Chapter 109

Amelia

The footage spread like wildfire. Grainy, high-contrast clips of rogue packs clashing with Richard’s patrols on the southern border. Angry shouting, snapping jaws, bodies thrown and pinned and bloodied. The kind of thing people didn’t need context for. They just needed to feel scared.

David had held a rally hours before. He stood on a crude wooden stage with flags snapping behind him, shouting about purity and strength and borders that had grown too soft. The crowd roared like they'd been starving for violence. By morning, packs that had been living quietly in border towns were in open conflict with anyone in uniform. The footage was already spliced into fear-mongering ads by the time we finished breakfast. One of them even used my face from an old interview, framed beside a burning checkpoint.

Nathan had warned us it was coming, but that didn’t make it easier to watch. I sat beside Richard while the screen replayed the same two angles, wolves slamming into guards, smoke rising from a patrol station, someone screaming off-camera. My hand was clenched around my pen hard enough to snap it. When I finally moved, it wasn’t to speak, it was to act.

I went to the shelters.

The refugee wing of the compound was overcrowded and underfunded, but I didn’t care. I rolled up my sleeves, tied my hair back, and got to work. I passed out water bottles, helped register new arrivals, listened to mothers explain how they’d carried children on foot for three days to escape what was coming. There were too many crying babies, too few diapers, and not nearly enough blankets. But people still smiled when I knelt down to ask if they’d eaten, or if their kids needed extra socks.

I found one boy under a cot, shaking. His sister said he’d stopped speaking after their village was raided. I crawled under the frame and sat with him while he let me hold his hand. When his sister wrapped his arm around my waist and said, "He’s okay when people don’t look scared," I nearly lost it.

One girl, maybe ten years old, clung to my arm while her brother got his wounds bandaged. Her grip was so tight I couldn’t move without her. When I asked her name, she just said, “You smell safe.”

No one asked who I was. But they looked at me like I mattered. Like I was part of something they could trust. I didn’t cry, I wanted to, but instead, I held a toddler with a bruised forehead while her mother filled out paperwork, and let someone take our photo without thinking much of it.

By nightfall, that photo was on every major media outlet.

Luna of the People, one headline read. Another showed me holding a child beside a quote I barely remembered saying: No one should have to prove they deserve safety.

I hadn’t done it for the cameras, but I wasn’t naive enough to pretend it didn’t help. Still, the glow didn’t last long.

In the council chamber the next day, I walked in to whispers. The air was tense, stale, like a fight had already begun without me. I wore something simple, but well-fitted. A nod to respect. Not submission.

“She’s become a distraction,” one of the elders muttered. “The King is off balance.”

“She undermines protocol,” said another. “She blurs the boundary between crown and common.”

“She gives speeches, appears in news cycles, stages charity efforts—”

“I didn’t stage anything,” I said, before they could spiral. “And I didn’t ask for cameras. But I won’t apologize for helping people your policies ignored.”

Silence. Then a scoff from someone behind the long table.

“You think a king should waste his time on the wounded?”

“No,” I said. “I think a king who forgets his people isn’t a king at all. He’s a tyrant in a palace.”

That landed. I saw it in the way two of them looked down. But the silence that followed was colder. Sharper.

As I left, I passed one of the junior advisors. He wasn’t speaking directly to me, but I heard him whisper, “She’s already acting like a queen.”

I didn’t go to Richard. I sat in the hallway instead, back pressed to the cool stone, trying to decide if I was brave or just tired. I kept seeing the girl’s face. You smell safe. How long would that last?

Richard

The ring was heavier than it should have been.

I held it in my hand for too long. The moonstone caught the light when I turned it, the onyx solid and sharp beneath my thumb. I had chosen it for her. Not for optics or symbolism, but because it reminded me of her, bright and grounded, impossible to miss. But now it felt like a lie, or maybe a delay I couldn’t afford.

Nathan came in without knocking. “We have reports of movement beyond the northern outpost. It could be David’s people testing our borders again.”

“Send scouts. Don’t engage unless provoked.”

He hesitated. “She’s been good for you. Amelia. But she’s becoming a symbol, Richard. That makes her a target.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. This isn’t just press cycles anymore. There are people in this building who would rather lose the election than see her rise with you.”

After he left, I didn’t move for a long time. I stared at the ring again, the one I’d picked in secret, the one I’d imagined on her finger a dozen different ways. I thought about how her hands had looked today in the footage—dirt-streaked, gripping children, steady and strong. I thought about how people were already calling her Luna.

Then I put the ring back in its box, closed the lid gently, and locked it in the vault. The click echoed through the room, final and cold, the sound of a decision he didn’t want to make but knew he had to.

Later that night, a staffer stepped into my office with a folded piece of paper, looking pale.

“Sir, you should see this. Leaked audio from Elsa’s phone. Apparently Jenny was on the line.”

I opened the transcript. I didn’t need to read the whole thing. One line was enough.

They’re calling her queen now.

She’s not taking my father. Not completely.

My throat closed. I handed the paper back without speaking. There were a dozen things I could have said, but none of them would fix what was already broken. She was still my daughter, but she was also hers.

I left the office and walked without direction, knowing exactly where I’d end up.

Amelia

That night, I found him in the garden. His jacket was off. His tie, undone. His eyes, tired in a way I hadn’t seen before. He looked like he hadn’t sat down in days, like holding everything together was something he felt in his spine and jaw and fists.

“I keep thinking we should talk,” I said, sitting beside him. “But every time I try, it feels like we’re running out of time.”

He didn’t look at me right away. “Say it.”

“I’m scared,” I said. “That whatever this is, whatever we are, it won’t survive a war.”

His hand found mine. Not soft. Not rehearsed. Just warm and rough and real.

“It will,” he said. “I won’t let it break.”

“Even if we lose everything else?”

“I already lost everything once,” he said. “I don’t think I’d survive it again. Not without you.”

He turned to me then. Kissed me, slow and serious, like the kiss itself was a vow. Like it might be the only one we’d get to make.

We didn’t go inside right away. We just stayed out there on the bench, holding hands in the dark like kids, listening to the wind and the distant sound of patrols shifting guard. He rested his head against mine, and for the first time in days, I let myself lean all the way into him.

We just sat there, hands clasped between us, like that was the only thing holding us together.