he silence was the worst part.
After the storm of her fury had broken, after her voice had cracked and her throat was raw from screaming at him to get out, an unnatural quiet fell over the garden.
It was a dead quiet, the kind that follows a fatal blow.
Rowan stood trembling in the heart of her sanctuary, the place that had always been her solace, her strength. Now it felt like a tomb.
Every leaf, every petal, every blade of grass was a testament to his lies.
The prize-winning roses he had saved? Poisoned by his deception.
The sturdy fence posts where his hands had carved strange, protective symbols? The bars of her cage. The patch of earth where they had kissed, where the moonlight had turned his silver eyes into liquid promises?
It was desecrated ground.
Her magic, the thrilling, terrifying power he had awoken in her, was a bitter ash in her mouth.
It had felt like a discovery, a homecoming to a part of herself she never knew existed.
Now she knew it was just another tool he’d used, a key to unlock the garden’s core so he could rip it out.
Her knees gave way, and she sank to the damp soil, heedless of the dirt smearing her jeans.
Tears she had refused to shed in front of him now streamed down her face, hot and furious.
They weren’t tears of simple heartbreak; they were tears of violation. He hadn’t just broken her heart; he had hollowed out her soul.
The garden, her garden, had always been an extension of her own being.
He had infiltrated both, wormed his way into their deepest, most secret places with the sole intention of plundering them for his own gain.
The grief was a physical weight, pressing down on her chest until she could barely breathe.
A strangled sob escaped her lips. Around her, the garden seemed to feel her despair. The vibrant greens seemed to dull, the air grew heavy, and the cheerful hum of bees faded into an oppressive stillness.
It was as if her own weeping heart was poisoning the soil from which everything grew. The garden was weeping with her.
She didn’t know how long she knelt there, lost in the echoing silence of her shattered world. But slowly, a new sensation pricked at her awareness.
A chill. It was a deep, unnatural cold that had nothing to do with the setting sun.
It slithered along the ground, coiling around the roots of her sunflowers, turning the vibrant evening primrose a sickly, bruised purple.
Rowan pushed herself to her feet, wiping her eyes with the back of a muddy hand.
The air tasted wrong—metallic and rank, like rot and rust. The shadows at the edge of the garden began to writhe, elongating into spidery, grasping fingers. This wasn’t the gentle twilight she knew.
This was an invasion.
Morwen.
The name was a venomous hiss in her mind.
Kael’s absence was a gaping wound in the garden’s defenses, and the Unseelie queen had wasted no time in tearing it wider.
The silence Kael left behind was the worst part.
It wasn’t the peaceful, buzzing quiet Rowan cherished, but a dead quiet, the kind that follows a fatal blow. The gate had clicked shut, a sound as final as a nail in a coffin, and she was alone in the wreckage of her trust.
Every leaf, every petal, every blade of grass was now a testament to his lies.
The prize-winning roses he had saved? Poisoned by his deception.
The sturdy fence posts where his hands had carved strange, protective symbols? The bars of her cage. The patch of earth where they had made love, where the moonlight had turned his silver eyes into liquid promises? It was desecrated ground.
Her magic, the thrilling power he had awoken in her, was a bitter ash in her mouth. It had felt like a discovery, a homecoming to a part of herself she never knew existed. Now she knew it was just another tool he’d used, a key to unlock the garden’s core so he could rip it out.
Her knees gave way, and she sank to the damp soil, heedless of the dirt smearing her jeans. Tears she had refused to shed in front of him now streamed down her face, hot and furious. They weren’t tears of simple heartbreak; they were tears of violation.
The garden, her garden, had always been an extension of her own being. He had infiltrated both, worming his way into their deepest, most secret places with the sole intention of plundering them for his own gain.
The grief was a physical weight, pressing down on her chest until she could barely breathe. A strangled sob escaped her lips. Around her, the garden seemed to feel her despair.
The vibrant greens seemed to dull, the air grew heavy, and the cheerful hum of bees faded into an oppressive stillness.
The garden was weeping with her.
She didn’t know how long she knelt there, lost in the echoing silence of her shattered world. But the growl of an engine, low and guttural, finally pierced her grief. It wasn’t a car; it was the sound of heavy machinery, and it was getting closer.
