Chapter 67 Xavier- POV
"Would you like to go to the garden? Get some fresh air?" I suggested. I needed to get her away from the prying eyes of the court, away from the stifling smell of perfume and the watchful, suspicious glares of James and Leo.
She nodded silently.
We walked through the palace corridors, the music of the banquet fading into a ghostly echo. I kept her hand in mine, my thumb tracing the back of her knuckles.
I felt James trailing us from a distance, a shadow among shadows, his confusion radiating off him in waves. He didn't understand why I was entertaining a known threat. Honestly, neither did I.
As we reached the Royal Garden, the air turned crisp, scented with night-blooming jasmine and damp earth. The moon hung bloated and silver above us, casting long, sharp shadows across the manicured hedges.
"What was his name?" I asked quietly, the question burning in my throat. I told myself it was tactical, that I needed to know the identity of the man who held such sway over a Heart assassin—but a darker part of me was simply, irrationally jealous of a ghost.
"Xavier," she said.
I paused, my boots crunching on the gravel. I raised a brow, the irony of the name striking me like a bell. "Xavier? The same name as the King?"
"Yes," she murmured, her gaze fixated on the silver moon, her expression turning distant and hollow. "His name is Xavier. He is gone... no, he isn’t. He is just..." She stopped, her voice trailing off into a jagged silence.
She looked back at me, her eyes pleading. "Can we not talk about it? I don't want to ruin your night with my silliness."
"It isn't silliness," I countered, stepping closer.
"It’s very sad," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rustle of the leaves. "I don't want to cry again. The pain is too much to bear alone."
The genuine weariness in her tone was chilling. She wasn't just sad; she was exhausted, as if she had been running for a lifetime through a graveyard.
I looked at her, and for a fleeting second, I felt a strange, impossible sense of recognition. I didn't know a woman named Heart, but I knew the weight of a kingdom’s expectations.
I knew the fear of watching everything you love stand on the edge of a precipice.
I didn't see an assassin looking for a heart to pierce. I saw a woman who had already lost hers, and was looking for a place to bury the remains. I reached out, tilting her chin up so she had to meet my eyes, my blue eyes against her grief-stricken ones.
"You aren't alone tonight," I said, and for the first time in my life, I wasn't playing a part. I wasn't 'Dark' the spy or Xavier the King. I was just a man standing in a garden, unwilling to let a broken girl fall.
The garden felt as though it had been carved out of time, a small island of silver light and blooming jasmine in a world of growing shadows. I held her hand, her skin cool against mine, and watched her profile as she spoke.
She didn't look like a spy weaving a web; she looked like a prophetess recounting a tragedy that hadn't happened yet—or perhaps, one that had happened a thousand times in her mind.
"Can I tell you a story?" she asked.
I nodded, my curiosity warring with a strange, rising dread. "I’m willing to listen. Does this involve the man named Xavier?"
"Yes," she answered instantly.
As she began to speak, the air seemed to grow colder. She talked about a man who was an anchor, a man burdened by the expectations of a world that didn't understand the cost of his silence.
She spoke of how people saw him as lazy or indifferent, never realizing that his very existence was the only thing keeping the darkness from swallowing the soil.
My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. She was talking about me. Not the mask of "Dark," but the hidden reality of the King.
She spoke of the dragon core, the very thing I carried within me, the secret burden that made me a target for every power-hungry house in the land.
"Then there was a traitor among his people," she continued, her voice trembling like a fraying wire. "They stabbed him in the back, but instead of saving himself, he saved this woman. They ended up in the Forbidden Forest... and the traitors trapped them. They wanted to take what was his."
I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. It was as if she were reading my own nightmares back to me, or perhaps, a future I had only caught glimpses of in the darkest hours of the night.
She didn't stop. Her voice grew more frantic, more haunted, as she described the Titans.
She spoke of monsters so large they turned cities into dust, of a kingdom that became nothing but a bed of gray ash.
She spoke of death on a scale that made my stomach turn, of a world where the cathedral bells didn't ring because there was no one left to pull the ropes.
"The man she loved... he died. Her family, her friends... everything was gone. And she was left to carry the pain alone."
By the time she finished, the massive clock on the Cathedral loomed over the city like a silent judge, its hands marking hours I hadn't realized were passing.
We had been seated there for so long, the music from the ballroom now nothing but a thin, ghostly vibration in the distance.
I looked at her, and for the first time, I felt a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the night air. I looked at the capital—the busy streetlamps, the pubs filled with laughter, the palace guards standing at attention, and for a terrifying second, I saw them as she did. I saw them as skeletons. I saw the ash.
I didn't let go of her hand. In fact, I gripped it tighter. If this was a story, it was the most beautiful and horrific one I had ever heard. If it was a warning, it was one written in her very blood.
"You talk as if you saw it," I whispered, my voice sounding foreign even to my own ears. "You talk as if you stood in the ash yourself."
She didn't answer right away. She just looked at the moon, her face a mask of somber, absolute exhaustion. I looked at this woman, this "assassin" sent to lure me to my death, and I realized I didn't care about the rebellion or the crown.
I wanted to protect her from the story she had just told. I wanted to be the anchor she thought was lost.
"Is that why you cried?" I asked, pulling her closer until our shadows merged on the gravel path. "Because in your story...the man dies?"
The sadness in her eyes was my answer. It was a love that had survived the end of the world, and it was looking at me with a longing that made my soul ache.
For a few hours in a quiet garden, the politics of a kingdom had vanished, replaced by the crushing, wholesome, and terrifying weight of a story that felt far too much like the truth.