The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 546

Liora’s POV

I left my father’s study with the word “abdicate” still rattling around my skull and only one person in the world I wanted to say it out loud to.

The throne room looked better every hour. The doors and windows stood wide open, morning light spilling across the floor where six hundred chairs used to be, and the last of the smoke had finally given way to soap and fresh air. Students were still everywhere, righting furniture and hauling the broken pieces into a pile against the far wall. Somebody had scrubbed the dark stain on the dais down to a shadow. I tried not to look at it, although my wolf licked her chops and sneered at the sight of the victory.

Zane stood in the middle of it all with a splintered chair under each arm, arguing with a boy half his size about where the pile was supposed to go. Amy was a few feet away, directing three students with what to do with a stack of Falcon’s Reach banners that were to be burned.

She spotted me first.

“Well, if it isn’t Her Royal—”

I crossed the floor and pulled her into a hug before she could finish. She went stiff for a second before her arms came up and squeezed back twice as hard.

“Careful,” she muttered into my shoulder. “I smell like shit right now.”

“I don’t care.” I held on anyway. When I finally pulled back, I got a good look at her. The gray dress. The raw hands. The dark circles under her eyes. I reached up without thinking and ran my palm over the stubble where her hair used to be. “What the hell happened?”

She smiled wryly. “Alder happened. But it’s taken care of now.”

I huffed out a sound. “I’m sorry, Amy.”

The rose gardens hadn’t been changed since I was last here. I smelled the redolent flowers long before I saw them. That was going to take some getting used to—a year without a wolf, and I’d forgotten the world had this many layers to it. Dew. Soil. Hundreds of roses, their scent sweet enough to make my head swim.

And underneath all of it, I smelled him.

I found Callum sitting alone on the ridge of the fountain at the center of the garden, his elbows braced on his knees, slowly twisting a single red rose between his fingers. His knuckles were split and scabbed over. He hadn’t cleaned up yet, and there was dried blood on his sleeve that probably wasn’t his. Or maybe it was. I still hadn’t gotten the chance to ask about half of what happened to him last night.

I knew he heard me coming, but he didn’t look up until I settled onto the bench beside him. I leaned into his side and put my head on his shoulder, and his cheek came down to rest against my hair. We sat in silence for a while.

The whole night was still processing. Bianca. Belinda. My mother. The taste of blood that I couldn’t quite scrub out of my mouth no matter how many times I rinsed it. Every time I thought I’d filed it all away to deal with later, another piece surfaced and knocked the wind out of me all over again. Judging by the way Callum kept turning that rose without ever really looking at it, he was doing the same thing in his own mind.