Page 32 of Scars and Crowns

I blink. "I do?"

"You always eat my chocolate cake."

" . . . Because you never finish it."

She grins mischievously. "So you still eat it."

Yuvaan chuckles beside me. "I think she won that argument."

I narrow my eyes at both of them. "You've known each other for twenty minutes."

"Twenty-seven," Sara corrects.

He looks at his watch. "Twenty-eight now."

She points at him triumphantly. "See? Mister knows."

"I stand corrected."

She giggles so hard her shoulders start bouncing. After calming down, she suddenly tilts her head. "Mister?"

"Hm?"

"Do you get scared?"

He blinks. "Sometimes."

"Of monsters?"

He smiles. "No."

"Ghosts?"

"No."

She leans even closer. "What then?"

He looks at her for a second before answering honestly. "People I care about getting hurt."

Her little face softens. "Oh." She thinks for a long moment before reaching across the table and patting his hand with her tiny one. "It's okay." His entire expression melts. "I'll protect you."

"I know you will." He clears his throat eventually, and something in his posture shifts, straightens, the way it does before he says something that matters to him.

"Princess," he says, and I feel that word land somewhere warm in my chest—he's taken to it so quickly, so naturally, like he's been calling her that her whole life instead of one week. "I wanted to ask your permission for something."

Sara's small face scrunches in genuine confusion. "Do Kings also need permission?"

I slump slightly in my seat, mortified, because this child has absolutely no filter between her brain and her mouth, and Yuvaan laughs—an actual, unguarded laugh, the kind I remember from years ago and haven't heard nearly enough of since I came back. "Yes," he tells her. "You're a very important person, after all." His eyes flick to mine for just a second, twinkling, warm, and something in my stomach turns over slowly at the sight of it.

Sara giggles, pleased with her new status. "Okay. What is it?"

"I wanted to ask," he says, and there's the smallest hesitation in his voice now, the first sign of nerves I've seen from him all week, "if I could marry your mother."

Sara's face goes completely still. All the playfulness drains out of it in an instant, replaced by something far more solemn, and I realize, with a small jolt, that she understands exactly what's being asked of her—that whatever answer she gives next carries real weight, that her fate and mine are both sitting in her small hands right now, and some part of her knows it.

"Why?" she asks quietly, all traces of her earlier cheer gone.

"Because I need it," he says simply, no performance in it at all, no grand speech, just the plain truth the way he's always given it to me. "And because I want to always protect you two."