The words hardly registered. They didn’t feel real. I felt like I was drifting outside my body, watching the world shift on an axis I never knew existed. The ground beneath my life had cracked wide open, revealing something ancient. Something impossible.
Can I travel through time?
Could I go back to the past? Leap forward to the future? Change things? Undo mistakes? Rewrite fate?
A thousand thoughts swirled in my head—but one cut through them all, sharper than any blade.
Did Balthazar know?
Could he travel through time?
The question coiled in my gut like venom.
I should have known everything about him by now. I should have unraveled every secret. But in truth, I knew so little.
He came and went without warning. Vanished for weeks—sometimes months and encouraged me to take lovers in his absence, only to demand absolute devotion when he returned. He’d even killed some of them, his hands as bloodstained as they were possessive.
Whenever I questioned his travels, he’d smile and deflect.
“Let’s speak of other things, my love. Where I go is of no concern to you.”
And I’d let him.
Until now.
“There’s something else we need to discuss,” Papa said.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.
More secrets. More truths waiting to undo me.
Part of me wanted to leap from the carriage. Run into the woods. Disappear before I had to hear what came next.
Instead, I sat frozen, unable to move, silently begging for the ground to open and swallow me whole.
My throat tightened as Papa’s words hit me like a crashing wave.
The rumors about me and Lord Balthazar weren’t just idle whispers anymore—they had found their way into my home. Into his ears. The man who raised me. The man who now looked at me as if I were something unfamiliar, something broken.
His eyes—so often stern—now shimmered with sadness. And yet, behind that sorrow lay something new. Accusation.
But how could he accuse me of something so vile? Of loving a monster?
I knew the things they said about Balthazar. I knew the rumors. The bodies. The blood. But none of it mattered becauseI loved him.
Fiercely. Desperately. Fatally.
He may not have been gentle. Or honest. Or safe.
But he wasmine.
My father—no, the man who hadraisedme—had no right to judge. Not anymore. Because in that moment of silence between us, I realized something devastating—he never truly knew me. And maybe he never tried to.
The color drained from his face.
“Darling girl,” he whispered. “He’s not right for you. He’s dangerous. There are whispers… that he’s a murderer.”
He swallowed hard.
