The world had shrunk to the space between three people, under the pale, indifferent glow of the solar-powered string lights.
Liam’s ancient book lay open on the potting bench, its brittle pages a testament to a truth so fantastical it should have been laughable. It wasn’t.
It was a gravestone marking the death of everything Rowan had started to believe.
Kael stood before her, stripped of his human guise. He wasn’t radiating light or shimmering with otherworldly power, yet the change was profound.
The comfortable angles of his face had sharpened into something more ancient, more severe. His eyes, those forest-green eyes that had held such warmth, were now deep, haunted pools of sorrow and unbearable age.
He was a prince. He was a liar. He was a thief who had come to steal the heart of her world.
“Rowan,” he began, his voice a raw rasp, the name a plea.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
The word was a sliver of ice. Her hands, which had so recently learned to feel the pulse of the earth under his guidance, were clenched into fists at her sides, nails digging into her palms. “Don’t you dare say my name.”
Liam moved to stand slightly in front of her, a protective gesture that was both touching and utterly useless against the man Kael truly was.
“You heard her,” Liam said, his own voice tight with a mixture of vindication and fury. “Time to go.”
Kael’s gaze never left Rowan’s. “It started as a mission. A duty. But it changed. You changed it. Everything I told you in the garden that night…”
“Was a lie,” she finished for him, her voice finally breaking, cracking with a rage so potent it felt like acid in her throat.
“Every word? Every touch? Was that all part of the mission, your highness? Find the simple human girl, charm her, teach her just enough magic so she wouldn’t notice you ripping the soul out of her life’s work?”
The pain that flashed across his features was so sharp, so genuine, that for a sickening moment, she almost believed it.
But belief was a luxury she no longer had. He had burned that part of her to the ground.
“No. It was never like that,” he insisted, taking a step forward.
Rowan flinched back as if he were fire. “Get. Out.”
“Rowan, please. Morwen knows. She knows I’ve hesitated. The garden is in more danger now than ever before. We need to—”
“We?” The word was a bitter laugh.
“There is no ‘we’. There is my garden, and there is the Fae prince who came to destroy it. The only danger here that I didn’t see was you.”
Her own connection to the garden, the thrumming life force she felt in the soil and the stems, was now a roaring current of agony. It felt his presence as a poison, a betrayal that echoed in every leaf and root.
The garden knew. It was rejecting him.
She raised a trembling hand and pointed toward the wrought-iron gate. “Get out of my garden. Get out of my life. And don’t ever come back.”
He stared at her, his jaw working silently.
For a moment, she saw not a prince but a lost man, caught between a dying world and one he had just broken.
But sympathy was a weed she had to rip out by the root. He had made his choice when he first stepped into her alley, cloaked in lies.
He gave a single, desolate nod.
Without another word, he turned and walked away. He didn’t look back. The gate clicked shut behind him, the sound as final as a nail in a coffin.
The silence he left behind was a physical weight. Liam’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. “Rowan? Are you okay?”
Was she okay? She felt as if her entire rib cage had been cracked open. She shook her head, unable to form words. She walked stiffly toward the center of the garden, to the bed of prize-winning roses they had saved together. His hands on hers, the jolt of energy, the shared breath. It was all a meticulously crafted illusion. A means to an end.
She reached out and touched a velvety, deep-red petal. Under her fingertips, the life within it felt…brittle. Fragile.
That’s when the cold started.
It wasn’t the familiar chill of an autumn evening. This was a deep, penetrating cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with absence.
It was the cold of a tomb. The cheerful string lights flickered, their warm glow turning wan and sickly. A shadow fell across the garden, vast and sudden, swallowing the ambient light of the city.
Liam looked up. “What the hell? There isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
A low tremor ran through the ground beneath their feet, a deep, guttural groan of stressed earth. It wasn’t an earthquake. It was a convulsion.
“Rowan…” Liam’s voice was tight with alarm.
