Chapter 70- The woman I Love #4
My fingers trembled once before I folded them together.
"What would you have gained from my death..."
I looked at him. "What could have been given to you that I wouldn't have if only you asked?"
Nathaniel's breathing remained shallow and uneven.
"Why?"
Nathaniel opened his mouth.
Nothing came.
I waited.
For a name.
A denial supported by something real.
A single fact capable of breaking the pattern I had spent six months trying to destroy.
He gave me nothing.
Because there was nothing left to give.
He laughed.
Slowly.
The sound did not resemble laughter at all.
It came apart before it ever truly formed, breaking somewhere deep inside his chest until it became little more than a hollow breath wrapped around a smile that held no warmth. There was no humor in it. No madness either.
Only grief.
Only the kind of grief that had been carried for so long it no longer knew how to exist quietly.
"If you could give me anything I asked for..." he said at last, his voice barely louder than the fire crackling behind us. "Could you give me the heart of the woman I love?"
I looked at him.
Confused.
His eyes never left mine.
"Could you return the future that was stolen from her?"
he whispered. "Could you make me happy after I watched the woman I loved spend years building a life... only to watch another woman step into it without ever knowing what it cost? She loved him," he continued quietly.
"Long before you ever learned his name."
His voice grew softer still.
"She stayed when everyone else left. She endured the worst parts of him. The coldness. The anger. The loneliness. She believed that if she remained long enough... one day he might finally look at her."
His breathing faltered.
"She believed patience would be enough."
Silence stretched between us. Then his eyes met mine again. "And then you appeared."
I blinked.
A small crease formed between my brows.
I did not interrupt him.
Partly because he needed to speak.
Mostly because I still had no idea who he was talking about.
He smiled again.
It was uglier this time.
"A frightened little thing." The words came without hatred. Only exhaustion. "A scarred child who stumbled through the palace doors with empty hands and frightened eyes."
His gaze traveled over me as though trying to reconcile the woman before him with the memory he carried.
"You were lost." Another pause. "You were broken."
His jaw tightened. "And somehow..." His voice cracked.
"You took everything...You sat on a throne you never fought for...You received the love of a man everyone believed incapable of loving anyone...You laughed with the version of him she spent years waiting to meet."
His breathing became uneven.
"She received the monster." His eyes closed briefly. "You received the man."
I watched him quietly.
There should have been anger inside me.
There should have been outrage.
Instead...
I only felt lost.
Who?
Who was he talking about?
I searched every face I had known since arriving in Elysium.
Every noblewoman.
Every servant.
Every lady-in-waiting.
Every woman whose path had crossed mine.
None of them fit the story he was telling.
He looked at me again.
"So tell me, Your Majesty..." His smile returned. Empty. "Can you give her heart back?"
The office became impossibly quiet.
I could hear the fire.
The distant ticking of the clock.
His breathing.
My own.
"Can you return the years she lost?"
His eyes drifted toward the floor.
"When history remembers her..." he said quietly, "she will not be remembered as the woman who loved him."
His fingers curled weakly against the carpet.
"She will become a rumor...A mistake...A woman whispered about behind closed doors."
His voice hollowed further. "The woman who warmed the king's bed before he found his queen."
He laughed again.
Once.
Softly.
"She will be called a harlot." His eyes slowly lifted back to mine. "And you..." His gaze held neither accusation nor admiration now. Only resignation. "You will become the gentle queen who tamed the monster...The innocent woman who taught a tyrant how to love."
His shoulders sagged.
"She will be a footnote." His voice had become almost too quiet to hear. "A forgotten name buried beneath yours...A character history never cared enough to understand... A life reduced to a single sentence because no one believed she mattered enough for her story to be told."
He swallowed painfully.
"Her death..."The words caught in his throat. "...will become nothing more than another casualty beneath the reign of a ruthless emperor."
His eyes never left mine.
"But your illness..."
He smiled bitterly.
"That became the story everyone remembered."
His hands trembled violently now.
From memory.
"Do you know what I remember?" His voice barely existed anymore.
"I remember holding her." The room seemed to shrink around us.
"I remember how cold she was." His eyes glistened.
"I remember begging her to wake up." His breathing hitched.
"I remember promising things I could no longer give."
His fingers curled tighter into the ruined carpet.
"And every time someone speaks your name..." He laughed through tears that never quite fell. "They speak of miracles you've done." His gaze met mine one last time. "They speak of the heart you've healed. Can you heal my heart, my hearty? Can you take away the pain I felt while I held her body?
I stared back at him. Searching desperately through memories that refused to answer the question he was asking.
Nathaniel watched my face.
He saw the confusion.
The genuine bewilderment.
For a fleeting moment, something like disbelief crossed his own expression.
As though he had expected guilt.
Recognition.
Anything.
Instead, he found only a woman quietly searching her memories, trying to understand whose name had just been buried beneath so much grief.
His voice broke one final time.
"Can you..."
The words dissolved into silence before he forced them out.
"Can you bring the woman I love back from the dead?"