He Sent Me Away So I Took His Crown Chapter 12
Two months later, I was trying on wedding dresses in a boutique in Denver.
Lark could already walk slowly with the aid of a support sling. Mara sent me recovery videos every day, and I had a quiet retirement paddock waiting for her beside the new company stables.
The internal Moretti tribunal was scheduled for next week. I no longer had any reason to stay in Chicago.
Luca had not contested the marriage dissolution. In front of three witnesses, an adviser struck my name from the Moretti spouse register, and the civil divorce was finalized.
This wasn’t them stripping me of my status again.
This time, I was the one holding the pen.
I had officially moved to Denver, but I hadn’t moved into Elias’s house.
The company rented me an apartment. The lease was in my name, and I alone had the keys.
Elias hadn’t shown the slightest disappointment.
He had only said, “First, have your own door. Then decide if you want to open it for someone else.”
The mirror in the fitting room was tall and unforgiving.
Standing before it in a simple ivory gown, I had a moment where I barely recognized myself.
I had once prepared four different public wedding plans for the north garden.
Every one of them had eventually been repurposed to serve Bianca’s political theater.
This time, there were no district leaders here, no allied witnesses, and no one demanding I give up my place.
Elias stood outside the curtain and only came in after I said, “You can.”
He was wearing a deep gray suit, his cuff still rolled once out of habit.
When he saw me, he stopped, his gaze fixed on me for a long moment.
“Does it look bad?” I asked.
“No. I’m just making sure this isn’t another scene I imagined.”
He came closer and adjusted the gauzy layer of fabric behind my shoulder, his touch careful not to brush my skin.
“Elena, do you remember the guy who used to sleep in his truck outside the livestock shed eight years ago?”
I blinked.
Then, slowly, the memory returned.
It was during the cold snap before sophomore year.
I was on night duty and found an old pickup parked on the leeward side of the shed. Curled up inside the cab, with only an old lab blanket for warmth, was a boy.
His student ID was on the dashboard.
Elias Reed.
I knocked on the window and woke him, asking why he wasn’t in the dorm.
He flushed, admitting his scholarship housing allowance hadn’t come through yet, and he just needed to get through three nights in the truck.
The boy I saw then hardly resembled the man standing before me now—the man who could make three powerful families wait on a contract.
“That was you?”
Elias smiled.
“It was.”