With that, they carry me upstairs to the ground floor. As we leave the house, I glance back at the place that was my prison for far too long. The relief from getting out of it is immense. But I realize with stupefaction that there’s a hint of another sentiment spliced into that relief—melancholy over leaving Stella behind.
I wish we’d spent more time together, while I was stuck in this parallel world, and she was my guardian angel. A world where normal rules didn’t apply.
DARREL
The mountains around Pombrio are gorgeous in early spring—just like the peaks of French Haute-Savoie, on the other side of the Savoy Prealps. One major difference, though, is that I can now admire the mountains from everywhere. All I could see during my month of captivity in Vosier-en-Haut were the walls of the Jezequels’ basement.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead.
“Come on, Darrel, keep going! You can do it,” the therapist says to bolster my confidence.
Clenching my fists, I push through the pain.
Come on, Darrel, you can do it!
The therapist’s encouragement and his calm, persuasive voice help a lot. I flex my left leg, then switch to the right one. We do multiple reps, working various groups of stiff, weakened muscles.
I moved into the Princess Gertrude Rehabilitation Center on Saturday, after being discharged from the Pombrio Hospital.
My mom, dad, brother, and sister visit every day, often bringing my nephews and nieces along. Prince Theodor canceled all his planned travel. He comes by daily, often with his betrothed, Elise. The other royals, including Eugénie, Max, Lucie, Arnaud, Sasha, Louis, Jonas, Celeste, Reigning Prince Richard, Princess Felicia, and even our venerated doyenne Princess Gertrude paid a visit, too. It’s too much.
The best thing about the royal visits is seeing Theodor so serene, so happy. He’s obviously pleased that I’m alive. Finding the third key despite Kurt Ozzi going all in to thwart him played a role, too, no doubt. But the change in him is profound. I believe the main reason for his sunny disposition is Elise’s love. It’s pure and bottomless, and it shines through every time she looks at him. Our badly scarred crown prince—the Beast, as some call him behind his back—is one lucky son of a gun to be loved like this by such a beautiful, worthy woman.
Call it God, karma, or fate, but something is at work here, something a human mind can’t fully comprehend.
With Jonas’s recent success, we’ve now had four key seekers who each successfully hunted down a key to the impenetrable vault. That leaves us with five more to secure before the year is out. All the key seekers ended their journey married or engaged to their Key to the Key.
Only a die-hard rationalist won’t see a pattern here. While I enjoy rational thought, I’m not religious about it. As it happens, I believe in destiny.
Sweat beads on my forehead as I flex my leg yet again to the therapist’s cheering and the faint sound of the heart monitor.The only way out of this is through it.Next up is hydrotherapy—my favorite part of the day. My reward. The thought of it fuels my determination. The other thing that powers me is that I can see progress. A lot of it. Every session brings me one step closer to full recovery.
At lunchtime, Mom complained again that I wasn’t spending my convalescence at home with Dad and her. The option had been on the table, as well as an invitation to stay at the royal palace, not to mention my own apartment. In all three cases, I was going to follow a personalized physical therapy program for several hours a day. Recovery was expected in about four weeks.
But at the Center, I get the whole gamut, including PT, hydrotherapy, augmented reality using exoskeleton training, massage, electrical bone stimulation, ultrasound therapy, plus regular 3D scans and MRIs for twelve hours from eight to eight. The doctors estimate that I’ll be back in business in two weeks.
Unfortunately, working as a personal attendant to Theodor, or as a bodyguard to anyone, is no longer possible. Although I’ll be able to walk and run, my legs will remain vulnerable after being broken in so many places during my fall and then rebroken when Jean-Claude kicked me. My days in the field are over.
I’ll be offered a leadership position at MESS or the palace security or the royal guard. If I succeed in bringing home the fifth key to the impenetrable vault, then I’m quite sure they’ll let me pick the branch and service for the next phase of my career.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the search for the fifth doesn’t fall to a royal or an aristocrat, but to me, a knighted commoner.
The “new intel” Elias mentioned in the Jezequel basement wasn’t information in the traditional sense. It was a series of two visions that our oracle, Princess Felicia, had had three weeks ago. She saw me locked away in a house. She didn’t get the exact address or the town, but she could tell from an array of minute details that the house was in the Alps, on the French side of the border. It was a real breakthrough. It meant that only was I alive, but I was the next key seeker.
The second episode of her vision revealed the identity of the Key to the Key. It was a woman once again, just like the first four times.
At that point of my briefing, right after I was told I was the seeker and before I learned who that woman was, I had a moment of euphoria. In that moment, I held my breath with the absurd hope that my Key to the Key would be Stella. It would explain why fate had put me on the Jezequels’ path, I thought. What if our key was somehow linked to the absurd cult of the Ever Mage and the talisman that the Jezequels had lost?
If Stella was my Key to the Key, then my irresistible attraction to a much younger woman would make sense, too. We were fated to be together. Her young age, her mental illness, whatever horrible crime she committed in her teens—none of it mattered, because Stella Jezequel was my destiny. You don’t argue with destiny. You don’t resist it. You embrace it.
God, I’d love to embrace Stella again!To make love to her, to protect her from her parents and, if necessary, from herself, to take care of her…
My therapist claps his hands. “Hydrotherapy time! You’ve earned it.”
Ah, finally.
As I lower myself into the warm water, my achy legs feel lighter at once, and a sensation of buoyancy envelops me.
“Good?” the therapist asks from the side of the pool.
