"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I didn't bring you into this world with a proper title. Just because you were born to a…"
Her lips trembled. The words cut her even now. But she made herself say it. She owed him at least that honesty.
"…to a royal mistress."
The word hung between them like a fragile blade.
Leroy felt the weight of it, not as a shock, but as a simple truth.
It hurt her to say it; he saw it in the way her jaw trembled slightly. She was not ashamed of having loved. She was not ashamed of him. But to speak of herself that way, to her grown son, the son who had once spat that word at her in his anger, it carved through years of carefully held composure.
"No, Mother," Leroy said quietly, and he reached out to hold her hand. His grip was warm and firm, grounding.
The Dowager's hatred had never been only about his birth. There had been other reasons, deep, tangled, dangerous. But right now, none of that mattered.
