Chapter 245: Your Friend Is Right Here. Always.

Natalia found him in the library three days later.

He was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a tactical report he’d already read twice, because the library still smelled faintly of her and he was pathetic enough to sit in it for that reason alone. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Asher."

He looked up. She was standing in the doorway, a scroll tucked under her arm. Her white hair was braided over one shoulder, and her green eyes held his with the quiet intensity that had always made him feel like she was seeing straight through him.

"Hey." He managed a smile. It was a good one. He’d been practicing.

She sat across from him. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

"How are you?" she asked. Natalia Moonveil didn’t ask how anyone was unless she meant it down to the marrow.

"Good." He set the report down.

A lie so clean it could have been framed.

Natalia studied him. Her brows drew together, just barely, the same expression she wore when she was reading a text and found a word that didn’t belong.

"You’re lying."

He laughed. "I’m fine, Nat."

"Your jaw does a thing when you lie. The muscle on the left side jumps."

His smile faded. He looked at her, at the woman who had shattered herself to honor a bond she believed in, who had handed him to a fated mate he didn’t want because she loved him too much to let him live wrong, and the urge to tell her the truth was so violent he tasted it.

Instead, he leaned forward.

"How are you?" he asked. "And don’t give me composed Natalia. Give me the real one."

Her chin tilted. "The real one is tired. She misses her friend."

Friend. The word was a controlled demolition of his chest cavity, and he let it happen because she needed this. She needed him to be her friend, because she was alone in a castle full of people who loved her and none of them understood her the way he did.

"Your friend is right here," he said. "Always."

Her eyes grew red but she didn’t cry. She smiled. Small. Real. The kind that reached her eyes and made the green in them catch the light.

"You’re reading a border analysis upside down," she said.

He looked at the report in his hand. She was correct. He’d been holding it inverted for forty minutes.

"I’m studying it from a different tactical perspective."

"You’re studying it from an illiterate perspective."

He laughed. A real one. The first one in weeks that didn’t feel like a performance, and the sound of it surprised both of them.

Natalia’s expression shifted. Something moved behind her eyes, quick and deep, a recognition she immediately buried.

She stood, tucked the scroll tighter under her arm, and paused at the doorway, turning to look at him.

He met her eyes.

Her lips parted. Then she closed her mouth and left before he could respond.

The library was quiet. The report was still upside down. His chest was on fire.

He knew she saw him. He knew she always had. She read him better than Ronan did, better than his own father, with an instinct that bypassed language and went straight to the source.

There is nothing in the world quite like being seen. And she saw him.

She loved him and had chosen to let him go anyway.

That was the cruelest part. The love hadn’t stopped. It had just been reclassified, filed under a label it didn’t fit, forced into a shape that allowed her to stand next to him without touching him and call it friendship.

He could feel it every time. In the way her eyes lingered a second past casual. In the way her voice dropped half a register when they were alone. In the way she said his name, still, like it belonged to her.

It did. It always would.

✦✦✦

The memory lurched forward.

The light changed. The marble was draped in black silk.

A funeral.

It came so fast Dexmon barely registered it. Oil lamps lining the great hall. Columns wrapped in dark fabric. Hundreds of wolves standing in silence. A body on a pyre he couldn’t see clearly, wreathed in smoke and the scent of cedar and iron.

Dexmon blinked. The image fractured, reassembled. He saw himself at the front, jaw locked, eyes dry. Wearing a crown.

His father’s crown.

The wise king, Ragnar. Tiberon in his current life.

Ronan stood at Asher’s right, his face wrecked.

Of the two of them, Ronan was the one who couldn’t hold it together. His eyes were red, his jaw working, his throat bobbing against something he was fighting to keep down. Natalia stood behind him, one hand resting on his lower back, her touch so light Ronan might not have even felt it.

But he did. Dexmon could see it in the way Ronan’s shoulders dropped a fraction. The way his breathing steadied by a single degree. The way his body leaned back into her hand, unconscious and desperate.

After the service, in a corridor stripped of all formality, Ronan broke.

"He was the best father I could have asked for." His voice split on the word father. "My parents were taken before I could remember half of them. Ragnar filled every gap they left. Every single one."

Asher pulled him into a hug. Held him. Let him shake.

"I know," Asher said, his own voice rough. "He loved you. As much as he loved me. He told me that more than once."

They stood there for a long time.

When Ronan pulled back, wiping his face with the heel of his hand, Asher spoke carefully.

"Father’s last wish. He wanted you to have land. Enough to rule. A kingdom of your own, carved from Valerion’s eastern territory. I’m honoring it."

Ronan stared at him.

"No."

"It’s done. The papers are drawn."

"Tear them up."

"Ronan."

"I want to be exactly where I am, brother." His voice was raw, but steady. "You would be lost without me. And you’re the only man I trust enough to serve."

Asher looked at him. At the boy who had arrived in borrowed clothes and become the man standing in front of him, a king in every way that mattered except the title he kept refusing.

"You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met," Asher said.

"Second most," Ronan corrected. "Natalia exists."

Asher laughed despite himself, and the sound was wrong, watery and cracked, and then they were both laughing and crying at the same time, two men holding each other up in a corridor that still smelled like the funeral of the man who had raised them both.