I was shaking as I lay back down. I kept thinking of Silas, so confident and funny and clever. I thought of him embracing me even though so many of his countrymen detested mine. I thought of him trying to make peace in whatever way he could.

He would have been a marvelous king.

But he didn’t want that. He wanted other titles. Husband. Father. Friend. And he was denied all of those at Quinten’s threatened hand.

“How do we make this right, Scarlet? How do we make him pay?”

“There’s only one way I can think of to make sure it never happens again,” she said plainly.

“Murder him?” I asked, hating to even think it. I didn’t think the answer to death was more death.

“And Hadrian. And probably Valentina for good measure. We’d have to remove the entire family.”

I could hardly breathe thinking about it. “I couldn’t lift a hand to Valentina. I still consider her a friend.”

Scarlet stared at the ceiling, looking as if she was carefully thinking over her words. “I’m not sure there’s a way to uncouple her from the royal family. She’s the queen.”

“I . . . Scarlet, I can’t.”

After a pause, she rolled to face me. “Can I ask you something completely unrelated to the topic?” she ventured.

“Yes, please.”

“Do you think you’ll ever remarry?”

I lifted my hand up and touched my chest. The ring Mother had given me was still proudly on my right hand, a sign of allegiance to my new family, but my rings from Silas were on a chain, and I kept them near my heart. These were the only pieces of jewelry I cared about anymore.

Sometimes I wondered if I should have kept my father’s ring, the one that was handed down through the lines of old Coroan aristocracy. Seeing as I wasn’t sure which of the charred rings we’d found in the remnants of the fire had been his, it probably never would have felt right.

“I don’t know. Silas left a mark. I don’t know if I want someone else to. No matter how much time passes, I don’t think I’ll ever forget what he did to me, for me. It probably doesn’t seem like it right now, but I’ll always feel like he rescued me.”

She was quiet for a while. “I think he’d be happy to know that’s how you felt, even after everything that’s happened. I think he’d be happy to know you don’t want to hurt anyone, too. He was like that.”

I smiled. “I know.” I still had a lifetime’s worth of things to learn about Silas, but I knew his character, and I would carry that with me. I swallowed, unsure if I could speak about him more just now. “What about you? Do you want to get married?”

“I don’t know if I can. Not anymore,” she confessed. “I feel like there might always be a wall around me.”

“That’s a good way to put it. It’s hard to think of letting anyone as close as I let Silas. . . . Before we left, I went by his grave. I told him I felt like I was going to have to let him go in a way so I could keep living.”