The audience with Emperor Aldous never happened.
Caelan moved too quickly for us. He had anticipated that we would try to appeal directly to the Emperor — he had, after all, spent years laying the groundwork for exactly this moment. By the time our petition reached the imperial secretary, Caelan had already filed his own report: a detailed, meticulously constructed document outlining the "evidence" of Lucian's instability, complete with witness statements from courtiers who had been carefully primed to see what Caelan wanted them to see.
The petition was denied.
No explanation given. No audience granted. Simply a sealed letter returned to Lucian's chambers with the imperial crest stamped in red wax: Request Declined.
That was the night I had my first clear vision of what was coming.
It came while I slept — sharp and vivid, without the usual haze. I saw the corridor. The guards. The cold iron in Caelan's hand. The pain blooming outward from my abdomen like fire spreading through dry grass. And Lucian — his face, finally, in full detail for the first time in any vision — breaking completely as he held me on the stone floor.
I woke up shaking.
Lucian was already awake beside me. He had felt it through the bond — the way dark magic reaches along connections and senses distress before the mind even registers it. His arms came around me immediately, steady and warm, but I could feel the tension in him.
"What did you see?" he asked quietly.
I told him.
All of it. Every detail. Because that was what we did — we told each other the truth, even when it was unbearable.
He was silent for a long time after.
Then: "We leave tonight."
I pulled back to look at him. "Lucian —"
"We don't wait for them to act," he said, his voice low and resolute. "We gather what we can and we go. Far enough that Caelan's reach doesn't follow. We'll find a way to live outside all of this."
It was the first time he had suggested running. Lucian had always been the one to face things directly — to argue, to prove, to endure. Running meant admitting that endurance wasn't enough anymore.
I searched his face in the dim light. "You would leave everything?"
"Everything here is already leaving me," he said simply. "You are the only thing I have that's worth keeping."
My heart twisted.
We planned quickly. Essentials only. Documents from his chambers that could be traded or forged into new identities. A small amount of gold he had set aside over the years. Clothing that wouldn't mark us as palace fugitives. We would meet in the east garden in one hour — a quiet spot, near a service gate that led to the outer stables.
One hour.
He kissed me before he left — hard, desperate, like someone sealing a promise. His hands framed my face, his thumbs brushing my cheeks with that familiar gentleness.
"One hour," he whispered against my mouth.
"One hour," I echoed.
Then he was gone.
I gathered my things as fast as I could — a small bag, nothing that would draw attention if someone saw me in the corridors. I moved through the west wing like water, avoiding the main passages, using the service halls I knew better than anyone.
I was halfway to my room when I heard them.
Footsteps. Too many. Moving with purpose.
Not toward Lucian's chambers.
Toward mine.
I turned and ran.
Beatrice's hands were clenched so tightly around the edges of the book that her knuckles had gone white. She hadn't noticed. Her eyes moved across the page without stopping, absorbing every word, every detail, as though pausing even for a breath would break the fragile thread connecting her to the woman who had written this — to herself, in a life she couldn't remember but could feel echoing through every line.
The past Beatrice's voice on the page was steady, but the pain beneath it was raw, like a wound that had never fully healed. Beatrice could feel it in her own chest, mirroring the ache she had woken with every morning for months.
She kept reading.
I ran the wrong way on purpose. Away from the exits. Deeper into the palace. Toward Lucian's chambers, where he was still gathering what he needed. If they followed me — and they would follow me, because Caelan knew about the bond, knew Lucian would feel my distress through it — it would give him time to escape.
Alone.
Without me.
Because if I ran with him, they would track us both. The bond was a beacon. Caelan had calculated that too.
I burst into Lucian's chambers without knocking.
He spun toward me, his satchel half-packed, his face shifting from focus to alarm in an instant.
"They're coming," I gasped. "Caelan. Guards. You have to go now — the passage behind the east fireplace. It leads to the outer courtyard. Go."
He crossed the room in two strides. "Come with me."
"I can't." The footsteps were louder now, closing in. "They'll follow the bond. You need distance. Alone."
"Beatrice — no."
"Lucian." I took his hands — those hands that had always been so careful with me — and squeezed them hard. "I love you. Remember that. No matter what happens next — I chose this. Every day. And I would choose it again."