Before he could finish, it began. From the rich, dark soil she had spent years nurturing, something new erupted. It wasn’t life. It was a mockery of it.
Thick, black vines, slick as oil and covered in hooked thorns the size of a finger, tore through the dirt. They moved with a horrifying, serpentine purpose, not growing but attacking.
One whipped through the air and wrapped around the trellis supporting her climbing jasmine, the delicate white flowers crushed into a fragrant, dying pulp. The wood of the trellis groaned and splintered under the immense pressure.
“What is happening?” Rowan breathed, frozen in shock.
This was Morwen. This was the full-scale assault Kael had warned her about.
The Unseelie blight was no longer a subtle test; it was an invasion. The garden’s two protectors were divided, and the enemy was storming the breach.
Her shock dissolved into a primal, protective fury. “No!”
She ran toward the vegetable patch where the thorny tendrils were strangling her tomato plants, ripping them from their stakes. She remembered Kael’s lessons—the feel of the earth’s energy, the way to draw it up, to guide it. She plunged her hands into the soil, ignoring the grime and the cold, and reached for that power.
She found it, a wild, chaotic torrent beneath the surface.
It was panicked, screaming. She tried to shape it, to command it as Kael had shown her. She focused on a thick, questing vine and pushed with all her will. Die!
The vine withered, turning to grey ash and crumbling away. A small, fierce thrill shot through her. She could fight this.
But for the one she destroyed, ten more erupted from the ground. They tore through her herb garden, the air filling with the death-scent of crushed basil and mint.
They swarmed the base of the old maple tree, their thorns digging into the bark like malevolent claws.
A wave of visible decay rolled out from the garden’s perimeter.
The vibrant green of the lawn washed out to a sickly yellow-brown. The cheerful heads of her sunflowers drooped, their petals shriveling and turning black as if touched by a chemical fire. The very air grew thick with the stench of rot.
The garden was screaming, and she could feel every lash, every cut, every strangled stem as a physical pain in her own body.
Her magic was a wild thing, lashing out without control.
She could feel it draining her, siphoning her life force into fruitless, desperate bursts of defense. She was a single bucket against a tidal wave.
“Rowan, we have to get out of here!” Liam yelled, pulling at her arm. A vine snapped at him, and he jumped back, his face pale with terror.
“I can’t!” she cried, her voice cracking with desperation. “I can’t leave it!”
This wasn’t just a patch of land. It was the repository of her love, her sweat, her hope. It was the living heart of her community. It was the only place she had ever felt truly whole.
And it was dying in front of her.
She pushed more power, more of herself, into the earth.
A patch of lawn around her feet held its green, a tiny, defiant island in a sea of decay. But the effort made her head spin. Black spots danced in her vision.
A thick, thorny vine shot out from behind her, wrapping around her ankle. The thorns pierced her jeans, biting into her skin. She cried out, a sharp gasp of pain, and fell hard to her knees.
She clawed at the vine, but its grip was like iron.
More tendrils snaked up her legs, pinning her to the ground in the ruins of her rose bushes. The thorns tore at her, cold and sharp.
The fight finally drained out of her, replaced by a hollow, bottomless despair. Her uncontrolled magic sputtered and died. The last patch of green around her faded to brown.
She was overwhelmed. Beaten.
Lying there, pinned amidst the wreckage of her most beautiful creations, she could feel the Heartseed.
Its vibrant, steady pulse was now a frantic, weakening flutter, like the heart of a dying bird.
Morwen’s parasitic magic was latched onto it, draining it, poisoning it.
The garden wept. Its lifeblood leaked into the blighted soil.
A single, perfect tear of morning dew, held in the cup of a now-shredded hosta leaf, trembled and fell. It was followed by another, and another.
A slow, silent rain of sorrow from the dying leaves.
Or perhaps the tears were her own. Rowan couldn’t tell anymore.
She closed her eyes, the scent of decay filling her lungs, and surrendered to the encroaching darkness.
She was alone, and she had lost everything.