Cassian's POV
The king's sudden illness had transformed the palace into something hollow and tense. Corridors once filled with certainty now whispered fear.
Every breath my father took sounded like it might be his last, and every breath I took felt stolen from a future I was not ready to claim.
I had not slept properly in days.
After the meeting with the council chamber, Elowen had gone back to her chambers to lie down.
I figured she wanted to be alone from the she did not acknowledge my presence after we had left the small council.
I exused myself and quietly went back to my study to take care of some matters like the propescts of war.
Thinking back at it, Claiming Rowan's life was a mistake.
And as strange as it was I didn't make mistakes.
I know it looks like an overreaction. But no.
But just few days before I had left to marry Elowen.
I had heard of his liking to the Princess of.....
Shit I couldn't even remember where Elowen was from.
My guards confirmed talking about how he was friends with her father and how he had planned to marry her but failed.
Giving he wasn't an heir to his throne.
I had let but slide but when I was informed with him questioning my wife.
I was not going to let that slide
The war council had stretched late into the night, voices overlapping, maps spread across my desk like wounds.
Rowan's disappearance was no longer a rumor. His kingdom demanded answers. Troops gathered at borders.
Messengers arrived faster than we could send them away. I was already king in everything but name, and the weight of it pressed against my skull until even thinking hurt.
I poured another drink. I should not have. I knew that. But the burn steadied my hands, softened the sharp edges of thought. I told myself it was necessary. A moment to breathe.
A moment to stop carrying everything alone.
That was when Sylvia entered.
She did not knock. She never did.
"You look dreadful," she said gently, closing the door behind her. Her voice carried sympathy, warm and practiced. "I heard about His Majesty."
I did not look up. "You should not be here."
"And yet I am," she replied, stepping closer. "Because you sent for comfort, even if you did not know it."
I scoffed. "Do not flatter yourself."
She smiled as if she had already won. "You are exhausted. Anyone can see it. You are carrying a crown that has not yet been placed upon your head."
I drank again. The room swayed slightly, enough to dull the tension in my shoulders. "Speak your purpose and leave."
She came around the desk, close enough that I could smell her perfume. Familiar. Dangerous. "My purpose is you."
I should have stood. I should have ordered her away. I did neither.
Her hand rested on my arm, light but deliberate. "You do not need to be strong every moment," she murmured. "Not with me."
Something inside me gave way. Not desire alone. Fatigue. Anger. Loneliness.
The kind that builds when the world expects you to be iron and never asks if you are breaking.
I turned to her.
The kiss was inevitable. Slow at first, as though we both pretended there was still a choice. There was not. The wine had blurred the line between restraint and surrender, and she knew it.
She always knew how to find the cracks.
I let myself fall into the familiar. Into the ease of someone who asked nothing of me except presence.
The night swallowed us whole, the desk forgotten, the war forgotten, the crown forgotten.
For a moment, there was only heat and breath and the illusion that nothing else mattered.
Later, when the room was quiet again, reality crept back in.
I sat alone, head in my hands, the taste of regret sharp and immediate. The war still waited. My father still lay dying. My wife still slept in chambers that were not mine.
Elowen.
The thought of her came unbidden. Not guilt, not quite. Awareness. A tightening in my chest that had nothing to do with wine or exhaustion.
I dismissed Sylvia shortly after, my voice colder than necessary. She left satisfied, certain of her place, certain of my weakness. That certainty angered me more than her presence ever had.
I did not go to Elowen.
Instead, the truth found her on its own.
I learned of it hours later, when a guard hesitated outside my office and spoke too carefully.
A maid had been questioned. Pressed gently, then firmly. Elowen had asked where I was. Who had been with me. She had not demanded.
She had only asked, quietly.
The maid had answered.
Not cruelly. Not maliciously. Just honestly.
I imagined the moment too clearly. Elowen standing still, listening.
Her face composed, her hands folded, her voice calm enough to invite truth. I imagined the words settling into her, slow and irreversible.
I had not seen her reaction, but I did not need to. I knew Elowen well enough now to understand silence was never emptiness with her. It was distance being built brick by brick.
She did not confront me.
That was what unsettled me most.
No accusation. No tears. No anger flung like a weapon. Just absence. Just a door closed softly, deliberately, as though she had already begun to step somewhere I could not follow.
For the first time that night, fear cut through the haze in my mind.
Not fear of war. Not fear of kingship.
Fear of what I had lost without realizing it had ever been mine.