“You’remeddling.”
“Semantics.” She turned to Kieran, though he was peering a bit off her right shoulder. “You’re welcome. And now I’ll leave you two alone. Try not to combust before I find you again.”
“Cordelia—”
But she was already shimmering out of sight, trailing laughter and the faint scent of lilac.
Silence dropped like a blanket around us.
The day stretched around us, full of rustling leaves and whispering fountains in the distance.
“She’s quite something,” Kieran said, settling back on the bench, draping his arm across the back, above my shoulders.
My heart gave an embarrassing little flutter. He wasn’t touching me, but the space between us felt charged.
“Cordelia is an acquired taste.”
“Much like you.”
I snorted. “Don’t start.”
“Start what?”
“That tone,” I said. “The one that sounds like sin and diplomacy had a baby.”
His grin sharpened, but his smile faded too fast, replaced by something quieter.
We sat there, two strangers who used to be something else.
“Why did you disappear?” I asked.
His hand stilled on the back of the bench.
“Six years ago,” I said. “You didn’t just vanish. You left without a word.”
He blinked down at me, studying my face. “You don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
“My parents died. I was called back to take the throne.”
The world tilted. “Oh,” I whispered. It wasn’t hard to understand what he must’ve been feeling, having lost my own parents when I was young.
“You weren’t supposed to know,” he said. “The crown demanded silence.” His voice carried that quiet kind of ache that crawls under your skin and stays.
“You could’ve written.”
“Perhaps I did.”
I tilted my head, gazing up at him. “Did you?”
He met my eyes, and the look in his made my heart stumble. “Yes.”
“I didn’t receive a note.”
“We need to discover why.”
“It would be easy to say you sent one when you didn’t.”
