Chapter 37
The restaurant was quieter than the street outside.
Not silent—never silent—but softened by distance, lamplight, and the low murmur of other tables settling into their evening meals. The crowd here was different from the one at the theater. Less bright with performance. More subdued. More interested in comfort than spectacle.
Dara approved of that.
She sat across from Prince Valerius in a private corner of the dining room, where the light fell warmly over polished wood, pale ceramic dishes, and the crystal glasses already set at the table.
Their order had been taken only moments ago, leaving them now in that brief, suspended interval before food arrived—long enough for conversation, short enough that silence did not become strange.
Grace stood a discreet distance behind her, composed as ever. Leon and Edric had taken up their usual positions with all the long-suffering dignity of men who had likely accepted by now that this courtship would include far more philosophy than they had originally hoped.
Dara rested one hand lightly against the stem of her glass and looked at the candle between them for a moment.
The play still lingered in her mind.
Not the beauty of it.
That part had been easy.
It was the ending that remained—silver veils, noble grief, and a world too eager to call a woman’s destruction sacred simply because it had been useful.
She lifted her gaze. “Would you like to hear another story?”
Valerius, who had been watching her with that steady attentiveness of his, did not appear surprised. “Another?”
“Yes.”
His mouth shifted, just slightly. “I take it this one meets your standards more easily.”
Dara considered that. “No. It’s worse.”
That, at last, earned a more visible reaction from him. “Worse?”
“It’s far more complicated.”
Valerius leaned back slightly in his chair, his attention sharpening rather than easing. “Then yes, I would.”
Dara nodded once.
Outside the tall windows, the last traces of the evening glowed faintly beyond the city lamps. Inside, the candlelight held steady.
For a brief moment, she said nothing.
Not because she did not know where to begin.
Because beginnings mattered.
“There was once a being prophesied to bring death and destruction upon the world,” she said at last, her voice even and low. “He was known as the Devil God. The embodiment of all sins.”
Valerius did not interrupt.
Dara continued.
“By the time the story begins, the prophecy has already almost come true. The world is nearly ruined. Demons and darkness have spread everywhere, and the last resistance comes from the remaining immortal cultivation sects still strong enough to fight him.”
The words sounded strange spoken aloud here, in this world, over candlelight and linen and silverware.
But not wrong.
“He was searching for an artifact,” she said, “something believed to be capable of ending his reign. So he turned his power against the two sects that still opposed him, determined to seize it before they could use it against him.”
Her fingers shifted slightly against the glass.
“In the middle of all that, a woman from one of those sects discovers—more or less by accident—that before he became the Devil God… he had once been only a mortal man.”
Valerius’s gaze did not leave her face. “So the catastrophe could be prevented,” he said quietly.
Dara nodded. “If that man never became the Devil God, then the destruction she knew in her own time would never happen.”
The candlelight flickered faintly between them.
“Her father tells her she has to go back,” Dara said. “Five hundred years into the past. Find him. Kill him before he becomes what he is destined to become.”
Valerius was still for a moment. “Simple in theory.”
Dara gave him a look. “Very.”
The faintest hint of amusement touched him and disappeared again.
“But there’s a problem,” she said. “If his mortal body dies too soon, the evil inside him will awaken immediately. He doesn’t die as a man—he transforms at once into the Devil God.
So she cannot simply kill him. She has to find a way to destroy what makes him fated to become that creature in the first place. ”
Valerius’s expression shifted—not in confusion, but in interest. “The source of it.”
“Yes.”
Dara looked down briefly, then back up. “So her consciousness is sent back into the past. And when she arrives…”
A pause.
“She realizes she is in the body of his wife.”
That landed exactly as it should.
Valerius’s brows lifted, just slightly. “Convenient.”
“Disastrously so.”
The corner of his mouth moved faintly.
Dara ignored it.
“At first,” she said, “she sees him only as the future monster. The thing she was sent to stop. But the more she learns about his life… the less simple it becomes.”
Her voice softened—not in sentiment, but in something more measured.
“He was born under a cursed fate. The moment he entered the world, his mother died in childbirth. His father, the king, hated him for it. Later, he was sent away as a hostage prince to another kingdom, where he was humiliated, beaten, starved, and treated as less than even the lowest servant.”
