# Chapter 18
The days following the shooting brought a version of the palace Angelo hadn't seen before — quieter, tenser, every corridor now watched by security personnel who no longer bothered pretending their presence was routine.
Elena bore it with more composure than Angelo expected, though he noticed the small signs — the way she flinched at sudden movement near windows, the way she no longer walked the garden paths alone.
He stayed close without being asked to. She didn't send him away.
It was Marcus who finally forced the next reckoning.
He found his father alone in the study, three nights after the shooting, and closed the door behind him with unusual deliberateness.
"You need to know something," Marcus said. "Before this family loses anyone else to secrets."
The King looked up. "Marcus—"
"I'm dying, Father."
The words landed in the room like something physical.
The King rose slowly from his chair. "What did you say?"
"The injury healed," Marcus said, his voice steady in a way that clearly cost him everything he had. "But the tests found something else. Something that has nothing to do with the battlefield. I've known for months. I told the doctors to say nothing. I wanted to spare you."
"Spare me?" The King's voice broke entirely. "You wanted to spare me by letting me believe I might lose my daughter to an assassin's bullet while my son quietly died of something I knew nothing about?"
"I didn't know about the shooting when I made that choice."
"You should have told me the moment you knew, Marcus. Before any of this." The King's hands were trembling now. "Do you understand what you've done? Do you understand what person has been circling this family, waiting for exactly the weakness your secret created?"
Marcus said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would undo months of silence.
The King sat back down heavily, his face in his hands, and for a long moment, the powerful, composed monarch Angelo had come to know disappeared entirely, replaced by an old man confronting, all at once, the two things he feared most.
"I asked Lieutenant Sanchez a question," the King said finally, quietly, "the week your mother and I returned from Sanjara. I told him my time was growing shorter, and that I wished to see your sister safe and happy before I passed." He looked up at his son. "I did not know, when I said it, how much shorter my time might truly be. Or yours."
"Father—"
"No." The King held up a hand. "I am done with secrets in this family, Marcus. All of them. Starting tonight."
---
Elena learned the truth an hour later, from her father himself, with Angelo standing quietly near the door, present because the King had asked him to be — a small, unspoken acknowledgment of how far he had already moved into the center of this family's life.
Elena did not cry, not immediately. She simply sat very still, absorbing what she had already half-suspected for weeks, now confirmed beyond any doubt.
"How long?" she finally asked.
"The doctors aren't certain," the King said gently. "Months. Perhaps longer, with treatment."
Elena looked at her brother, and something passed between them that needed no words — years of shared history, arguments, affection, all of it compressed into a single look.
"You should have told me," she said.
"I know."
"I would have wanted to know."
"I know that too." Marcus's voice cracked. "I was trying to protect you. I've clearly become very bad at knowing the difference between protecting people and simply leaving them alone in the dark."
Elena crossed the room and embraced him, carefully, mindful of everything his body had already endured.
Angelo watched from the doorway, and though the moment belonged entirely to the family, he felt, for the first time since arriving in Valoria, that he was no longer simply a guest observing it from the outside.