Chapter 226 --226
While Larus was busy dismantling his father’s pride in the north, Heena was buried under a mountain of paperwork that refused to shrink. The palace was quiet, the only sound the scratching of her quill against thick parchment.
Suddenly, she stopped. Her hand froze mid-air, the ink dripping a dark blotch onto a page.
She looked at the document she was about to sign. She read it once. Then again. Then a third time, her eyes narrowing until they were thin slivers of black.
It was a confession. A detailed, nauseatingly thorough admission of guilt.
The text was clear: the poison had been delivered by the High Priest’s grandson. The motive? A delirious claim that Empress had betrayed God, that she was a stain on the divine fabric of the world. It was religious zealotry mixed with high treason.
Heena leaned back, the chair creaking under her weight. She didn’t remember taking this confession. She didn’t remember an interrogation. In fact, she didn’t remember the boy even being arrested.
She began to whistle—a low, airy tune that sounded more like a warning than a song. The melody broke sharply, and as it did, a Shadow Guard materialized from the corner of the room, dropping to one knee before her desk.
Heena raised the document, shaking it slightly. "When did this happen? I don’t remember doing an interrogation. Did someone handle this while I was... away?"
The Shadow Guard didn’t answer immediately. He began to tremble. This was a man trained to face death without blinking, yet his shoulders were shaking under his dark cloak.
"It was the Emperor Consort, Your Majesty," the guard whispered, his voice barely audible.
Heena paused. "Larus?"
She was genuinely confused. The image of the soft, golden-haired prince who worried about her tea and tucked her into bed didn’t fit with the brutal efficiency required to extract a confession like this.
"Yes," the shadow continued, his voice thick with a fear that hadn’t left him for twenty days. "He... he didn’t wait, Your Majesty. Two days after you fell, when the physicians said you might not wake up, the palace changed."
The guard looked down at the floor, unable to meet her eyes.
"Not even a servant dared to utter a word about it. We were forbidden from speaking. But the things the Consort did to the conspirators... ."
Flashback to the days Henna does not wake up.
By twilight, the palace had arranged itself into the appropriate shape of grief.
Which meant: everyone was ’performing’.
The consorts had stationed themselves in strategically visible locations, doing strategically visible things. Kieran was dispatching urgent riders to every corner of the empire, supposedly seeking rare physicians and exotic remedies. Adrian had locked himself in the imperial library, surrounded by ancient medical texts, his face drawn with scholarly concern. Damien was organizing prayer vigils, his voice trembling with emotion as he led the palace in petitions for the Empress’s recovery.
And Raphael—that hypocritical bastard, the one who’d wanted her dead more than anyone, who’d been part of the Church conspiracy that likely ordered this very attack—had shut himself inside a meditation room three doors down from her chambers and was apparently kneeling on bare stone floors, hands clasped, fasting, the absolute ’picture’ of devastated devotion.
The servants whispered about how dedicated he was. How much he truly loved the Empress. How his grief was destroying him.
It was a masterful performance.
Meanwhile, Heena lay in her bed, breathing slow and even, her face peaceful in the particular way of someone who had gone somewhere very deep inside themselves and hadn’t found the way back yet.
And Larus hadn’t moved from his chair beside her bed.
Not to eat. Not to sleep. Not to change his clothes or wash his face or acknowledge the dozens of people who tried to coax him away. If the human body hadn’t occasionally demanded things that absolutely could not be ignored—biological necessities that even grief couldn’t override—he wouldn’t have left her side at all.
His face—that open, warm, beautiful face that smiled at kitchen maids and remembered servants’ children’s names and made everyone feel seen—was barely recognizable now.
Dark circles carved deep under his eyes like bruises. Beard growing in rough and uneven at his jaw, darkening the wheat-gold stubble. His hair, usually so perfectly maintained, fell limp and unwashed across his forehead. His lips were cracked from dehydration because he kept forgetting to drink water.
But worst of all was his eyes.
The warmth was gone. Completely gone.
Replaced by something raw and hollow and more frightening for being so ’quiet’.
He sat. He watched her breathe.
That was all.
He watched her chest rise and fall. Counted the breaths. Touched her face sometimes—just to feel the warmth there, just to confirm what his eyes were telling him but his heart wouldn’t quite believe.
She was still here.
’She was still here.’
She just wasn’t... present.
Her body remained, warm and breathing and alive by all technical definitions. But Heena—the woman who argued with him about mangoes, who teased him about jaggery, who smiled at him over breakfast like he was the only person who mattered—that Heena was somewhere unreachable.
Trapped behind her own closed eyes.
On the third day, as amber sunset light filtered through the window and painted her face in honey and gold, Larus reached out and touched her cheek with the back of his hand.
She didn’t stir.
She never stirred.
Her face was so ’peaceful’—and that was the part that undid him every single time. The peacefulness of it. Like she was just sleeping. Like she might wake up any moment and immediately have seventeen opinions about whatever he’d done while she was gone, about how he wasn’t taking care of himself, about how he needed to eat something before he collapsed.
But she didn’t wake.
His eyes went hard. Something behind them solidifying into cold, absolute certainty.
He leaned forward slowly and pressed his lips to her forehead.
Stayed there for a long moment, breathing in the faint scent of jasmine that still clung to her hair despite everything.
Then he pulled back and said, so quietly it was almost only for her:
"Rest. Take all the time you need. I’ll finish the work."
He looked at her face—memorizing it, storing it, making absolutely sure he could carry this image with him wherever he went next.
"When you wake up," he continued, his voice steady despite everything, "we’re going somewhere. I don’t care where. Anywhere that isn’t here. You pick."
A pause.
"You’ll argue about it. That’s fine. I’ll let you win."
Another pause, longer this time.
"You always win anyway."
He stood up for the first time in three days.
His legs were stiff. His back ached. His whole body protested the movement.
He didn’t care.
He walked out of the room without looking back, because if he looked back he might not leave, and he needed to leave now while the cold clarity was still holding him together.
The servants he passed in the corridor stopped and ’stared’, because something about him was simply ’different’.
Not the quiet grief they’d been watching for three days. Not the desperate, frozen stillness of someone waiting for a miracle.
This was something that had made a decision.