Edric closed his eyes for a moment.
It was not the girl he saw first, nor the impossible power she had carried, but the way the Crown Prince had looked at her. The way he had held her as if she were something rare enough to wound the world simply by existing. The way he had endured her fists and scratches without resentment, without pride, without the distance he wore so easily with everyone else.
There had been something almost disarming in it. Something painfully human.
That smile on the Crown Prince's face was so brief, so unguarded, so unlike the cold brilliance people feared in him. It was the kind of smile that appeared only once in a lifetime, the kind a man did not give freely. And that girl had brought it out of him as though it belonged there.
Should that be erased just because it was not meant to exist?
Shouldn't someone, at least, remember that it had happened?