Rowan pushed herself to her feet, wiping her eyes with the back of a muddy hand. Through the wrought-iron gate, she saw it: a monstrous yellow bulldozer, its blade glinting in the morning sun, crawling to a stop directly in front of her garden. It was a promise of death.
Before she could react, three black SUVs pulled up, and a team of men in black polos—Vex security—spilled out. And then, a final car, a sleek black town car, from which Morwen emerged. She wore a flawless navy suit, her smile a blood-red slash of lipstick that didn’t reach her cold, calculating eyes.
The time for grief was over. War had arrived.
Fueled by a last, desperate surge of defiant anger, Rowan marched to the gate, her body forming a flimsy, human barricade. “This is private property!” she yelled, her voice trembling but fierce. “You have no right!”
Morwen glided forward, a tablet held in her hand like a stone commandment. “Ms. Finch. This property was legally acquired as of 6 a.m. this morning. We have every right. Please step aside.”
“The community board never approved this!” Rowan countered, even as Liam and a half-dozen of her neighbors, alerted by the commotion, came rushing to her side.
While all eyes were on the standoff at the gate, Rowan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. It slithered along the ground from the back of the garden, coiling around the roots of her sunflowers. The shadows at the edge of the property began to writhe, elongating into spidery, grasping fingers.
Morwen’s attack was two-pronged: a mundane, overwhelming force at the front, and a magical, insidious one from within.
“No!” Rowan screamed, spinning around. She instinctively reached for the new power within her, but her connection felt frayed, muddied by her own anguish.
From the northern edge of the garden, near the old wrought-iron gate, the ground began to tremble.
With a sound like splintering bone, thick, black vines erupted from the earth.
They were not natural things; they were thorny, slick with a foul-smelling ichor, and they moved with a predatory intelligence, whipping through the air and lashing around her carefully tended tomato trellises, snapping the wood like twigs.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through Rowan. She instinctively reached for the new power within her, the earth magic Kael had taught her to feel.
She tried to summon the life force of the garden, to push back, but her connection felt frayed, muddied by her own anguish. The garden’s energy was sluggish, sick with her sorrow.
“No,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Not here. You can’t have this.”
Summoning every ounce of her will, she shoved her hands forward.
A pulse of green energy, raw and uncontrolled, shot from her palms.
It struck one of the writhing vines, which sizzled and recoiled, but two more immediately took its place, stronger and faster.
A wave of decay washed over the plot, a visible tide of grey death. The lush leaves of her zucchini plants blackened and crumbled to dust. Her vibrant cosmos flowers wilted in an instant, their heads drooping as if their necks had been broken.
Rowan cried out, a sound of pure pain. This was a violation far worse than Kael’s. This was murder.
She fought back with a desperate, clumsy ferocity.
She was all instinct, no training. She threw up shields of tangled roots that were just as quickly ripped apart.
She sent waves of life force that were swallowed by the encroaching blight. She was a single, flickering candle against a hurricane, and she was being extinguished.
One of the largest vines, thick as her arm and studded with thorns like shards of obsidian, whipped towards her.
She stumbled back, crying out as it slashed across her arm, tearing through her jacket and skin.
The pain was searing, but a deeper cold spread from the wound, a magical poison that felt like ice in her veins.
She felt her strength failing, her connection to the garden sputtering out. She was going to die here.
They were both going to die.
From the alley across the street, Kael watched, and his soul tore in two.
He had felt the shift the moment Morwen made her move.
The air crackled with Unseelie power, a foul stench on the wind that was anathema to his Seelie nature. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to return to his court, to report his failure and accept the consequences.
His mission was over. He had been discovered, banished. There was nothing more he could do.
But he couldn’t move. His feet were rooted to the cracked pavement, his eyes fixed on the chaotic battle unfolding in the garden.
He could see her, a small, fierce figure silhouetted against the sickening glow of dark magic. He saw the vines erupt, the wave of decay.
He saw her fight back, her raw, untamed power a beacon of brilliant, desperate green.
And he saw her fall.
Guilt was a physical entity, a monster with claws sunk deep into his chest, twisting and tearing.
