The air hung thick and heavy, smelling of ozone, bruised mint, and the wet, metallic tang of Fae blood.
Silence, profound and absolute, had fallen over the garden, a stillness more deafening than the cacophony of the battle that had just raged. Rowan stood in the heart of the devastation, mud sucking at her boots, her body a single, sprawling ache.
Her sanctuary was a wound.
The prize-winning roses, the ones Kael had saved from the blight, were now shredded by black thorns as thick as her wrist.
The community vegetable plots were gouged and cratered, fragile tomato vines and sturdy squash plants pulped into the earth. The fence, once a tidy boundary, was splintered and scarred with symbols that still seemed to hum with a faint, malevolent energy.
Her garden, her soul made manifest in soil and leaf, was weeping. And she was weeping with it, though no tears fell from her eyes. The grief was too deep, a hollowed-out cavern in her chest.
Kael stood a dozen feet away, his silhouette stark against the sickly glow of a flickering streetlamp.
He wasn’t the regal Fae prince or the aloof landscape consultant anymore. He was just a man, slumped with exhaustion, one hand pressed to his side where Morwen’s vicious magic had struck him. Dark, silver-tinged blood seeped through the fabric of his shirt, a stark reminder of the blow he had taken for her.
The sight of it sent a fresh wave of conflicting emotions through her: rage and gratitude, betrayal and a fierce, unwilling concern.
“Look at it,” she said, her voice a raw rasp. It wasn’t an accusation, not entirely. It was a statement of fact, a testament to the ruin that had followed him into her world. “Everything you touched.”
He flinched, the movement pulling at his injury.
He didn’t look at the garden. He looked only at her, his emerald eyes stripped of all glamour, reflecting the wreckage around them. “I know,” he said, his voice low and strained. “Rowan, I…”
“Don’t,” she cut him off, a tremor in her hands. “Don’t apologize. An apology is a bandage for a scrape. This… this is an amputation.” She finally tore her gaze from a crushed bed of lavender and met his. “Was it worth it? Your mission? Your dying kingdom?”
The questions were acid, meant to burn. And they did.
She saw the pain lance through him, deeper than his physical wound.
“No,” he said, the word raw and broken. “Nothing is worth this.” He took a hesitant step toward her, his movements stiff.
“My duty… it was a cold, grey thing, Rowan. A map with a single destination. Steal the Heartseed, save my people. It was simple. Abstract. I never… I never considered the cost.”
“The cost is my life’s work,” she shot back, gesturing to the carnage. “The cost is the one place in this entire concrete city that felt like it was truly alive.”
“The cost,” he said, his voice gaining a desperate strength, “was nearly you. And I have learned, far too late, that that is a price I am not willing to pay.”
His words hung in the charged air between them. Rowan’s anger, a roaring fire moments ago, faltered. She remembered the blinding flash of dark energy, his body moving without thought, placing himself between her and oblivion.
She remembered the feel of their magic intertwining—her wild, untamed earth-song and his ancient, melodic light—and how, for a moment, it had felt less like a battle and more like a homecoming.
She walked toward him, her steps measured, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She stopped just before him, close enough to see the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the grit of the city clinging to his skin.
He smelled of the garden, of soil and magic and blood. Her blood. His blood.
“You’re bleeding,” she stated, her voice softer now, devoid of its earlier venom.
He glanced down at his side as if only just remembering. “It will heal.”
“Not fast enough,” she countered. Instinct took over, the nurturer in her overriding the wounded woman. “Come on.”
She led him to the old potting shed at the back of the garden, its faded green door miraculously intact.
Inside, the familiar scent of potting soil, clay, and stored rainwater was a balm to her frayed nerves. She lit a battery-powered lantern, casting a warm, gentle glow over the cluttered space. She pointed to an overturned terracotta pot. “Sit.”
He obeyed without argument, sinking onto the makeshift stool with a ragged sigh.
Rowan rummaged through a battered first-aid kit she kept for scrapes and thorn-pricks, her movements clinical and detached.
It was easier to focus on the physical wound than the gaping one between them.
“Take your shirt off,” she commanded softly.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second before pulling the torn, blood-soaked fabric over his head. The lantern light played across the lean, powerful muscles of his chest and back, but what stole her breath was the wound itself. It wasn’t a clean cut.