Valerius’s gaze sharpened slightly.
Dara continued. “At one point, if he wanted to eat at all, he was forced to wash dishes in freezing water just to be given food that even pigs would have refused.”
Silence settled for a moment.
Then Dara said, more quietly, “She asked him once why he wasn’t angry.”
Valerius did not speak.
Dara looked at the candle flame. “And he said, ‘What would anger get me?’”
When she looked back up, his expression had gone very still.
“She asked him about his pride,” Dara said. “And he answered, ‘Pride doesn’t stop the hunger in my belly.’”
The restaurant around them seemed to recede. The quiet murmur of other tables remained, but dimly now, as though the story had begun to carve out its own space between them.
Dara rested her hands together loosely on the table. “That was the first time she began to wonder whether he had truly been born evil at all.”
Valerius said nothing.
So she went on.
“She begins showing him kindness,” Dara said. “Not because she trusts him. Not at first. But because she starts to think…” Her gaze drifted briefly. “Perhaps all the darkness that will one day consume him was fed by what the world did to him.”
She let that sit.
“Perhaps,” she said, “if someone had shown him enough warmth soon enough… fate might have bent.”
A server approached then with the first of their dishes, setting them down with careful discretion before withdrawing again. Neither Dara nor Valerius acknowledged the interruption beyond the faintest pause.
Once the table settled again, Dara continued. “For a time, it almost works.”
Valerius looked at her. “Almost?”
She gave a small nod. “They fall in love.”
No flourish. No dramatics.
Just the fact of it.
“He had spent most of his life being feared, used, or betrayed,” Dara said. “She was the first person who stayed by his side. The first person who saw the darkness in him and returned anyway.”
The candlelight moved softly across the rim of her glass.
“She tells him that she’ll stay with him,” Dara said. “That when the new year comes again, they can watch the fireworks together again.”
A small pause.
“And for someone who had never really believed in having a next year with anyone…” Her fingers tightened slightly against each other. “That meant everything.”
Valerius leaned forward just a fraction. “And yet,” he said, “you said it was worse than the other story.”
Dara let out a soft breath. “Yes.”
Her gaze lifted fully to his again. “Because love wasn’t enough.”
Valerius did not look away from her. “Then what happened?”
Dara’s gaze dropped briefly to the table, to the candlelight trembling against polished silver and the edge of her untouched glass.
For a moment, she did not answer.
Not because she did not know how.
Because there was no elegant way to say it.
“They loved each other,” she said at last. “But neither of them knew how to trust without fear.”
The words settled quietly between them.
“She had seen what he would become,” Dara continued. “Not in theory. Not as a prophecy. She had lived through the future he created. She had watched him kill the people she loved, destroy her sect, and bring the world to ruin.”
Valerius’s expression remained still, but his attention sharpened.
“And he,” Dara said, “had survived by suspicion for most of his life. Betrayal was not an exception to him. It was a pattern.”
A server stepped forward then with the next course, setting dishes down with practiced care before retreating once more into the soft rhythm of the dining room. Neither of them reached for the food immediately.
“The problem,” Dara said, her voice lower now, more thoughtful than dramatic, “was that kindness changed his world… but not his instincts.”
Valerius said nothing.
So she went on.
“There comes a point where he believes she is trying to poison him,” she said. “And at another point, she believes he has murdered her beloved grandmother. On top of that, he becomes jealous because he thinks her heart still belongs to another prince.”
A pause.
“And because he is still himself,” she added, “he does something cruel with that jealousy. He casts a spell that forces her hand. She wounds the other prince, and that chain of events leads to his death.”
Valerius’s brow shifted by the slightest degree. “So she concludes—”
“That no matter how much kindness she showed him,” Dara said, “he would never become anyone else.”
The candle between them gave a soft, wavering flicker.
“She tells herself he was born this way. That whatever pity she felt was foolish. That the future she came from was proof enough.” Dara’s mouth flattened slightly. “And by then, she is desperate enough to stop him that she decides to kill him anyway.”
Valerius leaned back slightly in his chair. “Even after loving him?”
“Yes.”
“On their wedding night,” Dara said, earning the smallest pause from him, “after they remarry according to his customs, she tries.”
Valerius exhaled once, very quietly. “She fails?”
“Completely.”