This was his fault. His lies, his betrayal, had created this vulnerability.
He had broken her heart, and in doing so, had broken the garden’s first and most powerful line of defense.
Morwen wasn’t just attacking a plot of land; she was capitalizing on the wound he had inflicted.
He saw the obsidian-thorned vine lash out, saw Rowan cry out and clutch her arm.
He felt the Unseelie poison snake into her, and a rage unlike anything he had ever known—hotter than a forge, colder than a winter star—eclipsed everything else. His duty, his dying realm, his failure—it all burned away, leaving only one, undeniable truth.
He could not let her die.
He didn’t make a conscious decision. His body moved on its own.
One moment he was a spectator shrouded in guilt, the next he was a warrior crossing the street, the human glamour he wore dissolving like mist.
The true form of Kaelen of the Silverwood Court was a thing of starlight and summer storms. A faint, silver luminescence surrounded him as he vaulted the fence he had once secretly warded.
He landed silently on the blighted soil just as a massive, thorny tendril arched through the air, aimed directly at Rowan’s heart.
She was on her knees, struggling to rise, her face pale with shock and pain. She wouldn’t be able to stop it.
“Rowan!”
His voice was not the quiet, measured tone she knew.
It was a commander’s roar, filled with the power of his court. He moved faster than a human eye could follow, placing himself directly in the path of the attack. He threw up his hands, and a shield of woven moonlight and solidifying air shimmered into existence an instant before the vine struck.
The impact was immense. The shield cracked, splintering with a sound like shattering glass, and the force of the blow threw him back a step.
He grunted, his arms straining as he poured his own fading energy into the ward.
Rowan stared, her eyes wide with disbelief and confusion.
He was here. Not as Kael, the quiet landscaper, but as a prince of the Fae, glowing with an ethereal light, holding back the darkness that was about to kill her. The unwanted savior.
“Get back!” he yelled, not daring to look at her, focusing all his will on the shield.
But she didn’t run. He felt her shift behind him, felt a surge of familiar, potent energy. Her raw earth magic.
“Together,” she breathed, her voice tight with pain but resolute.
She placed her hands on his back.
The moment she touched him, their magic collided.
It should have been a disaster, his refined Seelie light and her wild, untamed nature-force. Instead, it was like two halves of a whole snapping into place.
Her green, chaotic energy flooded into him, raw and powerful, bolstering his failing strength. His own magic, cool and controlled, flowed into her, giving her power shape and focus.
It was perfect, painful harmony. The grief and betrayal were still there, a raw chasm between them, but their magic didn’t care.
It recognized its counterpart.
Kael roared as their combined power surged through him.
He pushed forward, and the shimmering shield didn’t just hold—it exploded outward in a blinding wave of silver-green light.
The wave of pure life force slammed into the Unseelie corruption. The black vines shrieked, a high, thin sound of pure agony, as they were seared by the light.
They withered, turning from obsidian black to brittle grey before dissolving into dust. The creeping blight was scoured from the ground, pushed back to the edges of the garden. For a moment, the air was clean, the stench of rot replaced by the smell of ozone and freshly turned earth.
The onslaught ceased. The remaining shadows recoiled, melting back into the deepening twilight.
Morwen’s assault had been driven back.
Not defeated, but repelled.
Silence descended once more, but this time it was a ringing, breathless quiet. The garden was a wreck. Torn plants, snapped trellises, and patches of blighted soil scarred the landscape. But it wasn’t dead. Wounded, but not broken.
Kael let his arms fall, the last of the silver light fading from around him. The adrenaline drained away, leaving only bone-deep exhaustion and the agony of his choices. He slowly turned to face her.
Rowan stood just a few feet away, her hand still hovering where his back had been. Her face was pale, smeared with dirt and tears, and a dark stain of blood was spreading on her sleeve.
Her expression was a battlefield of warring emotions: shock, rage, pain, and a sliver of something he couldn’t dare name.
He had saved her.
The man who had betrayed her to her core had just saved her life.
He was not her prince asking for forgiveness, but a warrior who had fought for her.
And now, in the ruins of the sanctuary he had helped to destroy, he had nowhere left to run.