Theron looked at her, genuinely stunned for the first ti in a long while.
Beneath the confusion, beneath the irritation, beneath the dull pain still knotting his thoughts together, sothing sharper began to stir. A vague unease. A sense that this had gone from ridiculous to dangerous far too quickly.
He reached for her shoulders and held her there, stopping her before she could crowd him any further.
Rosalyn looked at his face, and what she saw there made sothing in her chest crack. It was not even close to desire; his face was stiff, but it was not anger or even annoyance.
It was pity.
Pity.
And sohow that hurt her more than everything that had happened before it. The humiliation, the laughter, the glances, the fireball that had gone wildly astray, all of it suddenly seed small compared to the quiet insult of being looked at as though she were pathetic.
"So Your Highness does know how to stop a woman from getting close you," she said, her voice tight with contempt.
And yet, he did nothing to stop that woman.
Theron said nothing.
His silence only made the wound deepen. Rosalyn’s eyes burned, and the fury that had been simring in her all this ti finally overflowed. She struck his chest once, then again, her fists landing hard against him in frustrated, humiliating disbelief.
Theron clenched his jaw.
Another image flickered across his mind, sharp and fleeting. Rosalyn’s face seed to blur, and for one impossible instant, it was replaced by that other woman’s expression, the one he could not fully rember but could never quite forget. His head throbbed harder, as though the mory itself resisted being dragged into the light.
Before Rosalyn could strike him a second ti, Theron caught her wrist.
His grip was firm, but not rough. It was the kind of restraint one used when trying to stop a situation from becoming worse rather than winning it.
"She is not my woman," he said. "I do not know who she is."
The words felt strange even as he spoke them.
Because they were true.
He did not know who "Ava" was. Not really.
He did not know why her face haunted his dreams. He did not know why hearing her voice felt familiar. He did not know why seeing pain in her eyes had twisted sothing inside his chest so violently that it still hurt.
And yet he knew none of that would sound reasonable.
Perhaps Rosalyn deserved an explanation. Perhaps that was why he had spoken at all.
Rosalyn laughed.
The sound was brittle.
"So that is her ga."
Sothing dark settled into her expression.
"A social climber dressed in borrowed refinent."
Her lips curled with disdain.
"The nerve of her. To imagine she could reach above her station and lay claim to what is mine."
Theron felt sothing tighten inside him.
His hand clenched. For a brief mont, he did not even understand why. Rosalyn was insulting a woman he barely knew. A woman who, by all logic, should have ant absolutely nothing to him.
Yet every word felt wrong. The contempt in Rosalyn’s voice felt misplaced.
The image of Aveline rose unbidden in his mind. The way she had stood beneath the golden firelight... The stubborn lift of her chin... The complete indifference she had shown toward status, titles, and expectations.
A social climber?
The thought almost felt absurd.
That woman did not seem interested in climbing toward anything.
If anything, she appeared to regard the entire social hierarchy as an inconvenience she tolerated only because she had no choice.
Theron’s jaw tightened.
For so reason, he did not like hearing Rosalyn speak about her like that, and that realization irritated him almost as much as Rosalyn herself.
Perhaps, he should not have bothered explaining. Perhaps, he owed Rosalyn nothing.
The engagent had been arranged by others. The expectations belonged to others. The future everyone seed so determined to force upon him had never felt like his own.
Rosalyn mistook his silence for agreent.
"Won like that are predictable," she continued bitterly. "They see a title, a crown, a future king, and suddenly they think they can take what belongs to soone else."
Theron looked at her.
Really looked at her.
And the strange thing was that every word she spoke seed to move him further away rather than closer.
Because when he thought of Aveline, he rembered a girl who had walked away from him repeatedly.
A girl who had insulted an Archduke to his face.
A girl who had been offered attention by so of the most important people in the kingdom and had seed more interested in a magical dallion than any of them.
