Sold To The Cruel Prince

Chapter 169: Dark Dreams

Theron tried to make sense of her notes.

She was writing about colors when she described the stones, not in the broad careless way most people used the word, but with the kind of precision that suggested she could see shades others did not even know existed.

He had never heard anyone speak about materials like that. It should have seemed strange to him.

And yet, for some reason, it did not.

Or perhaps it did, only not enough to feel unfamiliar.

A faint rustle sounded beneath the bed, but he scarcely registered it. His attention remained on the parchment, on the cramped lines of her handwriting, on the proof of how seriously she had been working.

Slowly, almost absentmindedly, he removed his shoes and lifted one leg onto the bed, then the other, settling more deeply into the mattress while she continued talking from behind the divider.

She spoke about breakfast, about a stair she had nearly slipped on, about this and that in the easy, uninterrupted stream of someone who had grown used to filling silence with her voice.

How long would it take her to change?

The thought drifted through him lazily, without any urgency, and before he quite realized what he was doing, he had slipped down farther, his head resting against her pillow, the parchment still in his hand.

That was when something warm and strangely satisfying stirred in his chest.

He looked again at the notes.

At the care in them.

At the labor behind them.

At the evidence of a mind that had not merely copied what she had been taught, but had truly learned, absorbed, and built something of her own.

A quiet kind of happiness fluttered through him then, unexpected and small but undeniable, as though somewhere deep inside him, this was exactly what he had wanted for her all along. Not praise. Not approval. Something more private than that.

He wanted to see her succeed. He wanted to see her stand on her own and take hold of the knowledge she was reaching for.

The feeling startled him.

Where had that come from?

He frowned faintly, though not enough to break the softness of it, and shifted again. Her blanket had curled beneath his back, bunching awkwardly under him and making it impossible to lie still. With a quiet exhale, he tugged it free, intending to set it aside.

Instead, the fabric came away with her scent caught in it.

He paused.

Then, almost without thinking, he brought it closer.

It was soft and clean and strangely calming, a scent that felt at once unfamiliar and deeply known, as though it had found some hidden place inside him long before he had ever entered this room. It wrapped around him with a gentleness that made the world seem softer at the edges. Less sharp. Less demanding.

The notes blurred in his hand.

His thoughts loosened.

And that was all he remembered.

Only the scent remained, familiar and soothing, folding around him like a cocoon until even his rest seemed to belong to her.

Aveline finally stepped out from behind the divider, still adjusting the fabric at her shoulders as the last of her dressing rustled into place.

But the words she had been about to say died before they ever reached her lips.

Theron had fallen asleep.

He was still holding the parchment loosely in one hand, his body settled against her bed as though he had surrendered to exhaustion without meaning to.

The tension that usually lived in him, the sharpness, the guardedness, the constant sense that he was prepared to spring away from the world, had softened in sleep. His face looked younger that way, stripped of its usual severity.

There was fatigue there too, deep and honest, written beneath his eyes and across the faint lines of strain on his brow.

Aveline stopped speaking at once.

She stared for a moment longer than she meant to.

Something in her chest went quiet.

Then she began to walk toward him, slower now, as though any sudden movement might disturb the fragile peace that sleep had brought to his face. When she reached the edge of the bed, she looked down at him in silence, her expression softening with every second.

He looked so tired.

So impossibly tired.

It tugged at her heart in a way she could not have explained even if she tried. She had seen him fierce, confused, distant, irritated, and strangely tender in moments that seemed to escape his control.

But this was different. This was the kind of stillness that revealed more than waking ever could. He looked like someone who had carried too much for too long and only now, in the quiet safety of her room, had finally allowed himself to rest.

Aveline’s mouth pouted faintly.

"Oh, poor baby," she murmured under her breath, her tone tender and aching all at once. "You can rest here..."

There was only a warmth so gentle it seemed to fill her entire face. Her eyes shone with nothing but affection as she reached out and softly traced her fingers over his cheek.

He felt warm beneath her touch.

Real.

Present.

And somehow even more precious because of how worn out he looked.

The moment her fingers brushed his face, something in him shifted.

His arm moved before he was fully aware of it, slipping around her waist with the same quiet instinct as always. In one smooth motion, he drew her closer, pulling her down against him as though her nearness had been waiting for him even in sleep.

Aveline froze for only a second. Then her breath caught, and instead of pulling away, she let herself settle against him. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

There was no struggle in her at all; only the faint, helpless softness of someone who had already grown too used to being held by him to object now.

She rested there for a moment, her cheek against him, her hand still near his face, and listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing. The quiet in the room wrapped around them both. The warmth of his body, the familiar hold of his arm, the gentle stillness that had settled between them made everything else feel far away.

And before she fully realized what was happening, her own exhaustion caught up to her.

Her eyelids grew heavy.

Her body, already tired from the long day and the lingering aches, gave in with a quiet sigh.

Aveline curled closer into his embrace.

And just like that, while his arm remained around her and his breathing stayed even and calm, she fell asleep too.

-----

Even in his sleep, Theron could not escape the darkness.

He stood in a forest so deep and shadowed that it seemed to swallow sound itself. The trees rose around him like silent sentinels, their branches tangled overhead in a canopy that blocked out what little light might have remained.

Every direction looked the same, every path dissolved into blackness, and the air felt cold enough to settle into his bones. There was something wrong with the place, something ancient and watchful, as though the woods were not merely dark but hostile, waiting for him to falter.

He tried to bend light into existence.

Nothing happened.

Again he reached for it, frustration tightening in his chest, but the magic would not answer him. No glow sparked at his fingertips. No flame, no shimmer, no obedient flicker to push back the gloom. The silence that followed felt heavier for it, as though the forest itself had noticed his helplessness and grown even more still.

Then, through the darkness, he heard a voice.

Her voice.

Soft. Familiar. Just distant enough to make his heart ache.

"You can rest here..."

The words did not echo. They reached him with such quiet certainty that something inside him immediately moved toward them, pulled by instinct. The fear that had tightened through him loosened at once, replaced by a desperate need to find her, to reach the person whose voice sounded like shelter in a place that offered none.

And so... he ran.

He pushed through the darkness toward her, toward the only thing in that endless forest that did not feel wrong, toward the voice that called to him as though it had always known the way out.