Chapter 51

Fahlada’s POV

The sudden crunch of leaves behind me snapped the quiet of the garden in half.

My entire body froze.

For a brief second, everything seemed to go silent—the wind through the trees, the distant hum of the estate, even my own breathing.

My hand moved before the thought fully formed in my mind. My fingers slipped beneath the hem of my pants and to the holster strapped against my ankle.

In one smooth motion, I pulled the gun free as I rose to my feet, turning toward the direction of the noise. The weapon was already raised by the time I faced the trees behind me.

“Who’s there?” I asked, my voice firm and steady despite the sudden spike of adrenaline in my chest.

No answer came.

My eyes swept across the garden, every sense sharpening at once. No one should be inside the mansion grounds right now.

My servants only came on weekends to clean and restock supplies, and the security staff were stationed outside the estate perimeter unless they were in their barracks. Which meant someone was here who shouldn’t be.

I took a cautious step forward, the grass whispering beneath my shoes as I moved.

“Show yourself,” I repeated, my voice lower this time.

Still nothing.

Then I heard a faint shift of movement to my right. My body reacted instantly, pivoting toward the sound with the gun following the motion. The barrel lifted and aimed before I even consciously decided to do it.

And then I stopped.

Queen Miu stood only a few paces away, looking directly at me with a smile that was far too relaxed for someone who had just been nearly shot.

She had her hands loosely clasped behind her back, as though she had simply wandered here for a casual stroll.

“Well,” she said lightly, tilting her head in mild amusement, “you’re certainly tense, Doctor.”

My eyes widened as reality finally caught up with me. I lowered the gun immediately and the motion felt embarrassingly abrupt.

“Your Majesty—!” I bowed quickly, the words rushing out before I could stop them. “My deepest apologies. I didn’t realize it was you. I never intended to—”

“To point a gun at me?” she finished for me, her tone surprisingly casual.

There was no anger in her voice. In fact, when I cautiously lifted my gaze, she looked almost entertained by the situation.

“It’s fine,” she said, waving one hand dismissively as if the matter were trivial. “If anything, I should be the one apologizing.”

I blinked in confusion.

She gestured toward the ground behind her, where a pile of dry leaves had clearly been disturbed. “I was sneaking around back here like a suspicious burglar,” she added with a soft laugh. “Honestly, you were completely justified.”

The Queen glanced somewhere briefly before returning her attention to me. “Sorry for interrupting your… conversation,” she said, nodding gently toward the two tombstones behind me.

My shoulders stiffened slightly at that.

For a moment, none of us spoke. The wind stirred through the trees again, rustling the leaves softly around the garden as the quiet returned.

But then, Queen Miu stepped past me quietly. Her movements slow, almost careful, as though she sensed that this corner of the garden demanded a certain kind of respect.

I watched her approach the graves, the soft crunch of grass beneath her shoes the only sound breaking the stillness between us.

She stopped just in front of the two tombstones and studied them for a moment. The breeze lifted a strand of her hair, carrying it gently across her cheek as her eyes traced the names carved into the stone.

“The Valeas…” she said softly, almost to herself. “I didn’t know they were your parents.”

I turned slowly toward her, but she remained facing the graves, her back to me as she continued speaking. Her voice had changed from the light amusement she carried earlier. It was quieter now, thoughtful.

“When I was younger,” she continued, “I remember hearing about them often. Their work traveled across the entire kingdom.” She paused briefly, as if searching through old memories. “Everyone used to speak about their charity drives… their clinics in places most doctors refused to go.”

A faint smile touched her lips as she spoke.

“They said your parents believed medicine shouldn’t belong only to the wealthy. That every life they touched mattered the same.”

Her words settled gently in the air between us.

“I always admired that,” she added.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. The garden seemed to grow even quieter around the two graves.

Then she hesitated.

I saw it in the subtle shift of her shoulders before she finally asked, “Do you mind if I ask… how they passed away?”

My jaw tightened before I could stop it.

The question itself wasn’t unexpected. Still, the memories attached to that answer were never gentle ones.

I walked forward slowly until I stood beside her. The stone beneath my parents’ names looked the same as it always did—cold, unmoving, stubbornly permanent.

For a moment, I simply looked at it.

Then the memories came back.

“We were traveling north,” I said quietly. “My parents were organizing one of their usual charity drives. A small town near the border had requested medical assistance. They wanted to provide basic treatment for the slums there—vaccinations, wound care, simple things most cities take for granted.”

My fingers folded behind my back as I spoke, a habit I had developed whenever I forced myself to remain composed.

“It should have been routine.”

I paused.

“But King Arthur had other suspicions.”

The Queen didn’t interrupt.

“He believed rebels were secretly gathering in that area,” I continued. “He suspected the town was hosting meetings for them.”

