CHAPTER 3: The Last Place That Still Felt Like Hers

Elara’s POV

I woke before dawn, the way I had every morning for two years, my body still keeping a schedule no one had asked it to keep.

The estate was quiet in a way it hadn’t been the night before — no laughter drifting up from the gathering, no clink of silver, no voices raised in toasts to a King I’d never met and never would. Just the pale grey light easing in through unfamiliar curtains, and the particular stillness of a house sleeping off its own performance.

I dressed slowly, favoring my ribs, and slipped out into the hallway before anyone else was awake enough to notice me moving through it.

There was a place I wanted to see. I hadn’t let myself think about it directly since coming back — not the room, not my old life, just this one place, tucked away past the west wing, that had belonged to something quieter and truer than any of it.

The greenhouse.

Mother used to bring me there when I was small, back when her hands were steadier and her breath came easier. We’d spend hours among the herbs, her teaching me which leaves eased fever and which ones only looked like they would, her patience never once running thin no matter how many jars I broke or roots I mislabeled. It was the one place in this entire house that had only ever belonged to the two of us. No pack business. No politics. Just her, and me, and the smell of crushed mint.

Some small, foolish part of me believed it might still be there, untouched, waiting.

I found the door at the end of the east corridor exactly where I remembered it, and pushed it open before I could talk myself out of it.

The smell was wrong first — no mint, no soil, no green growing things. Instead: polished wood, faint traces of rosin, something floral and expensive layered over everything like perfume covering a smell it didn’t want you to notice.

The glass walls were still there, the light still fell the same way through them, gold and soft, but everything beneath that light had been replaced. A piano stood where the potting table used to be, gleaming black, sheet music open across its stand.

An easel leaned against the far wall, half-finished canvas propped against it — soft colors, careful brushstrokes, undeniably skilled. Small personal touches scattered everywhere, all of them Selene’s. A shawl draped over a chair. A ribbon tying back a curtain. A framed photograph on the windowsill, Selene laughing at something just out of frame.

Every trace of what this room used to be — every jar, every dried bundle of herbs, every small mark my hands had once left on this space — was simply gone.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment, and something in my chest cracked open in a way the guest room, the flinch, even Mother’s flat greeting hadn’t managed to reach. This wasn’t about losing a bedroom. This was the one place that had ever felt like it belonged to just the two of us, and it had been erased so completely there wasn’t even a scar left to prove it had existed.

“Elira?”

Ronan’s voice, from the corridor behind me, followed by his footsteps slowing as he reached the doorway and saw what I was looking at.

He went very still.

“I didn’t—” He stopped, started again. “I didn’t realize this had changed.”

“You wouldn’t have,” I said quietly. “You were never in here.”

He stepped further into the room, turning slowly, taking in all of it the way I had — the piano, the easel, the complete absence of anything that used to be mine — and something shifted across his face. Not confusion this time. Guilt, raw and sudden, the kind that catches a person off guard because they never thought to look for it before now.

“Elira, I’m sorry. I should have—”

“Ronan?”

Selene’s voice, soft and startled, from the corridor. She appeared in the doorway a moment later, still in her nightclothes, hair loose around her shoulders, and it took her only a second to understand what she was looking at.

Her face crumpled instantly.

“Oh — oh, Elira, I didn’t know this was yours. I didn’t know, nobody told me, if I had known I never would have—” Her voice caught, tears rising fast and genuine-looking. “I’ll move everything out today. All of it. I don’t need this room, I can practice anywhere, please, I’m so sorry—”

“Selene.” Ronan crossed to her immediately, hand finding her shoulder, voice dropping into something gentle and reassuring. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”

I watched it happen the way I’d watched it happen since the moment I walked back through the front gate — his guilt, so briefly mine, sliding sideways and settling onto her instead, transformed into something he needed to comfort rather than something he needed to sit with.

It didn’t even take a full minute this time.

“I don’t want the room,” I said, and both of them turned back to me like they’d forgotten I was still standing there. “I don’t want compensation either. Keep it.”

“Elira, that’s not—” Ronan started.

“I mean it.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt. “I didn’t come back to reclaim anything. Not the room. Not my old life. I’m not here to take back what’s already been given away.”

Selene’s tears slowed, something uncertain flickering behind them, like she wasn’t sure whether to trust what I’d just said. Ronan just watched me, jaw tight, the way he did whenever a conversation wasn’t going the direction he expected.

“Then why are you here?” he asked, quieter now.

I thought about lying. It would have been easier, in a way — some soft, forgivable answer about family, about healing, about wanting to belong again. But I was too tired to manage the performance, and some stubborn, worn-down part of me wanted him to hear the truth plainly, even if he wasn’t ready for it.

“I’m staying until Mother is stable,” I said. “That’s all. Once she doesn’t need me anymore, I’m leaving.”

The room went quiet. Selene’s eyes widened slightly. Ronan’s jaw shifted, and for a moment I thought he might actually argue, might finally push back the way the old him would have.

Instead, he let out a short breath, almost a laugh, though nothing about his expression was amused.

“You’re upset,” he said. “That’s understandable, after everything. You don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

“Elira—”

“I’m not staying in this family forever, Ronan.” I said it as calmly as I would have stated the weather, no anger in it, no plea for him to argue me out of it. Just fact, laid flat between us. “I’m not angry. I’m not punishing anyone. I’m just telling you the truth.”

He studied me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that I couldn’t quite name — not disbelief exactly, not yet, but something close to it, something that assumed this was grief talking, or exhaustion, or a wound that would heal itself given enough time and enough patience from him.

“You’ll feel differently once you’ve settled back in,” he said finally, gently, like he was soothing a spooked animal rather than listening to a sister who meant exactly what she said.

I didn’t argue. There wasn’t any point.

I turned and walked out of the greenhouse that wasn’t mine anymore, leaving both of them standing among the piano and the easel and every trace of a life that had quietly, completely replaced my own — and behind me, I heard Ronan exhale, already deciding this was something he didn’t need to take seriously yet.