It was a spiderweb of angry black veins spreading from a deep gash, pulsing with a faint, dark light. Unseelie magic. Poison.
“Kael…” she breathed, her hands freezing over the antiseptic wipes. “This isn’t a normal wound.”
“Morwen’s magic is meant to fester,” he said, his voice tight with pain. “It will take more than mortal medicine.”
Rowan looked from the poisoned wound to his face. She saw the truth of his earlier words reflected there. He had known what that blow would do. He had taken it anyway.
“My duty was a prison,” he repeated, his gaze locking with hers, intense and pleading. “I was born into it, Rowan. I have been the Prince of Silverwood since my first breath. I never knew anything else. I never knew… this.”
He gestured weakly, not to the shed, but encompassing something larger. “The chaos. The tenacity. The sheer, stubborn beauty of a flower forcing its way through a crack in the pavement. I never knew you.”
He reached out, his uninjured hand finding hers. His skin was cool, but a current of warmth, of Seelie magic, flowed from his touch.
It was the same energy she’d felt when he’d healed her roses.
“I came here to take from you,” he confessed, his voice thick with self-loathing. “And instead, you gave me everything. You showed me what it was to feel the sun on your skin and not just see its light. You showed me what it was to fight for something because you love it, not because you are bound to it. I fell in love with this garden, Rowan. And I fell in love with you. And in doing so, my duty became not a map, but a cage I had to break out of.”
The confession settled in the small space, as tangible as the dust motes dancing in the lantern light. It wasn’t a plea for forgiveness.
It was a statement of fact, as raw and real as the ruined earth outside.
Rowan felt the last of her rage dissolve, replaced by a profound, aching sorrow. For him. For his dying world. For them.
She looked at his wound, then back into his eyes. She saw a prince who had abdicated his mission, a warrior who had taken a poisoned blow, a man who was laying his heart bare in the ruins he had inadvertently helped create.
She squeezed his hand. “Morwen will be back.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t absolution. But it was an acknowledgment. An acceptance. It was the beginning of an alliance.
A flicker of relief, so powerful it was almost painful, crossed his face. “Yes. The celestial alignment Liam was investigating… she’ll use it to corrupt the Heartseed for good.”
“Then we stop her,” Rowan said, the words tasting like a vow. “Together.”
The word hung between them, a promise of a future they might not live to see. She let go of his hand and dipped a clean cloth into a bucket of rainwater.
Gently, she began to clean the edges of his wound. As her fingers brushed against his skin, a soft green light bloomed from her fingertips, instinctively trying to soothe, to mend. Kael gasped, not in pain, but in wonder.
A corresponding silver light shimmered from his own skin, meeting hers. The two magics twined together over the dark corruption, not erasing it, but holding it at bay, a gentle, luminous truce.
The clinical act of tending his wound became something else entirely. Her touch lingered, tracing the lines of his muscles, feeling the thrum of his life, his magic, beneath the skin. His gaze never left her face, watching her with an intensity that made the air grow thick and warm. The space between them shrank until their breath mingled.
He lifted his hand, his fingers tracing the line of her jaw, sweeping away a smudge of dirt on her cheek. The touch was feather-light, reverent. All the pain, the betrayal, the fear of the last few days seemed to coalesce into this single, fragile moment.
This was no longer about discovery; the explosive passion of their first kiss had been about curiosity and surprise. This was different.
This was about finding an anchor in a hurricane. It was about healing.
“Rowan,” he whispered, his voice a prayer.
She leaned in and closed the final distance, her lips meeting his. The kiss was soft, questioning at first, then deepening with a desperate, shared need.
It tasted of earth and starlight, of grief and hope.
Her hands moved from his wound to his shoulders, pulling him closer, while his arms wrapped around her waist, drawing her onto his lap.
The pain of his injury, the devastation outside, all of it faded to a dull roar.
There in the quiet sanctuary of the old shed, surrounded by the ghosts of what was lost, they began to forge something new.
It was a fierce, tender claiming, a silent conversation spoken through touch. Every kiss was a stitch, mending the tear between them.
Every caress was a promise to stand together against the coming darkness.
They were two broken pieces, a prince of a dying world and a botanist from a concrete jungle, fitting themselves together in the ruins, creating a bond they both knew would be their only shield in the war to come.