I exhaled slowly through my nose.

“He never bothered to confirm if it was true.”

The breeze rustled the flowers resting at the base of the graves.

“He sent knights to raid the entire town.”

Even now, the memory returned with unsettling clarity. The shouting. The chaos. The confusion.

“They stormed through every building,” I said. “Breaking doors, dragging people out, searching for evidence of rebellion.”

My gaze drifted toward the trees for a moment, but the scene was already playing clearly in my mind.

“The charity clinic my parents set up was inside one of the town’s larger buildings. It was filled with volunteers… patients… children.”

My voice grew quieter.

“In the middle of the raid, something went wrong.”

I could still hear it.

The explosion.

“A bomb was thrown into the building.” The words felt heavy leaving my mouth. “It detonated inside.”

The sound had been deafening. I remembered the floor shaking, the walls cracking, the violent force that had thrown everything into darkness.

“The blast knocked all of us unconscious,” I said. “When we woke up… the building was already burning.”

Flames.

Smoke.

The smell of it still lingered somewhere in the back of my mind.

“We were trapped inside for a long time.”

My fingers tightened slightly on my side.

“I was buried beneath collapsed debris,” I said quietly. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even see them.”

The memory of that helplessness never faded.

“My parents were searching for me. But the fire spread too quickly.”

My eyes remained fixed on the gravestones.

“They never made it out.”

The words came out steady, though my chest tightened slightly as I spoke them.

“When the rescue teams finally arrived, they found them both inside.”

I paused.

“They died from smoke inhalation.”

For a while, neither of us said anything.

But then… the Queen did the most unexpected thing.

She turned toward me, her gaze drifting not to my face, but to the faint edge of the scar that peeked out from my vest.

For a moment she said nothing. The room was quiet enough that I could hear the soft rustle of her breath.

But her expression… it looked broken.

Not like a composed sorrow. Not the polite sympathy people sometimes showed when they learned about my past. This was something rawer. Something that seemed to crack straight through the careful mask she had been wearing..

“It must have been… terribly painful…”

Her voice faltered. I saw the moment it happened—how the words struggled to leave her mouth, how her eyes shimmered with sudden tears.

I froze.

I didn’t know what to do.

People had reacted to my scar before. Curiosity. Pity. Sometimes even admiration, as though surviving something like that made me strong. But no one had ever looked at it like this—like it hurt them just to see it.

Then the tears slipped free, rolling slowly down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry…” she whispered, her voice so weak it almost disappeared between us.

My mind went blank.

Before I could even think of a response, she stepped forward and suddenly wrapped her arms around me, pulling me into an embrace.

The movement was so abrupt, so unexpected, that my body didn’t even resist. I simply stood there as she held me.

“I’m so sorry…” she repeated, her voice breaking again and again between quiet sobs.

My limbs went slack in her hold.

“Why… are you apologizing?” I asked weakly.

But the question sounded strange even to my own ears. My voice trembled, and something warm slid down my cheek before I realized what it was.

Tears.

For a moment, the realization stunned me more than anything else.

Ever since that day… I had never cried. Not once. Not in front of anyone.

Because I hated the world.

I loathed myself.

For not dying with them.

There had never been time for sadness. I convinced myself of that long ago. If I lived when my parents didn’t, then the least I could do was keep going. Live properly. Live well enough for all three of us. I owed them that much.

So I buried everything else.

The anger. The grief. The loneliness.

All of it.

So why… why am I crying now?

The Queen’s grip tightened around me as another sob shook her shoulders. Her face was pressed against me, her tears soaking into my clothes as she kept repeating those same words, as though she had carried them for years and could no longer hold them back.

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

And something inside me cracked.

Without understanding why, I started to cry harder. The tears came faster, hotter, until my chest ached and my breathing broke into uneven gasps.

I didn’t try to stop it.

I couldn’t.

The sound that left my throat was raw and unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone else entirely. My hands clutched weakly at the back of her dress as the grief I had locked away for ten long years finally tore its way free.

I bawled in the Queen’s arms.

Like a child.

Like the child I had been ten years ago when I lost my parents.

Everything around us disappeared. The years of pretending to be strong, pretending that I had already moved on—they all collapsed under the weight of something far more honest.

Now… I see.

All this time, I had been sad.

I had just refused to admit it.

Somewhere deep inside me, I had been waiting—waiting for someone to hold me like this, to acknowledge what had happened, to tell me that the pain I carried wasn’t something I had to bear alone.

I wanted comfort.

I wanted someone to say they were sorry.

And as I cried against the Queen’s shoulder, finally allowing the grief I had hidden for so long to pour out of me, I realized that perhaps… this was the first time since that day that I truly allowed myself to mourn.