Chapter 164: A Great Rift
Leroy’s voice cracked, barely a whisper, as if the words were foreign to him. "I did?" His eyes trembled, wide with disbelief, and his chest throbbed painfully beneath his skin.
He never had thought of her that way. How could he have said such a thing if he hadn’t believed it, deep down? His own question seemed to betray him, unraveling the fragile thread of his denial.
His eyes, wide and pale, searched her face, as if trying to recognize a memory he could no longer grasp. The way he looked at her, so empty and so lost, made her feel as though the words had slipped from his lips without a second thought, as if they never held meaning to him at all.
Her chest tightened, a slow, suffocating ache. She had built this conviction brick by brick, rationalized it so thoroughly that it needed no confirmation. It didn’t matter if he remembered saying it or not. What mattered was that somewhere, in some moment, he had thought of her as useless.
His face betrayed no regret, no recognition, only a hollow confusion that screamed of abandonment.
"It doesn’t matter now," she whispered, her voice brittle, laced with the finality of defeat. Her eyes remained locked on the parchment, even though the ink blurred before them.
"You wanted Elyse and you got me," she said, her words deliberate, each one a dagger sharpened by years of self-recrimination. "If I were in your position, I would have wanted the perfect Arvand daughter too... the one with her father’s name, her family’s power, her future secured, someone who could have offered you a lot more."
Leroy’s face paled further, his lips parting in silence, his eyes widening as if struck by a revelation too painful to speak.
She pressed on, her tone unwavering, her smile thin and brittle. "I wanted you to look at me and see my heart... My heart that held only you all these years," she murmured, "to see the woman who endured the darkness, who kept standing when everything else fell apart. I wanted to prove I was worthy of your gaze. Of your love. Of your touch."
Her smile deepened, not with joy, but with the hollow satisfaction of survival. "I’ve achieved that now, haven’t I?" she said, the faintest trace of a smile curling her lips, fragile and defiant. "Finally, I got you."
Her eyes glimmered with something fierce and resolute, a quiet triumph. She didn’t need him to say it; she already knew. He loved her. In that fragile, imperfect way, he loved her.
"And now..." Her voice lowered, full of determination and despair all at once, "I’ll still try to be useful. I started a war, and I will finish it. Without you getting hurt."
Her voice was steady, but beneath it lay the weight of a thousand broken dreams.
She was determined to bear the cost, to carry the blame. Because in the twisted logic of her heart, that was all she could do.
Her heart, once burdened by doubt and rejection, now burned with the certainty that, whatever storms came, she would face them. Alone, if she had to, but never useless.
Leroy was still staring at her, his eyes hollow, unmoving. Each of her words had landed like an anvil upon his chest. The weight of them sank deep, unbearably so, and he felt as though he were drowning on solid ground; suffocating in the light of her certainty.
She had believed it for so long that he saw her as useless. That somewhere, in the quiet shadows of his thoughts, he dismissed her as a burden, a failure. If only he could have bared his heart to her, if only she could see the place she held in it.
From the moment their eyes first met. From the night he kissed her, when everything else had seemed to fall away, her place in his heart had never shifted, never wavered, no matter how dark the world grew around them. Even when he teetered on the brink of despair, even when humiliation crushed him, even when death seemed inevitable, he had held onto her.
Her alone.
And all this time... she had thought he considered her worthless.
And Elyse. The very idea of her seemed to claw at his insides. She had believed the whispers, the half-truths woven into lies by those around them, that he desired Elyse, the perfect daughter of House Arvand, the one who embodied everything he should want. How could she have been so blind? How could she have allowed that poison to take root in her mind?
How could she not have known it was her he wanted all along?
She had believed he was capable of bringing a mistress into their home. She had believed the cruel murmurs as though they were gospel.
Then what was the difference between her and those who whispered? What was she, if not another shadow among shadows? Nothing more than a misplaced servant of fate.
What was she?
Who was he to her?
His expression cracked, his composure splintering into fragile shards. His eyes, once so steady, now flickered with unspoken torment, exposing wounds so deep they seemed impossible to heal.
Every dream he had nurtured, every silent promise he had held close to his chest...each one crumbled into dust under the weight of her conviction.
She doesn’t know you.
The words echoed in his mind, haunting him as sharply as Aldric’s voice had. Aldric, who had never known her, never witnessed their fragile, complicated love, had claimed that she didn’t know him, that he was a stranger to her. But how could Aldric possibly understand?
Turns out... he was the fool.
Because others knew her better than he did.
Because she, too, had come to believe the lies of others over seeing his heart.
Even after ten years of marriage, there was no magic. No sacred thread that bound them together, that let her see his heart, just like he saw hers. Was there anything beyond duty and desperation? If he didn’t fight hard to get her, would she have married someone else without a care in her heart?
He wanted to disappear. To vanish into nothingness. To let go of everything—the crown, the responsibilities, the love he barely dared to name.
His chest ached so deeply, his mind numbed itself against hope.
He couldn’t shout.
Couldn’t plead.
Couldn’t even speak.
For he knew that the sound of his voice raised in anger, in defense, would shatter her into irreparable pieces.
What could he do but hold his silence?