The door rattled.
His eyes — dark, burning — went to it, then back to me.
"I'll come back for you," he said, his voice breaking on the words.
"I know."
A lie. The kindest one.
The door burst open.
Guards flooded in — twelve of them, armored and armed, with Caelan stepping through behind them like a shadow given form. His expression was serene. Satisfied. The look of a man watching a long-planned trap snap shut.
Lucian moved me behind him instinctively, placing himself between me and all of them.
"Go," I whispered.
He didn't.
One guard stepped forward, hand reaching for my arm.
That was when everything shattered.
The darkness exploded outward from Lucian like a living thing — not the controlled shadow he had shown me in quiet moments, but something vast and wild and utterly unrestrained. The torches shattered. The temperature plummeted. The stone walls cracked with the force of it, spiderwebbing outward as the magic surged through the room.
The guards staggered back. Two fell to their knees, overwhelmed. Caelan himself stumbled, his composure cracking for the first time I had ever seen.
Lucian turned to me.
His face — gods, his face in that moment. Grief and rage and love all tangled together into something that looked like it was tearing him apart from the inside.
"I told you to go," I said.
"I heard you," he replied, his voice raw.
He reached for me — gentle, even now, even with the room trembling around us — and pulled me against him.
The guards retreated further. Caelan raised something in his hand — a glinting object, forged in cold iron and etched with runes that glowed faintly in the fractured light. A weapon. Sharp. Calibrated for dark magic. For him.
I saw the trajectory in my vision, clear as day.
I stepped in front of it.
The impact was immediate. Cold first, then heat — blooming outward from my abdomen in a wave that stole my breath and buckled my knees.
Lucian caught me before I hit the floor.
His scream echoed through the palace — a sound that would haunt the walls for centuries, even if no one remembered why.
The darkness surged again, wilder this time, lashing out at everything in reach. The guards fled. Caelan dropped the weapon and ran. The room itself began to come apart — stones cracking, furniture splintering — as Lucian's control shattered completely.
He held me on the floor, his hands pressing against the wound, trying to stop what couldn't be stopped.
"Don't," he whispered, over and over. "Don't leave. Please — don't leave me."
I reached for his face. My hand was slick with blood. His tears fell onto my skin.
"I'm not leaving," I said, my voice smaller than I wanted. "I'm just... going somewhere else for a while."
He shook his head, his entire body trembling.
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't." I made him look at me. ""Will you wait for me? I'll come back. I promise I'll come back to you—"
His forehead pressed against mine, hard and desperate.
"I love you," he said, the words breaking. "Beatrice — I love you."
What happened after— the palace running red, the screaming, the destruction — I did not see directly. But I know it from the visions that came before my death, and from the echoes that have lingered in my dreams since.
Lucian lost himself.
The grief turned the magic into something monstrous. He tore through the palace, through anyone who tried to stop him, through Caelan and the priests and half the imperial guard before they finally contained him with the seal.
They called it a curse.
They called him a beast.
They sealed him beneath the palace in chains forged to hold a monster, and they rewrote the history to erase the man.
But he was never a monster.
He was a man who loved too deeply, in a world that gave him no safe place to put it.
In my vision, years later — I saw myself sitting in by a snowy window—reading the letter I wrote.
That's how I knew my death won't be my limitation. That won't be my end.
Me or you will come back again to—
Find him.
Free him.
Tell him I kept my promise.
The book ended there.
Beatrice sat in the window seat for a long time after, the final page open in her lap, her fingers tracing the last lines as though touching them could somehow bridge the centuries between the woman who had written them and the woman reading them now.
Tears had dried on her cheeks. She hadn't bothered wiping them away this time.
Lucian.
His name settled in her mind like something finally remembered after too long forgotten. Prince Lucian von Devereux. The thirteenth prince. The one sealed away. The one waiting.
The pull beneath the floor was no longer a mystery. It was him. Reaching along a bond that had survived death and time and three hundred years of silence.
Reaching for her.
She closed the book gently.
Stood.
And walked to the door.
The guard outside straightened. "Lady Laporte? The snow has lightened. The carriage is being prepared."
"Take me to the west wing," she said.