Chapter Text
Tick. Tick. Tick.
It’s the only sound in the room other than the faint hum of Paris beyond the balcony — distant sirens, soft wind rustling the trees and the steady, too-steady beat of Alex’s heart against my spine.
I lie still in the dark. His arm is heavy around my waist, his breath slow and warm where it ghosts against the nape of my neck. I have realised he always runs hot in his sleep. I thought it would be annoying — but now it’s unbearable because now I know I have to leave.
The clock ticks on. I can't stop staring at it. Every second sounds like a closing door. Tick. Tick. Tick. Like a countdown to some terrible detonation. To absence. To silence. To the end.
My phone on the nightstand. A message. The Queen.
“ We understand you’ve rerouted your itinerary post-Germany. Trust you’ll remember your duty when you return. We will talk. ”
She knows.
I swallow hard. Sweat clings to the back of my neck — maybe from Alex, maybe from me. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for days, weeks, a lifetime. And it’s finally run out.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
He shifts behind me slightly, murmuring something into the hollow of my shoulder. I ache so viciously it feels like a wound. But I don’t move. I won’t let myself.
I just close my eyes.
And listen.
To the clock.
To his breath.
To the golden boy behind me.
This — this right here — the warmth, the safety, the way someone knows me without ceremony — this is a miracle. A forbidden one. A borrowed miracle with an overdue return.
And tomorrow, I will leave him behind.
Because I have to.
Because I must.
Because love isn’t always a door opening. Sometimes, it’s closing one before someone walks through it and falls into ruin.
Alex Claremont-Diaz is everything I am not allowed to want — joy and light and future and freedom. He would burn down every palace in the world to make space for the people he loves.
And I would let him.
That’s why I have to go.
I am the one thing he must never set alight.
I would not burn — I would extinguish.
And he deserves fire.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“ I am sorry, Alex. But it’s best. Before it becomes more.
Before I take your light and make it mine. Before I ruin it.
There is no way out. So I’ll take the only one left:
I leave. ”
When the first thread of light creeps through the window, I untangle myself gently from his arms. I move like I’ve trained myself to — silently, precisely, as if detaching from a bomb.
I do not kiss his forehead.
I do not say goodbye.
I do not look back.
Because I am a coward.
Because I cannot bear to face the way his eyes would look at me when he realises what I’m doing. I cannot survive the words he would say — that there must be another way, that we can make it work.
But there is no way. Not for me.
Not here.
Not yet.
So I leave under a suffocating cloak of silence, every step forward a fracture, every heartbeat a betrayal.
It hurts. It breaks. It wrecks me.
But it is the only way I know how to protect him — from me, from the crown, from everything I cannot be and never will be.
I leave quietly, with a firm mask on my face, already dreading the coldness of the palace walls.
And I do not look back.