"...what if there's no Ruby between us? There's no my mother either. Just... us, learning to love each other?"
Cecilia's eyes faltered.
"Then everything would be different, right?"
That was what she used to think, too. For years, she had turned that question over in her mind like a worn stone, smoothing its edges with the constant friction of her own hope.
If there was no Ruby, no Elara, no Saintess thing hanging over their marriage like a guillotine, would he love her? Would they be the couple Cecilia had always wished they could be?
Perhaps this was what Arzhen was talking about now. Of her saving him. Of making him… good, making him whole, making him the best version of himself.
The version that had always been buried beneath his mother's poison, beneath Ruby's shadow, beneath everything that had taught him all the wrong lessons about love and power.
Perhaps he was asking her, in his own broken way, to finish what she had started all those years ago.