A girl who had kissed him with enough anger to start a war and then imdiately acted as though solving magical theories was more important than his reaction.
Nothing about that resembled ambition or calculation.
And yet Rosalyn spoke as though she had her figured out.
The carriage fell silent.
Outside, the city rolled past unnoticed.
Inside, Theron found himself thinking about a girl who claid not to know him, a voice calling soone little hare, and a feeling he could neither explain nor escape.
He wondered whether the person he was trying hardest to convince was not Rosalyn.
It was himself.
"Perhaps," he said, his voice low and strained, "we are not compatible, as your grandfather said."
He did not even get to finish the sentence.
Rosalyn’s face changed.
For one stunned second, she only stared at him.
Then she tore herself free, turned away without another word, and shoved open the carriage door. The mont it stopped, she jumped down and walked away from him with rigid, furious steps, refusing to let him see how much that had hurt.
Theron did not stop her.
He only sat there in the carriage, staring out at the world beyond the window, while that sa strange ache pressed harder at the back of his mind.
-----
Rosalyn stord into her grandmother’s study and practically slamd the door behind her, the force of it betraying the anger she had tried and failed to keep contained.
The room was quiet, orderly, and filled with the faint scent of old paper and tea, which only made her own fury feel more out of place. She did not pause to steady herself. She launched straight into the story, every humiliating detail spilling out in a rush, from Aveline’s infuriating defiance to Theron’s maddening indifference, from the chaos in the corridor to the way everything had unraveled in front of everyone.
Archduchess Leone listened without interrupting, her expression composed and unreadable as Rosalyn paced in front of her. She let her granddaughter speak until the anger had burned itself into exhaustion, and only then did she set down her teacup with deliberate care.
"He gave her the Guardian’s Sigil?" Leone asked, one brow lifting as Rosalyn finally ntioned the chain Lucien had placed around Aveline’s neck.
Rosalyn’s eyes twitched.
Of all the things she had said, of all the humiliation she had poured into the room, that was what her grandmother seed to find important.
Not the kiss.
Not the insult.
Not the way Theron had looked at that girl.
But the sigil.
Rosalyn drew in a tight breath, annoyed all over again that Leone could remain so infuriatingly calm. "Yes," she said bitterly. "He gave it to her."
Leone’s gaze sharpened at once. "Who is she?"
Rosalyn hesitated.
Lucien would not have given the Guardian’s Sigil to just anyone. That much was obvious even to her, and the realization made the whole scene feel even stranger now that she was forced to say it aloud. She swallowed, her eyes drifting away as the mory of Aveline’s face rose in her mind.
"She was... very pretty," she said at last, almost against her will.
Even saying that felt irritating. She had never seen a woman so striking before, not in the way Aveline had been beautiful. It was not the sort of beauty that begged to be admired or softened by charm. It was sharper than that, colder sohow, and more dangerous because she had worn it so casually, as though she had never once considered that anyone else might find it remarkable.
And the way she had looked at Rosalyn, as if she were no more significant than dust on a windowsill, had only made everything worse.
Rosalyn’s voice rose again, her composure cracking under the pressure of mory. "And Grandfather called her Leveret. Leveret," she repeated, the na practically spitting from her mouth. "And he looked at her as if she were his..."
She stopped herself, but the implication hung in the air all the sa.
Leone’s teacup slipped from her hand.
It struck the stack of docunts on her desk with a soft, disastrous splash of tea that spread darkly over the paper.
Rosalyn stared.
Leone’s face had gone pale so abruptly it was almost frightening.
"He called her Leveret?" she asked, her voice suddenly very quiet.
Rosalyn did not answer at once, unsettled now not by her grandmother’s surprise but by the unmistakable shift in her expression. The room seed to narrow around that one question, and for the first ti since leaving the corridor, Rosalyn felt the edge of sothing larger and far more dangerous than her own humiliation.
Leone was staring at her as though she had just nad a ghost.
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