Silent Crown: The Masked Prince's Bride-Chapter 307: Leroy’s Fight

The declaration trembled with the rawness of a wound torn open after ages spent quietly bleeding beneath the surface.

He wanted her. Not in the distant, aching way he had yearned while imprisoned in stone-silence and centuries of sleep, but with a living, breathing hunger that roared through him like wildfire. His heart, his ancient, wearied, and starved heart, filled with a greed that startled even him.

He was a demigod. A being carved from flame and divinity. Who, truly, was left in existence with the power to stop him? And what was greed to a demigod in love? What commandments of heaven or earth had ever managed to tame such a force?

When it came to love, was he any different from a mortal, really? Mortals shattered themselves over affection, clung to the memory of a single kiss, spent decades, sometimes entire lifetimes, mourning a heart they could not reclaim. And he, who had lived far longer, who had loved far deeper, who had carved space for her in the golden marrow of his very spirit... how could he be expected to remain unmoved?

He had endured centuries with nothing but the echo of her laughter, the shadow of her smile, the warmth of her light pressed into memory. Century after century, he held her as both prayer and punishment. And now she stood here... her soul trapped in another mortal skin, fragile yet fiercely present, impossibly close.

How could it be wrong for him to want her when she was the one truth he had never stopped breathing for? How could it be monstrous to reach for her when the universe itself had placed her in front of him, wrapped in the heartbeat of another life he had not chosen but could not deny?

He was power incarnate. She was the only softness he had ever knelt to.

And when a demigod loved, truly loved, the world had never once found a way to tell him no.

The moonlit eyes, those impossibly familiar eyes that belonged to Eiralyth even when surrounded by someone else’s face, widened, shocked by the sheer audacity of his claim, yet softened in the same breath with an understanding only she could’ve held. She knew his heart too intimately, had witnessed the shape of his love through centuries, and she could see how the lines between devotion, desperation, and destiny blurred mercilessly before him now.

As absurd as his claim was, a small part, a small selfish part of her soul wondered... Why shouldn’t she take up on that offer?

She felt the flutter in her belly and her hand rushed to that flicker of life inside, naturally. She remembered being pregnant too, but fate didn’t let her raise her baby. What if this was her second chance? This baby was their descendant, any way and they could be the best parents for this baby, more than any mortal could be.

What was the harm?

But the universe, cruel in its timing, refused to leave that moment suspended in stillness.

For at the entrance of the tunnel, Leroy stood frozen, half-hidden in shadow, his breath caught in his throat as the words echoed through the cave like a prophecy spoken aloud.

He had returned quietly, silently retracing his path the moment dread began to claw at him, the moment the bond between them tugged at his chest with a warning he could not ignore. And now he stood there, witnessing the nightmare no man should ever have to confront: another calling his wife his own, another laying claim to the soul that had chosen him, an ancient, divine force declaring he would never let her—his wife--go.

And there he was... his ancestor, the Dragon King himself... kneeling.

The very same demigod who, according to every surviving legend, had only ever bent his knee to one soul in all of creation, was now kneeling before her. Before his wife... inside Lorraine’s body.

The image hit Leroy like a blow to the ribs.

His hands curled slowly into fists, not the steady fists of battle, not the controlled fists of a prince familiar with war, but trembling fists born from something raw and primal. Not fear of dragons. Not fear of fire. Not even fear of gods.

It was the terror of loss.

A visceral, marrow-deep terror that had nothing to do with Vaeronyx’s power and everything to do with the woman standing in that firelit hollow, the woman he had chosen and clung to in a world determined to strip him of everything.

Lorraine.

His wife.

His anchor.

His only softness in a kingdom of cold steel.

And now the ancient demigod, his ancestor, his lineage, his curse... was bowing to her with reverence so profound it made the air itself tremble, and Leroy could feel something inside him fracture.

His worst fear, the one he had buried beneath trust, beneath courage, beneath desperate rationality, rose from the grave he had shoved it into and stood before him in brutal, undeniable clarity.

She could be taken from him. Not by war. Not by politics. Not by betrayal or fate or prophecy. Not even in childbirth.

But by love.

By a love older than kingdoms, older than the river, older than every oath he held sacred. The kind of love that belonged to gods.

And that was the exact moment Leroy felt the truth slam into him like a collapsing world: this was not a battlefield he could fight in. Not a war he could win. Not an enemy he could stab or outwit or bleed dry.

This was his wife, his Lorraine, standing at the very center of a centuries-old divine tragedy, and he was powerless to pull her back.

How could he lose her when she was the only thing in this entire broken world that was truly his? When she was the only warmth he had ever been given without cruelty attached? When she was the only home he had ever known?

The fire cast two silhouettes on the stone: the kneeling demigod and the woman who held the moon in her eyes.

And Leroy, standing at the mouth of the tunnel, realized with a sickness that stole his breath, that this was the moment the world decided to test how tightly he could hold on to her.

No...

He was not going to let her go, not now, not ever, not without fighting with every last shred of strength in his battered body, and if he was destined to lose her in the end, then he would lose her clawing his way forward until his final breath left him, because surrendering the woman who had become the center of his world was simply impossible.

He could not fathom it, could not accept it, could not breathe at the thought of it.

How could he let her slip from his grasp when she had become the only thing that felt real in a life carved out of loss and survival; when she was his, when the child she carried—his child, their child—represented the fragile and precious little piece of a future he never believed he deserved?

Demigod or not, ancient or not, sacred or feared or worshipped or whispered about in legends, no being had the right to tear his family away from him, not while he still had breath, not while his heart still beat with the fury and desperation of a man who had fought his entire life just to keep the smallest things that mattered.

He stepped forward with that determination burning in him like a slow, consuming fire. Still, before his foot fully planted on the earthen stone, those eyes—those luminous eyes, pale as moonlit water, staring out of Lorraine’s face yet carrying a depth and resonance that belonged to someone far older—shifted toward him. In that instant, he felt it, the recognition, the acknowledgment, the divide between the woman he loved and the being now looking through her.

She raised her hand with a motion so fluid and serene it should not have inspired terror, yet it did, because the moment her fingers lifted, the air around him collapsed inward as though the cave itself had exhaled all at once.

The wind did not simply blow; it surged through the cavern as though an ancient storm had awakened within its walls, spiraling around him with a violent, unrelenting force that slammed him backward and pinned him in place, driving him against the tunnel mouth with the weight of a storm compressed into a single, merciless command.

Dust and sparks tore through the air like furious spirits, his coat snapped against his frame as if trying to break free of him, and his hair lashed across his face as he pushed against the wind with every muscle straining, every bone protesting, and every instinct screaming at him to move forward even though the cyclone refused to allow so much as a single step.

Still, he fought, teeth clenched, feet digging into the rock even as they slid perilously, his entire body shuddering with the effort it took simply to stand his ground.

"Give my wife back," he said, the words torn from him like a plea and a threat woven together for the one thing he could not live without, the woman who had stood beside him and loved him despite the world’s cruelty.

His fists tightened, trembling violently, and he forced the words again, each one dragged from the depths of his soul, "Give her back to me," even as the wind raged harder.