felt hollow.

Leaving felt like relief. Relief from watching him not want her and from imagining things that weren’t there. But beneath that relief was something heavier.

Grief.

Because somewhere between duty and helping with homework and dancing under wedding lights, she had started to hope. And hope, she was discovering, was far more painful than silence.

The morning they left, Lucas carried the bags to the car and kissed each girl’s forehead. He turned to Sia last.

“Be careful,” he said. His expression was neutral and controlled.

She nodded and for a split second, she thought he might say something more, but he didn’t. As the car pulled away, the girls waved wildly from the back seat.

Sia kept her eyes on the back of the driver’s head.

Relief and heartbreak, mixed with the quiet, terrible ache of realizing she had fallen for a man who had just proven to her that she meant nothing at all.

Chapter 13

Lucas

The castle had never been this quiet.

Lucas had always thought of silence as a luxury. In the years after Dian died, he’d craved it. The hush meant no condolences whispered in the hallways, no sympathetic glances from the staff, and no small voices asking questions he couldn’t bear to answer.

Now it felt like punishment. He stood in the center of the great room with his hands braced on his hips while he listened.

Nothing.

No clatter of little feet racing down the stairs. No delighted squeals as they chased each other through the rooms. No Sia’s laughter drifting from the kitchen, bright and warm and alive.

He swallowed hard.

It had been a simple thing for the girls to want to go visit their grandparents. A practical request on Sia’s part. She’d asked him three times if he was sure he didn’t mind.

He had simply shrugged. “Of course not. They should go.”

He hadn’t considered that Sia didn’t ask him to go. He hadn’t even contemplated the fact that she might be running away. He knew she would never do anything to the girls, but if she really wanted to escape him, she could use them as an excuse.

What if she didn’t come back?

He should have talked to her more about the trip. Found out if there was a specific reason she wanted to go home. After their dinner, the wine had loosened them up to where they had a normal conversation.

He felt the same mixed signals that he was convinced she had felt.

He walked through the castle like a ghost haunting his own life. The dining room table was clear. No crayons, no half-finished homework, no sticky fingerprints on the polished wood. The playroom was pristine. The girls’ beds were made, stuffed animals lined in careful rows like soldiers awaiting inspection.

He sat on the edge of Stella’s bed and stared at her small pillow. Her favorite bunny was missing from its place of honor, and he could see her cuddling it up in a strange bed at her grandma’s house.

They missed their mother fiercely. He knew that. He felt it in the way they still sometimes reached for someone who wasn’t there. In the way Stella whispered Mama in her sleep or Luna was constantly braiding someone’s hair. Or in the way Celeste tried to mother her sisters.