Then I left the ballroom.
Outside, the hotel corridor was lined with royal guards and stunned staff. The noise of the gala faded behind the closing doors, replaced by the distant hum of elevators and the soft crackle of radios.
King Alistair walked beside me, not ahead of me. Dr. Veyra followed with her case. Two guards led the way toward a private suite.
I should have been asking questions. A thousand of them crowded my mind. Why was I taken? Who left me at the church? Why had no one found me? What did Conrad Ashcroft know?
Instead, the first thing I said was, “I’m not educated for this.”
The king looked at me.
The words poured out of me before I could stop them. “I went to community college for two semesters. I never finished. I worked in a bakery, then as a receptionist, then I helped Preston build his career. I don’t speak Ardenian. I don’t know palace rules. I don’t know anything about being—”
“A daughter?” he asked gently.
My eyes burned.
He stopped walking.
“You do not need training for that,” he said. “Only time, and truth, and perhaps forgiveness neither of us has earned yet.”
The corridor blurred.
“I don’t know you,” I whispered.
“No,” he said. “But I have known the absence of you every day for twenty-seven years.”
That was when I cried.
Not loudly. Not beautifully. Tears simply slipped down my face, hot and humiliating, and I turned away because I had learned early not to let strangers see what hurt.
The king did not touch me.
He only took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it.
It smelled faintly of cedar and winter air.
In the private suite, the world became procedure. Dr. Veyra unpacked sterile tubes and explained each step. A cheek swab. A blood sample, only if I agreed. Photographs of the locket under magnification. Questions about childhood scars, allergies, memories.
I consented because facts felt safer than feelings.
When Dr. Veyra asked whether I had a small crescent-shaped birthmark beneath my left shoulder blade, I nearly dropped the glass of water in my hand.
